Current Events

Registration for this In Person event:

This program will be offered in person for 2.0 hours Traditional Indiana CLE credit.

Event Recording

Agenda:

Friday, March 25

Award Lecture Title:
“The Law and Ethics of Conscience in Healthcare”

Description: Healthcare raises complex ethical and moral issues for patients and practitioners. This talk explores the role of conscience for patients and providers. It evaluates the approaches that ethics and law respectively take to protecting conscientious refusal and conscientious provision of reproductive services, end-of-life care, and other treatments. With states effectively banning abortion and gender-affirming care for patients and the Supreme Court revising constitutional protection of abortion, it examines the possibility of conscience as sword and shield.

Awardee Bio:

Elizabeth Sepper, JD, LLM, BA

Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Elizabeth Sepper, Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin, is a nationally recognized scholar of health law, religious liberty, and equality. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life healthcare and on conflicts over religion and insurance coverage. Professor Sepper’s articles appear in top journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review. Her article, Doctoring Discrimination in the Same-Sex Marriage Debates, on the issue of religious objections to gay rights won multiple awards. She is an editor of Law, Religion, and Health in the United States (Holly Fernandez Lynch, I. Glenn Cohen, & Elizabeth Sepper, eds. Cambridge Univ. 2017).
Sepper received her B.A. in History magna cum laude with distinction from Boston University. She received her LL.M. and J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law. Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. Marjorie Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, practiced human rights law with a focus on women’s rights, and was a Center for Reproductive Rights fellow at Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the Texas faculty, she was a professor at Washington University School of Law.

Panelists

Panelist 1: Dr. Stephanie Boys

Presentation Title: “The Deepening Reproductive Health Care Divide”
Presentation Description: Access to birth control and abortion have long been limited by financial resources in the United States. Recent policies exacerbating difficulties obtaining basic reproductive health care will be covered, followed by a newer divide in health equity. Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) is an optional screening procedure offered to patients undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The test offers an array of genetic information about created embryos for the purpose of determining which to transfer for an attempted pregnancy. Thus, embryos with known genetic abnormalities can be discarded prior to pregnancy. Use of the procedure has exploded over the past decade. PGT increases multiple problems of disparity, diversity, and inclusion in US society, as America has done little to regulate IVF and PGT practices. From an economic perspective, wealth disparity will be exacerbated as wealthy families will have the choice to select against common developmental disabilities, while those unable to afford PGT will continue to shoulder additional costs associated with raising children with special needs. Philosophically, it has been argued that parents have a moral obligation to choose the best options for their children, but this is endorsed from a problematic ableist perspective, and PGT in this way promotes the rejection of diversity and inclusion. Finally, from a legal perspective, abortion for genetic conditions can be difficult to access for many reasons, while those who pay for PGT can avoid similar restrictions, as well as stigma.

Bio: Dr. Stephanie Boys earned a JD and MSW from Indiana University, and a PhD in Social Work and Political Science from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Associate Professor of Social Work and Adjunct Professor of Law at Indiana University. She teaches a range of courses in research, policy, and leadership at the BSW, MSW and doctoral levels. Her research agenda combines legal studies with the substantive areas of reproductive rights, criminal justice, and welfare policy implementation.

Panelist 2: Dr. Mary Ott

Presentation Title: “Using a Human Rights Lens to Support Adolescent Reproductive Health”
Presentation Description: Adolescent reproductive health is an area of enormous health inequities. Yet the human right to the best attainable health includes reproductive and sexual health. Although human rights have little traction in the United States, a human rights lens provides a developmental framework for adolescents, parents, and policy makers to collaboratively address reproductive health inequities and extend reproductive justice to adolescents.

Bio: Mary A. Ott, MD, MA, is a Professor of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at IU School of Medicine and a Faculty Investigator at the Indiana University Center for Bioethics. Dr. Ott received her BA from Princeton University, her MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MA in Philosophy (Bioethics) from Indiana University, Indianapolis. She completed her pediatric residency and fellowship in adolescent medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and provides care for adolescents at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health. Dr. Ott’s research interests are adolescent pregnancy and HIV prevention, pediatric research ethics, and the thorny issues of adolescent capacity, consent and confidentiality. Her research includes implementation sciences approaches to community-based adolescent pregnancy preventions, adolescent contraceptive access, ethics of sensitive research with vulnerable populations, and global adolescent health. Her work has been funded by the NIH, the Society for Family Planning Research, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Dr. Ott co-authored the influential American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on Contraception for Adolescents and co-edits the new Reflections on Ethics and Advocacy in Child Health (REACH) section of The Journal of Pediatrics.

Panelist 3: Jane Hartsock

Presentation Title: “Conscientious Deflection: How claims of conscience augment racial disparities in reproductive healthcare.”
Presentation Description: Conscientious refusal theoretically operates as a kind of compromise protecting clinicians from the moral distress of providing treatment that conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs. In practice, however, the “refusal” is frequently directed or mandated by health care institutions rather than individual clinicians serving to constrain clinicians’ conscience rather than accommodate it. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, because of the practicalities of the United States’ insurance-based health care system and the pragmatics of much of women’s reproductive health care, the limitations on otherwise standard, routine care and treatment disproportionately disadvantage minoritized populations, augmenting existing disparities in health care access.

Bio: Jane Hartsock, J.D., M.A. is the Director of Clinical and Organizational Ethics for the Academic Health Center at IU Health, a faculty investigator with the IU School of Medicine Center for Bioethics, the Co-Director of the Scholarly Concentration in Medical Humanities at the IU School of Medicine, and an adjunct Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities and Health Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University, Indianapolis. Jane completed her law degree at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2002 where she focused her course work on medical-legal issues and completed a year-long clerkship with a malpractice defense firm here in Indianapolis. After completion of her law degree and admission to the Illinois State Bar, Jane embarked on a career in healthcare litigation, primarily defending hospitals, clinicians, and long-term care facilities in Chicago, Illinois. Jane’s legal career provided her with substantial experience in multiple jurisdictions throughout the country exposing her to a variety of cultural and ideological differences in attitudes towards health, illness, and medicine, which informs her approach to clinical ethics. These interests ultimately led Jane to pursue a masters in philosophy with a concentration in bioethics, and a Fellowship in Clinical Ethics at the Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics, which she completed in 2016.

Moderator

Dan Orenstein

Bio: Daniel G. Orenstein is a visiting assistant professor of law at the McKinney School. His research centers on health and public health law, ethics and policy. His current research focuses on cannabis/marijuana law and policy, and he has additional research interests and past work in emergency preparedness, vaccination, organ and tissue donation, and health care reform. Prior to coming to McKinney, Orenstein completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. He also previously served as deputy director of the Network for Public Health Law Western Region, where he provided technical assistance to public health officials, practitioners, advocates, attorneys and others across a wide spectrum of public health legal issues.

Parking:

Parking is available for a nominal fee at the campus Gateway Garage, located on the corner of Michigan and California Streets (Address is 525 Blackford Street). Parking is also available for a nominal fee at the Natatorium Garage two blocks west of the law school.

Special Accommodations:

Individuals with disabilities who need special assistance should call (317) 278-3857 no later than one week prior to the event. Special arrangements can be made to accommodate most needs.