Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Might Kristen Booth Glen become the next Judge Judy?  Last week she approved a petition from CNN to video and then broadcast the adoption proceedings of a 5-month-old boy named Nicholas by “Tony,” the partner of “Gary,” who conceived the child with a surrogate.  Judiciary Law §218 bars cameras in the courtroom without a judge’s […]

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Nation For some years now, the biotechnology of fertility enhancement has been exalted as God’s gift to the biblically barren. A relentless narrative of entitlement intertwined with prayerfulness has framed infertility as a tragedy, an oppression, an agony, a disease. Some have proclaimed a “right” to […]

Nazneen Mehta is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School and is writing a Note on the international market in surrogacy services – particularly between relatively affluent “intended parents” in the US and poor female surrogates in India. Her Note will examine the ways in which this market might better be regulated by law […]

Khiara Bridges is the Center for Reproductive Rights/Columbia Law School fellow at Columbia Law School who has just completed her PhD in Columbia’s Anthropology Department studying the intersection of race, poverty, and gender through the experience of women in an obstetrics clinic in a New York City public hospital.  She offers the following further reflections […]

Noa Ben-Asher, an Associate at Columbia Law School who works on issues of surrogacy and ideals of the family, reflects on the cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Her Body, My Baby, last Sunday: Her Body, My Baby, the story of a married couple who hires a gestational surrogate to carry their genetic […]