Law, Religion, and Health in the United States

Description

While the law can create conflict between religion and health, it can also facilitate religious accommodation and protection of conscience. Finding this balance is critical to addressing the most pressing questions at the intersection of law, religion, and health in the United States: should physicians be required to disclose their religious beliefs to patients? How should we think about institutional conscience in the health care setting? How should health care providers deal with families with religious objections to withdrawing treatment? In this timely book, experts from a variety of perspectives and disciplines offer insight on these and other pressing questions, describing what the public discourse gets right and wrong, how policymakers might respond, and what potential conflicts may arise in the future. It should be read by academics, policymakers, and anyone else - patient or physician, secular or devout - interested in how US law interacts with health care and religion.

Holly Fernandez Lynch is Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. She is the author of Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise (2008) and co-editor of Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (2016), FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies (2015), and Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (2014). I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center. He is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He has authored or co-edited eight books and has published more than eighty articles in venues like The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, and the Harvard Law Review. Elizabeth Sepper is an Associate Professor at Washington University School of Law. She is an expert in health law and religious liberty law. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life care, and conflicts between religion and antidiscrimination laws with articles in top law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Indiana Law Journal.

'Health care - in particular, care related to sexuality and procreation - has become the epicenter of the struggle to define religious liberty in America. From insurance mandates to professional autonomy, from refusing reproductive care to 'treating' homosexuality, and from defining life to defining death, Law, Religion, and Health in the United States is essential reading.' R. Alta Charo, Sheldon B. Lubar Distinguished Research Chair and Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin, Madison 'This timely volume addresses a wide array of deep religious, ethical, legal, and technological quandaries that swirl around the increasingly complex world of health care in the United States. Bringing together top scholars from divergent disciplines and perspectives, this book will be essential reading for those who wrestle with power over life and death in a divided country where there are no one-size-fits-all answers.' Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania 'This impressive volume offers an in-depth analysis of a broad range of issues at the intersection of law, religion, health care, and public policy. ... Many of the contributors are noted scholars and all bring substantial expertise to their essays. All of the essays are well-documented with extensive citations. Legal analyses are frequently enriched with historical and socio-cultural context. The authors' introduction provides an excellent overview of the many chapters.' Robert S. Olick, Journal of Church and State