News

Surrogacy goes more mainstream

By Carly Mallenbaum, Axios [cites Emily Galpern] | 03.29.2026

More Americans are turning to surrogacy to build their families, as the practice becomes more common and more publicly discussed.

Why it matters: As surrogacy becomes more visible and accessible, ethical, legal and cultural tensions become harder to ignore...

U.S. Federal

Eugenics and the Modern Synthesis, Part I

By Jessica Riskin, Los Ángeles Review of Books | 03.23.2026

This is the first part of the 14th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by...

Civil Society

Surrogacy laws are all over the map

By Carly Mallenbaum, Axios [cites Surrogacy360] | 03.29.2026

Without a federal law, surrogacy in the U.S. is governed by a patchwork of state regulations/

Why it matters: Confusing...

Policies

Project Eugenics: The Rollback of Disability Rights

By Kiana Jackson and Shannon Stubblefield, New Disabled South | 02.09.2026

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This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in...

U.S. States

Black Americans Don’t Trust Medicine Because Of Racism. That’s Bad In A Pandemic.

By Dan Vergano and Kadia Goba, Buzzfeed | 05.04.2020

WASHINGTON — Outside the grocery store in Congress Heights, people are playing dominoes in the parking lot, close together without...

Eugenics

Fertility Clinics Stay Open Despite Unclear Guidelines

By Natalie Lampert, New York Times | 05.01.2020

Since March, fertility clinics across the country have halted treatments for tens of thousands of people because of Covid-19, forcing...

Assisted Reproduction

Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans

By Jeffrey Ostler, The Atlantic | 04.29.2020

As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most...

Eugenics

Genetic Engineering Could Make a COVID-19 Vaccine in Months Rather Than Years

By Charles Schmidt, Scientific American | 04.29.2020

On January 10, when Chinese researchers published the genome of a mysterious, fast-spreading, virus, it confirmed Dan Barouch’s greatest worry...

Genomics

COVID-19 Immunity Testing: A Passport to Inequity

By Françoise Baylis and Natalie Kofler, Issues in Science and Technology | 04.29.2020

As COVID-19 case numbers start to plateau in various places, some governments are now focusing on how best to ease...

Bioethics

Did this virus come from a lab? Maybe not — but it exposes the threat of a biowarfare arms race

By Sam Husseini, Salon | 04.24.2020

There has been no scientific finding that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered...

Fertility clinics push back

By Alison Motluk, HeyReprotech Newsletter | 04.21.2020

Several of the fertility world's top advisory bodies have strongly urged fertility clinics to stop or severely scale back services...

Assisted Reproduction

blue and black double helix superimposed on map of the world

Ethics and Global Governance of Human Germline Genome Editing: The Problem of Techno-Scientific Colonialist Paternalism

By Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez, CRISPR Journal (paywall) | 04.21.2020

Abstract

I want to enrich the debate about the ethics and governance of human germline editing (HGE) by emphasizing an...

Policies