This essay examines the right of health care freedom of choice contained in some state constitutions. It explores how courts have, and could, use this constitutional health care right as a basis for recognizing or reinforcing a fundamental right to choose an abortion.

From its inception, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive force on U.S. health care and public health systems. President Biden’s announced termination of the national public health emergency on May 11, 2023 portends a return to normalcy and relief for Americans from the greatest infectious disease scourge the nation has ever faced. In reality, closing out this pandemic presents a tempest of legal and practical complications.

Political debate regarding trans youth’s access to gender-affirming care (GAC) has pushed many to advocate for GAC by pointing to tragic, pathological outcomes of non-treatment, namely suicide. However, these pathologized arguments are a harmful ethical “shortcut” which should be replaced by a meaningful engagement with the ethics of providing GAC to youth.

Legal challenges to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone have destabilized patients’ ability to access controversial medicines like medication abortion. We argue that federal courts’ receptiveness to this litigation undermines the coherence and integrity of prescription drug regulation in the U.S.

The global impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the backlash towards reproductive justice that it represents warrant a global feminist response informed by broad theoretical and geopolitical lenses. We consider how a solidaristic, transnational feminist movement might learn from Latin American feminist movements that have been successful in uniting broad coalitions in the fight for reproductive justice as situated within far-reaching political goals. The success of such a global movement must be decolonial and must contend with the fact that overlapping realities of global inequality, severe poverty, extractivism, and western-backed violence are fundamentally implicated in reproductive justice.

This response to Kariyawasam and Rai affirms their critique of the pathologization of trans youth but forecasts a foreseeable negative outcome of their proposed elimination of diagnosis as a prerequisite to gender-affirming care (GAC) — the risk of removing GAC entirely from the medical sphere and compromising the wellbeing of those transgender individuals for whom GAC is deeply affirming. We suggest an ethical framework of GAC that expands past a focus on autonomy to incorporate a principle of respect for persons that affirms the dignity and diversity of trans youth — recognizing the need to facilitate both medical assistance and social change.

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious wrongdoing by physicians.

The end of the constitutional right to abortion with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health stands to generate massive conflict between abortion regulation and the First Amendment. Abortion exceptionalism within constitutional doctrine -- which both treats abortion differently than other areas and favors anti-abortion over pro-choice viewpoints -- will not retreat but advance, unless confronted by the courts.

Global health law for pandemics currently lacks legal obligations to ensure distributional and reparative justice. In contrast, international environmental law contains several novel international legal mechanisms aimed at addressing the effects of colonialism and global injustices that arise from the disproportionate contributions to — and impacts of — climate change and biodiversity loss.

This article considers challenges facing the pro-life movement after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). It identifies four questions the movement must face: (1) whether to adopt a combative or conciliatory rhetorical stance; (2) how to prioritize new legislative goals; (3) how to define the limits of acceptable compromise; and (4) how to respond to Americans with ambivalent attitudes toward abortion. The article argues that each of these issues could precipitate serious division in the pro-life movement that will impact likelihood of future success.

A series of structural constitutional arguments lodged in multiple cases against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) authorities to negotiate prescription drug prices via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act threaten the legitimacy of CMS program and federal agency powers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for people living with dementia (PLWD) and their caregivers. While prior research has documented these effects, it has not delved into their specific causes or how they are modified by contextual variation in caregiving circumstances.

Medical aid in dying (MAiD), despite being legal in many jurisdictions, remains controversial ethically. Existing surveys of physicians’ perceptions of MAiD tend to focus on the legal or moral permissibility of MAiD in general. Using a novel sampling strategy, we surveyed physicians likely to have engaged in MAiD-related activities in Colorado to assess their attitudes toward contemporary ethical issues in MAiD.

In recent months, pharmaceutical manufacturers have brought legal challenges to a provision of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) empowering the federal government to negotiate the prices Medicare pays for certain prescription medications. One key argument made in these filings is that price negotiation is a “taking” of property and violates the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. Through original case law and health policy analysis, we show that government price negotiation and even price regulation of goods and services, including patented goods, are constitutional under the Takings Clause. Finding that the IRA violates the Takings Clause would radically upend settled constitutional law and jeopardize the US’s most important state and federal health care programs.

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly High-Level Meeting (HLM) on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR) was a missed opportunity to bring high-level commitment and momentum to the global governance of health emergencies. Intended to bring much-needed attention to a policy issue that is rapidly slipping down the international agenda, the fraught diplomacy among member states, lack of consensus on key issues, and weak UN Political Declaration in New York foreshadow a difficult road ahead for upcoming negotiations under the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. This column chronicles the evolving engagement of the UN in global health governance, examines the diplomatic process leading to the UN HLM on PPPR, and assesses the contributions and missed opportunities of its resulting Political Declaration.