Mary E. Harned, J.D.

Federal, state, and professional regulations provide a very limited patchwork of protections for IVF patients, let alone their unborn children created through the procedure. There is a need for improved regulation of the IVF industry, both federally and at the state level.

Articles highlighting poor quality medical care in pro-life states have raised concerns that state laws are preventing pregnant women from obtaining necessary emergency care. However, all pro-life state laws allow doctors to treat women with pregnancy emergencies, no law requires “imminence” before a doctor can intervene, and every pro-life state permits doctors to treat women suffering from miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. Doctors who fail to provide patients with necessary emergency treatment therefore may be committing malpractice.

Recently CLI scholars Ingrid Skop, M.D. and Mary Harned, J.D. published a rebuttal in Issues in Law & Medicine to a series of misleading statements made in an article that appeared in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

This report compares gestational limits on abortion in the U.S. with limits in other countries and serves as an update to CLI's original 2014 study. Of 193 U.N. countries, the U.S. is one of eight countries that allows, at the federal level, abortion on demand without any gestational limits. The U.S. is also one of only 15 countries in the U.N. that permit abortion on demand past 15 weeks of gestation, meaning its abortion law is far more permissive than the vast majority of the world.

In post-Dobbs America, lawmakers in abortion-promoting states are predictably repealing their paltry life-affirming statutes and solidifying the special legal status that their states afford to abortion.

Legislators and governors in abortion-promoting states are forging new strategies in their war on unborn children.

Every state with strong pro-life laws allows doctors to intervene to save a woman’s life in a medical emergency.

In Iowa and Mississippi, state supreme court decisions have created an additional impediment to the enforcement of the states’ abortion bans.

Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington have amplified or codified a special status for abortion in their state law.

With the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court last October, pro-life advocates are more optimistic that the Court will uphold legal protections for unborn children and their mothers. However, so far this term the Court has not taken any significant action.