"Human Life is Inviolable": Costa Rica's Human Rights Crucible.

The Costa Rican Constitutional Court banned in vitro fertilization in 2000, citing the inviolability of life. Conservatives hoped the ban would initiate a hemispheric movement to protect the unborn. But in 2012 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that reproductive rights are human rights and that women's rights take precedence over embryo rights.

The Dublin Declaration on Maternal Health Care and Anti-Abortion Activism: Examples from Latin America.

The Dublin Declaration on Maternal Healthcare-issued by self-declared pro-life activists in Ireland in 2012-states unequivocally that abortion is never medically necessary, even to save the life of a pregnant woman. This article examines the influence of the Dublin Declaration on abortion politics in Latin America, especially El Salvador and Chile, where it has recently been used in pro-life organizing to cast doubt on the notion that legalizing abortion will reduce maternal mortality. Its framers argue that legalizing abortion will not improve maternal mortality rates, but reproductive rights advocates respond that the Dublin Declaration is junk science designed to preserve the world's most restrictive abortion laws.

Culture, Health, and Science: A Multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Alternative to the Public Health Major.

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation.

Claiming Rosa Parks: conservative Catholic bids for 'rights' in contemporary Latin America.

When the Rosa Parks Prize was awarded to a conservative Argentine senator in 2009 for her outspoken opposition to contraception, sterilisation and abortion, it was clear that something odd was happening. This paper documents the appropriation of 'human rights' discourses by conservative Catholics in Latin America, where the recent success of reproductive and sexual rights social movements has generated a significant backlash. It specifically traces an effort by Catholic legal scholars to justify what they term 'a distinctively Latin American approach to human rights' while ignoring decades of human rights activism by others.

Reproductive governance in Latin America.

This paper develops the concept of reproductive governance as an analytic tool for tracing the shifting political rationalities of population and reproduction. As advanced here, the concept of reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors - such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements - use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices. Examples are drawn from Latin America, where reproductive governance is undergoing a dramatic transformation as public policy conversations are coalescing around new moral regimes and rights-based actors through debates about abortion, emergency contraception, sterilisation, migration, and assisted reproductive technologies.

The rise and demise of a collection of human fetuses at Mount Holyoke College.

When I found myself at the center of a controversy over the disposition of an old collection of human fetal specimens at Mount Holyoke College, I was motivated to explore the historical transformation that turned embryo collecting for research and pedagogical purposes from a noble to a disparaged practice, and dead fetuses from prized anatomical specimens to ugly, anomalous entities. Using Linda Layne's analysis of the literal and symbolic erasure of dead fetuses from American cultural discourse, this article examines the shifting circumstances that once encouraged the collection of fetal specimens but that now mandate their disappearance. Using Mount Holyoke as a case study, it describes the scientific logic and specific social exchange networks that led to the acquisition of hundreds of fetal specimens in the first half of the 20th century.

A social biography of Carnegie embryo no. 836.

A tiny, sectioned embryo specimen known as Carnegie no. 836 has served as the prototype for Stage 13 (28-32 days) since the 1910s. Recently digitalized and reanimated for the 21st century, this singular specimen is now being used to develop 3D and 4D visualizations.

"Properly disposed of": a history of embryo disposal and the changing claims on fetal remains.

This paper explores recent controversies concerning the disposal of embryonic and fetal remains in order to ask how such remains came to be classified as "medical waste." Based on archival research into the social history of human embryo collecting in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early 20th century, I argue that the classification of embryos and fetal remains as medical waste can be traced to a pragmatic alliance between embryologists and state functionaries. Embryologists relied on the state to assist them in acquiring thousands of human embryo remains for scientific study, while state authorities relied on embryologists to provide authoritative knowledge that could be used to facilitate state control over nascent citizens.