We Have Lost Our Minds

Authors

Teneille Ruth Brown, J.D.; James I. Farr Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law. Director for the Center for Law and the Biomedical Sciences; Member of the Center for Health Equity, Arts and Humanities.

Abstract

This Article examines the paradoxical treatment of autonomy in American healthcare law. While autonomy has become the dominant principle in medical ethics and neoliberal market philosophies, pregnant people have been systematically denied this same autonomy through increasingly restrictive abortion statutes. Using the rhetoric of “informed consent,” abortion-restrictive statutes ironically pervert the animating principles behind the doctrine—rendering it almost meaning- less. I argue that this contradiction stems from the dehumanization of pregnant people who seek abortions, particularly through the denial of their capacity to have individual, complex mental states and feelings. Drawing on moral psychology, the Article demonstrates how pregnant people are cast either as irrational and incompetent, or as cold and calculating, but never as fully human agents capable of making rational healthcare decisions. This dehumanization enables policymakers to strip pregnant people of the very autonomy that is championed in other medical contexts, while simultaneously blaming them for the inequalities that flow from the neoliberal system. I conclude by reflecting on how respect for autonomy has become hollow rhetoric that masks deep sexism both in medicine and the marketplace.

Recommended Citation

Teneille Ruth Brown, We Have Lost Our Minds, 45 Pace L. Rev. 103 (2024)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58948/2331-3528.2100
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol45/iss1/7