Legal Discrepancies and Expectations of Women: Abortion, Fetal Therapy, and NICU Care.

Over the past several decades in which access to abortion has become increasingly restricted, parents' autonomy in medical decision-making in the realms of fetal care and neonatal intensive care has expanded. Today, parents can decide against invasive medical interventions at gestational ages where abortions are forbidden, even in cases where neonates are expected to be seriously ill. Although a declared state interest in protecting the lives of fetuses and newborns contributes to justifications for restricting women's autonomy with regards to abortion, it does not fully explain this discrepancy. We believe that social portrayals of women as complying with or shirking their reproductive function play a major role in explaining it. The growing divide between a woman's rights as a reproductive being and as a parent suggest that abortion restriction is rooted in a historical societal desire for women to serve as reproducers and in the corresponding fear of them abandoning this allotted role in pursuit of social equality. The Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision is not based in a view of abortion as a medical act occurring between a doctor and patient, as Roe v. Wade (1973) did, but decision-making about fetal therapy or NICU care is still viewed as occurring between a doctor and patient or surrogate because in this act a woman is seen as fulfilling her role as mother.

Public Engagement through Inclusive Deliberation: The Human Genome International Commission and Citizens' Juries.

In this paper, I take seriously calls for public engagement in human genome editing decision-making by endorsing the convening of a "Citizens Jury" in conjunction with the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing's next summit scheduled for March 6-8, 2023. This institutional modification promises a more inclusive, deliberative, and impactful form of engagement than standard bioethics engagement opportunities, such as comment periods, by serving both normative and political purposes in the quest to offer moral guidance on gene editing. In examining evidence from the Australian Citizens' Jury on Genome Editing convened in 2021, I argue that Citizens' Juries should work in tandem with governing institutions to preserve the role of expertise while ensuring that the diverse views of the public are incorporated into their final reports as well. First, early inclusivity allows "the people" to hold agenda setting power through helping to set resource priorities. This also makes a downstream deliberative event, such as the called for Global Citizens' Assembly, both more likely to occur and more influential on policy. Second, Jury's diverse composition promises substantive contributions to the Commission's work. Third, Citizens' Juries could help to cultivate the Commission's trustworthiness.

Machine learning in medicine: should the pursuit of enhanced interpretability be abandoned?

We argue why interpretability should have primacy alongside empiricism for several reasons: first, if machine learning (ML) models are beginning to render some of the high-risk healthcare decisions instead of clinicians, these models pose a novel medicolegal and ethical frontier that is incompletely addressed by current methods of appraising medical interventions like pharmacological therapies; second, a number of judicial precedents underpinning medical liability and negligence are compromised when 'autonomous' ML recommendations are considered to be en par with human instruction in specific contexts; third, explainable algorithms may be more amenable to the ascertainment and minimisation of biases, with repercussions for racial equity as well as scientific reproducibility and generalisability. We conclude with some reasons for the ineludible importance of interpretability, such as the establishment of trust, in overcoming perhaps the most difficult challenge ML will face in a high-stakes environment like healthcare: professional and public acceptance.

Governance Choices of Genome Editing Patents.

There are a variety of governance mechanisms concerning the ownership and use of patents. These include government licenses, compulsory licenses, march-in rights for inventions created with federal funding, government use rights, enforcement restrictions, subject-matter restrictions, and a host of private governance regimes. Each has been discussed in various contexts by scholars and policymakers and some, in some degree, have been employed in different cases at different times. But scholars have yet to explore how each of these choices are subject to-or removed from-democratic control. Assessing the range of democratic implications of these patent governance choices is important in understanding the social and political implications of controversial or wide-ranging technologies because their use has a significant potential to affect the polity. This paper seeks to unpack these concerns for genome editing, such as CRISPR, specifically. Patents covering genome editing make an interesting case because, to date, it appears that the polity is concerned less with certain kinds of access, and more with distribution and limits on the technology's particular uses, such as human enhancement and certain agricultural and environmental applications. Here, we explore what it means for patents to be democratic or non-democratically governed and, in so doing, identify that patents covering many of the most controversial applications-that is, ones most likely to gain public attention-are effectively controlled by either non- or anti-democratic institutions, namely, private restrictions on licensing. This may be effective-for now-but lawmakers should be wary that such restrictions could rapidly reverse themselves. Meanwhile, other choices, like compulsory licenses, more broadly touch on democratic deliberation but, as currently structured, are aimed poorly for particular applications. Insofar as the public wants, or perhaps deserves, a say in the distribution and limits of these applications, illuminating the ways in which these governance choices intersect-or fail to intersect-with democratic institutions is critical. We offer some concluding thoughts about the nature of patents and their relationship with democratic governance as distributed claims to authority, and suggest areas for scholars and policymakers to pay close attention to as the genome editing patent landscape develops.