Fertility clinic mix-up. Date rape. Frozen embryo adoption. Male circumcision as gender violence.
For Sherry Colb, professor of law and Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar at the School of Law–Newark, such talk-show topics provide an important opportunity to reflect on the often thorny issues that arise when intimate aspects of our lives intersect with the law.
In her new book, When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Colb eagerly dissects some of the most complicated – and some of the strangest – headline-grabbing cases and identifies reproduction and a woman’s unique capacity to become pregnant as central to many of them. Colb traces her interest in women and gender equality issues to a course in biomedical ethics at Columbia College, where she earned an A.B. in psychology and was the valedictorian of the second class to graduate women.
“Studying cases in which women were forced to have a caesarean section, I confronted for the first time the role of pregnancy in allowing for regulation of women almost as wards of the state,” she said. “It became clear to me that the unique ability to become pregnant and the implications of that ability help define women’s opportunities, burdens, and responsibilities in society.”
In “Adopting Embryos From the Frozen Orphanage,” one of the 36 chapters in her book, Colb assails descriptions of frozen embryos as “children” in need of adoption. Such language “essentially relegates women to a custodial role,” she said, thereby denying how crucial pregnancy – a uniquely female process – is to reproduction. It unfortunately also creates competition for real children awaiting adoption, added Colb, who is both an adoptive mother and a birth mother.
Colb does not ignore the role of men in her writings about the consideration of gender in legal and public policy matters. For example, in a chapter entitled “When Oral Sex Results in a Pregnancy: Can Men Ever Escape Paternity Obligations?” she maintains that because women have unique control over the reproductive process, men should not always have to assume the risk of a pregnancy.
Colb sees the influence of Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, for whom she clerked during the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992–1993 term, on her thinking about reproduction and gender equality. “Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade was written in a way that reflects deference to the doctor’s judgment,” she explained. “By the time he authored the concurring opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, however, he was writing about a woman’s right to bodily integrity.”
A member of the School of Law–Newark faculty since 1995, Colb teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and mental health law. She also writes a regular column for FindLaw’s Writ, a legal commentary website, finding rich source material in the day’s headlines, policy statements, and court decisions.
Often, she writes about what Randall L. Kennedy, her Harvard Law professor and “a great role model for people who like to depart from the usual ways of thinking about issues,” describes on the book jacket as “the dark intersection of law and sex.”