Beyond Conception: Legal Determinations of Filiation in the Context of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

This article argues that legal determinations of filiation are normative ideological constructions about how societal relations between parents and children should be ordered. They am based upon particular understandings of the relationship between biological and social facts and, as this article demonstrates, operate to create an asymmetrical relationship between the categories between paternity and maternity I suggest that fairly recent developments in reproductive and genetic filiation have been made and offer the potential for an expanded understanding of relatedness or kinship which does not take the two-parent-one of each sex-model of the family as its normative form. While the examples I draw on arise in the context of reproductive technologies, l suggest that the analysis has broader implications for the recognition of broader family forms and relationship

Accommodation in the Academy: Working with Episodic Disabilities and Living In Between

This chapter steps away from the institutions of mental health facilities, the extended care home and the prison, to enter another institutional setting within which disability as a concept is constructed and materialises, but where, until recently, its lived experience has generally been excluded: the university. Unlike the institutional settings from which people with disabilities have conventionally wished to flee, the university is one into which many people, including those with disabilities, have sought entry. Historically, and even now, universities are regarded as elite institutions that restrict entry based on achievement and performance. As both an educational setting and a workplace, the university creates and enforces norms about who properly belongs within its sphere. Examining whether people with disabilities are permitted entry into the hallowed halls of the university and the conditions of their inclusion if and when they arrive exposes the dynamic interplay between the complex institutional logics of belonging and the inadequacy of the legal and policy regime of accommodation to dismantle the barriers to fully include people with disabilities

The Social Determinants of ‘Health’ of Embryos: Practices, Purposes, and Implications

An increasing focus on the biomedical determinants of the health of embryos and fetuses is resulting from new technical possibilities, clinical considerations and research purposes (Nisker and White, 2005), but also from social factors, and for a variety of reasons. An exploration of the determinants of health of embryos, just as an exploration of the determinants of child or adult health, must take into consideration traditional social determinants, including those related to the consequences of poverty, such as poor nutrition and toxic environments (World Health Organization, 1948; Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003; Raphael, 2004), but also laws, policies and institutions, which are also social determinants of health (Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003)

Sites of Exclusion: Disabled Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Rights

“Women with disabilities commonly find themselves precluded from performing the major life functions commonly assigned to women”. This is nowhere more true than in the areas of sexuality, reproduction and parenting. While women generally are identified with, and indeed valorized for, their nurturing roles, sexual attractiveness and reproductive capacities, women with disabilities are all too often regarded as lacking in each case. Disability affects whether and how women are permitted to participate in sexual, reproductive and nurturing activities. In a culture where women are still defined, to a significant extent, as sexual beings, reproducers and nurturers, the, “general culture limits disabled women’s maternal occupation and leaves them ‘roleless’”. Thus, even in contemporary society, women with disabilities are denied the roles most commonly assigned to their gender and the characteristics most valued in women

Canada Tracks Disability Rights: A DRPI Model of Systemic Monitoring

This chapter surveys laws and policies in Canada that affect the rights of persons with disabilities. It does so as part of a broader project on international disability rights monitoring and is guided by DRPI\u27s National Law and Policy Monitoring Template (2008). The template is based on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and other international instruments. The template\u27s purpose is to monitor human rights for people with disabilities at the systemic level, that is, at the level of existing laws, policies, and programs, and to identify and draw attention to the most critical gaps and deficiencies in the legislative and policy framework (p. 2) based on human rights

Regulating Inheritable Genetic Modification or Policing the Fertile Imagination?: A Feminist Response

The past few years have seen an explosion of legislative activity around developments in genetics and assisted reproduction. In this chapter we examine recently passed legislation in Australia and Canada in the area of genetic modification technologies and reproductive genetics. We demonstrate that legislative control in this area has a twofold purpose. Less controversially it is aimed at providing limits to scientific innovation for the purpose of ensuring safe and ethical research and experimentation. More controversially it is concerned with what should be the proper nature of reproduction\u27 namely, how it happens (sexually), between whom (a man and a woman, both human), in what kinds of relationships (heterosexual), such that progeny, the product of reproduction, inherit the blood/genes (bodily substances) of only two biological progenitors. It is to this latter purpose that we turn our attention in this chapter, analyzing the role of law in limiting, determining, and constituting reproductive possibilities in an age of genetic modification. Our focus is on new and potential technologies that enable inheritable genetic modification (1GM) of humans, but we read these, and their legislative limits, in the context in which they appear medically and legally, namely alongside other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as reproductive cloning. We ask what is at stake in the new legislative limits, who benefits, who loses, and what kinds of humans are we left with

Regulating Reproductive Technologies in Canada

This chapter will identify and examine the major legal issues raised by the development and proliferation of technologies involved in assisted reproduction. It will review the application of existing legal principles, statutes and common law rules to these issues, and will illustrate the uncertainty present in the current legal regime in Canada. The chapter will then evaluate the need for a unified regulatory framework for reproductive technologies ( RTs ).\u27 While the focus of the chapter is an identification and review of the legal issues, it should be understood that these are shaped in a moral, ethical and social context

The Social Determinants of ‘Health’ of Embryos: Practices, Purposes, and Implications

An increasing focus on the biomedical determinants of the health of embryos and fetuses is resulting from new technical possibilities, clinical considerations and research purposes (Nisker and White, 2005), but also from social factors, and for a variety of reasons. An exploration of the determinants of health of embryos, just as an exploration of the determinants of child or adult health, must take into consideration traditional social determinants, including those related to the consequences of poverty, such as poor nutrition and toxic environments (World Health Organization, 1948; Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003; Raphael, 2004), but also laws, policies and institutions, which are also social determinants of health (Wilkinson and Marmot, 2003)

Terminal Care, Terminal Justice: The Supreme Court of Canada and Sue Rodriguez

On February 12, 1994, Sue Rodriguez ended her life. According to her friend and supporter, M.P. Svend Robinson, who was present at her death, she was assisted by an anonymous physician who attended at her home and helped her accomplish the manner of death she had publicly declared she wanted. She controlled - to the extent that someone with a relentless, intractable condition could - the circumstances, timing and manner of her death. Sue Rodriguez achieved in her death what she could not persuade the Supreme Court of Canada to do during her lifetime. By placing the manner of her death on the public record, she forcefully demonstrated that death is indeed part of life. Bearing witness to her own cause, she preserved the power to take an initiative with her life by determining the time and manner of her death