Legal Conceptions

As a historian interested in women's sexual and reproductive health in the twentieth century, and in particular in the understudied area of infertility, I opened this book with interest. Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a relatively new area of medical practice, but one which provides a lens to examine changing ideas of what it means to be a parent as well as who should be a parent. While neither idea is historically new, the emergence of ART as an increasingly viable method of reproduction has required the legal system to intervene as the technology changes who is and should be a parent. This book compiles excerpts from attorney Susan L. Crockin's “Legally Speaking” column since 1990 for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine's newsletter. Crockin, a pioneer in the legal issues which the use of ART has brought to the fore, proposed this column to the editors of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine's (then the American Fertility Society) newsletter in 1990 as a means to communicate with medical practitioners recent court decisions regarding ART. As she writes in the preface to this book, her column provided “in real time and in plain English” an account of court cases and laws as they developed in the judicial and legislative system, not simply the “final decision or legal ‘bottom line’,” with the intention of aiding “professionals in the field” in understanding “the changing legal landscape within which their actions and decisions are questioned and ultimately judged” (x).

Assisted reproductive technology · Infertility · Legal profession · Legislature · Political science · Practice of law · Reproduction · Reproductive technology · Sociology · Law · Reproductive Health and Technologies