Legal Commentary

Thank you to Dan and the other permanent bloggers at PrawfsBlawg for having me back. I am primarily interested and have written on the social adoption processes of new technologies. I hope to spend my time here this month discussing some legal and policy developments related to the use of new technologies.

One issue I would like to discuss involves direct to consumer genetic testing. Direct to consumer genetic testing enables a consumer to purchase a genetic testing kit for a couple of hundred dollars and test for multiple conditions, without ever seeing a medical professional. This summer, after Walgreens announced a plan to to sell direct to consumer genetic testing in its stores, both the FDA and Congress have finally taken steps to regulate direct to consumer genetic testing. As I am currently immersed in writing a symposium paper on this topic I would like to address these proposals.

In addition, I would like to look at a growing international regulatory trend, which prohibits anonymity for sperm and egg donors. Naomi Cahn, in her new book, Test Tube Families, proposes to adopt this policy in the U.S and I would like to react to this proposal and examine some empirical data I have collected, which shows the impact of prohibiting anonymity on the availability of donor sperm and eggs and use of donor dependent reproductive technology.

Finally, in a recent paper, titled Over-Parenting, my co-author Zvi Triger and I, describe current parenting norms as Intensive Parenting. Intensive parents are constantly involved in cultivating and monitoring their children, We show that parents use new technologies, including the cellular phone, nanny cams, the Internet and GPS tracking systems to intensively parent their children. In the paper we show several ways in which the law enforces intensive parenting and warn against the incorporation of current norms of intensive parenting into the law. Here, I would like to examine some new legal developments particularly in the regulation of schools that are in effect enforcing intensive parenting.