Professor Dov Fox Interviewed by Washington Post, New York Times, and The Atlantic Magazine

SAN DIEGO (May 7, 2024) – University of San Diego (USD) School of Law Herzog Research Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics Dov Fox was interviewed by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Atlantic magazine about the spate of recent errors in reproductive medicine.

The Washington Post story quotes Professor Fox on the relative dearth of regulations over the fertility industry: “In other areas of health care, states require hospitals to monitor and report major avoidable errors, things like mismatched blood transfusions or surgery on the wrong body part. They call these ‘never events’ because these are things that just shouldn’t happen. No agency or authority tracks or polices what might be called ‘reproductive never events.’”

In The Atlantic, Professor Fox explains how, after the birth of the first IVF baby in the early 1980s, “Congress just threw up their hands and said, ‘We’ll let the private sector sort it out.’” Because of the federal research-funding ban, he said, “assisted reproduction grew up less as a medical practice or research than as a business activity.”

His multiseason podcast series, Donor 9623, is discussed to illustrate how sperm banks operate without limits or disclosure requirements on how many offspring a man can produce or any checks that the medical and other information that prospective parents are provided about each donor are true.

About Herzog Research Professor and Professor of Law Dov Fox

Professor Dov Fox teaches and writes in the areas of health law and bioethics, the regulation of technology, and criminal law. He is the director for the Center of Health Law Policy and Bioethics and the Herzog Endowed Scholar. Fox serves on the advisory boards of the Appellate Defenders, American Constitution Society, and Illumina Genomics. Fox also works on National Institutes of Health grants that focus on topics of genomic privacy, translational medicine, and biomedical research ethics.

About the University of San Diego School of Law

Each year, USD educates approximately 800 Juris Doctor and graduate law students from throughout the United States and around the world. The law school is best known for its offerings in the areas of business and corporate law, constitutional law, intellectual property, international and comparative law, public interest law and taxation.

USD School of Law is one of the 84 law schools elected to the Order of the Coif, a national honor society for law school graduates. The law school’s faculty is a strong group of outstanding scholars and teachers with national and international reputations and currently ranks 30th nationally among U.S. law faculties in scholarly impact and 41st nationally in past-year faculty downloads on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). The school is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Founded in 1954, the law school is part of the University of San Diego, a private, independent, Roman Catholic university chartered in 1949.