JSI Seminar: The law and ethics of a property rights approach to frozen embryo disputes

In-person event

Disputes over frozen embryos represent a particularly problematic case, legally and ethically, due to the ambiguity of their moral and legal status and the potential rights-claims which can be made with regard to them. Recent work has contextualised frozen embryos as liminal and suggested a contextual approach to their legal classification.

By appeal to personal property law, with a lens provided by Roman law doctrines, and reproductive bioethics, we argue that frozen embryos may be subjects of property rights, providing a more stable framework for dispute resolution. To illustrate how a property approach would work, we reconsider the facts of the influential Evans case and argue that if a proprietary rather than promissory estoppel claim had been pursued, the reverse outcome may have been reached, to the benefit of women who are disproportionately harmed in these scenarios.

About the speaker:

Teresa Baron

Teresa is a Nottingham Research Fellow working on reproductive ethics and philosophy of parenthood. She was previously a postdoc at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Thursday 2 November 2023, 6-7.30pm AEDT

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.