
Alicia OuelletteAlbany Law School · Law
Alicia Ouellette
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29
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Publications (29)
Terminally ill people with disabilities face multiple barriers when seeking physician aid in dying (PAD) in the United States. The first is legality. Efforts to legalize the practice have been thwarted in dozens of states in part due to vocal opposition by advocates for people with disabilities who contend that legalized aid in dying discriminates...
Students with sensory and physical disabilities are underrepresented in medical schools despite the availability of assistive technologies and accommodations. Unfortunately, many medical schools have adopted restrictive "organic" technical standards based on deficits rather than on the ability to do the work. Compelling ethical considerations of ju...
Purpose:
Physician diversity improves care for underserved populations, yet there are few physicians with disabilities. The authors examined the availability of technical standards (TSs) from U.S. medical schools (MD- and DO-granting) and evaluated these relative to intent to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Method:
Documen...
This essay re-examines the disability critique of prenatal and pre-implantation screening in light of evidence about the larger context in which fertility and reproductive healthcare is rendered in the U.S. It argues that efforts to identify acceptable criteria for trait-based selection or otherwise impose reasons-based limitations on reproductive...
Although disability rights activists and bioethicists share a common commitment to respect for individuals of all abilities, they often find themselves on different sides of issues involving the provision or removal of health care to persons with disabilities. This article considers the differing perspectives each group brings to such cases, compar...
In deciding NFIB v Sebelius, the Supreme Court upheld the ACA, the Obama Administration's most significant piece of social legislation. Resting the decision on the Taxing and Spending Clauses, the Court confounded most pundits and scholars. It also provided proponents and opponents of health reform some insight into how future challenges to the Act...
More than twenty years after Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to end disability-based discrimination, many U.S. medical schools will not give a seat to applicants with certain sensory or mobility disabilities. In some cases, the barriers to admission are explicit. They take the form of “Technical Standards” that define base...
This Article examines the phenomenon of body modification among adolescents from a legal perspective. In particular, it culls together the law of body modification and positions it generally within the law regarding adolescent decision-making. It then briefly reviews the ways in which the law of adolescents is shaped both by our understanding of th...
In 2002, a Michigan woman faced charges of medical neglect because she refused to consent to cochlear implantation for her deaf sons. The testimony at the resulting trial revealed starkly contrasting views on the value of cochlear implants for deaf children among experts in audiology, bioethics, deafness, and child development. Using the Michigan c...
Bioethics and Disability provides tools for understanding the concerns, fears, and biases that have convinced some people with disabilities that the health care setting is a dangerous place and some bioethicists that disability activists have nothing to offer bioethics. It wrestles with the charge that bioethics as a discipline devalues the lives o...
In the healthcare setting, parental decisions to size, shape, sculpt, and mine children’s bodies through the use of non-therapeutic medical and surgical interventions are a matter of parental choice except in extraordinary cases involving grievous harm. This Article questions the assumption of parental rights that frames the current paradigm for me...
In July 2009, five scholars and practitioners engaged in a two-hour conversation about current end-of-life health issues in New York state. Thaddeus Pope (Widener Law), Alicia Ouellette (Albany Law), Timothy Quill (Rochester Medicine), Robert Swidler (Northeast Health), and Nancy Dubler (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) discussed the Family Hea...
This essay is part of volume celebrating the successful tenure of Chief Judge Judith Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals. The author shares personal and professional reflections on her encounters with Judge Kaye as a law student, legal practitioner, and law professor. The essay offers unique insights into the traits and habits that made Judge Kay...
By emphasizing parental rights, the law allows parents to choose surgery to modify a child for aesthetic, cultural, or social reasons unrelated to a physical or psychological need of the child. This paper explores the case of an adoptive parent who chose cosmetic surgery to open the eyes of his Asian daughter. The paper identifies the potential har...
In her article Creating Children with Disabilities: Parental Tort Liability for Preimplantation Genetic Interventions, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1158631, Professor Kirsten Rabe Smolensky argues that children who were subject to preimplantation genetic manipulation should have the ability to sue their parents for damages whe...
This article seeks to answer the call from the disability rights community for a real debate on the role of disability in end-of-life decisionmaking. The article questions whether the crusade by disability rights activists against freedom in medical decisionmaking is in fact in the best interest of people living with physical and mental challenges,...
This paper explores the relevance of the morality of homosexuality in judicial decisions written in cases challenging laws that limit marriage to heterosexual couples. That study shows that judges ruling in favor of same-sex marriage eschew moral opprobrium as a legitimate basis for legal decisionmaking in favor of a traditional liberal vision of t...
The case of Ashley X, a profoundly disabled child from Washington whose growth and sexual development were purposely stunted through medical and surgical treatments elected by her parents, raises important questions about the law's role in protecting children from the decisions of their parents, and about the rights of disabled children. This paper...
Bioethicists are often interested mostly in national standards and institutions, but state governments have historically overseen a wide range of bioethical issues and share responsibility with the federal government for still others. States ought to have an important role. By allowing for multiple outcomes, the American federal system allows a bet...
Scholars of differing political affiliation and the President's Council on Bioethics have called for regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) that would emulate many aspects of the regulatory system of the United Kingdom, in particular that of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Specifically, scholars and the Council have...
In some states, case or statutory law prevents patients or their families from declining life-sustaining medical treatment absent clear and convincing evidence that the patient would decide to terminate treatment under the specific circumstances presented. These vitalist laws are premised on the belief that erring on the side of life benefits all c...
Less than a month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the New York Court of Appeals heard oral argument in three criminal cases with no apparent relation to the attacks or their aftermath. The Court's decision in those cases, however, may have a profound impact on people of Middle Eastern descent in light of other post September 11 cha...
This article provides guidance to practitioners who wish to expedite an appeal in a New York court. It first sets forth the existing rules for taking an expedited appeal in the court of appeals and each department of the Appellate Division. It then sets forth the preferred practices in those departments that lack published rules, as best those prac...
New medical technologies have the ability to treat fetuses in utero, but these technologies and treatments come with consequences for the women carrying the child, particularly in cases of fetal surgery. This comment discusses the emerging technology of fetal surgery and explores the legal consequences for women if physicians and courts force women...
Scholars and the President’s Council on Bioethics have called for regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) that emulates the regulatory system in the UK especially in regard to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). The HFEA has complete authority over fertility clinics and human embryo research in the UK and has been...
Bioethicists can be fairly accused of wanting to solve complex problems with single standards and national institutions. Both liberal and conservative bioethicist, have pressed for national standards administered by federal agencies across a wide variety of issues, ranging from research ethics and assisted reproduction the governance and financing...