Professor Isabel Karpin

Karpin, I.A. & Savell, K. 2012, Perfecting Pregnancy - Law, Disability and the Future of Reproduction, 1, Cambridge University Press, United States.
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Prenatal and preimplantation testing technologies have offered unprecedented access to information about the genetic and congenital makeup of our prospective progeny. Future developments such as preconception testing, noninvasive prenatal testing, and more extensive preimplantation testing promise to increase that access further still. The result may be greater reproductive choice, but it also increases the burden on women and men to avail themselves of these technologies in order to avoid having a child who has a disability. The overwhelming question for legislators has been whether and, if so, how to regulate the use of these technologies in the face of compelling but seemingly contradictory claims about the advancement of reproductive choice and the dangers of eugenic or discriminatory effects. This book examines the evolution of this legislative oversight across a number of jurisdictions and explores the tensions and ambiguities that inform these laws.

Nikser, J., Bayliss, F., Karpin, I.A., Mcleod, C. & Mykitiuk, R. 2010, The Healthy Embryo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Karpin, I.A., Bennett, B. & Carney, T. 2008, The Brave New World of Health, Federation Press, Annandale,NSW Australia.

Karpin, I.A. & Fineman, M.A. 1995, Mothers in Law, Columbia University Press, New York.

Karpin, I.A. & Mykitiuk, R. 2011, 'Feminist legal theory as embodied justice' in Martha Albertson Fineman (ed), Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of Feminism and Legal Theory, Routledge, Oxon, UK, pp. 115-130.
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This chapter examines a shift within feminist legal theory from a central concern with sexual difference to one of embodied difference. The subject at the center of this theorizing is marked by bodily (as opposed to sexual) difference from the normative, self-actualizing individual of legal subjecthood, Bioethical and biotechnological inquiries too are concerned with bodily differentiation, Bodies discussed in these contexts are often anomalous or pathologized. They are brought under scrutiny, when they deviate from what is often regarded as "normal)" that which is both valorized for its "species typicality" and) by exten~ ion, held out as the "natural)' state of being (Buchanan et al. 2000).

Karpin, I.A. 2010, 'Taking care of the health of the preconceived embryos or constructing legal harm' in Jeff Nisker, Francoise Baylis, Isabel Karpin, carolyn McLeod and Roxanne Mykitiuk (eds), The Healthy Embryo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 136-150.
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Karpin, I.A. & Ellison, D. 2009, 'Reproduction without women: Frankenstein and the legal prohibition of human cloning' in Catherine Kevin (ed), Feminism and the Body, Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, pp. 29-48.
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Putting events in Genesis to one side, the most famous nonconventional act of creation recorded in Western literature occurs in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.' Painstakingly assembled in Victor's "workshop of filthy creation", the life that emerges from this gothic setting is not confined to the plot of the novel, but oddly for a creature doomed to sterility and apparent death, produces innumerable copies across a variety of genre and media. Significant among the novels, films, cartoons, games and toys that perpetuate the creature's existence, is its presence as a rhetorical device employed in the language of ethical restraint. When legislators or advocates of varying stripe call for science to just stop, now, Frankenstein (in monster or progenitor form) makes his inevitable appearance

Bennett, B., Karpin, I.A., Ballantyne, A. & Rogers, W. 2008, 'Gender Inequities in Health Research: An Australian Perspective' in Michael Freeman (ed), Law and Bioethics, Oxford University Press, New York, USA, pp. 409-431.
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Karpin, I.A. 2008, 'Constructing the Body Inside and Out:genetic and Somatic Modification' in Belinda Bennett, Terry Ross Carney, Isabel Karpin (eds), The Brave New World of Health, Federation Press, Sydney, Australia, pp. 73-92.
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Karpin, I.A. & Mykitiuk, R. 2006, 'Regulating Inheritable Genetic Modification or Policing the Fertile Scientific Imagination a Feminist Response' in Basko J, O'Sullivan G, Ankeny R (eds), The Ethics of Inheritable Genetic Modification: A Dividing Line, Cambridge University Press, New York, USA, pp. 193-222.
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The past few years have seen an explosion of legislative activity around developments in genetics and assisted reproduction. In this chapter we examine recently passed legislation in Australia and Canada in the area of genetic modification technologies and reproductive genetics. We demonstrate that legislative control in this area has a twofold purpose. Less controversially it is aimed at providing limits to scientific innovation for the purpose of ensuring safe and ethical research and experimentation. More controversially it is concerned with what should be the proper "nature of reproduction," namely) how it happens (sexually). between whom (a man and a woman. both human). in what kinds of relationships (heterosexual). such that progeny. the product of reproduction. inherit the blood/genes (bodily substances) of only two biological progenitors. It IS to this latter purpose that we turn our attention in this chapter, analyzing the role of law in limiting, determining, and constituting reproductive possibilities in an age of genetic modification. Our focus is on new and potential technologies that enable inheritable genetic modification (IGM) of humans. but we ~ead these, and their legislative limits, in the context in which they appear medically and legally. namely alongside other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as reproductive cloning. We ask what is at stake in the new legislative limits. who benefits. who loses, and what kinds of humans are we left with?

Karpin, I.A. 2005, 'Genetics and the Legal Conception of Self' in Margrit Shildrick, Roxanne Mykitiuk (eds), Ethics of the Body:Postconventional Challenges, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 195-216.
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The provocative contention of the postmodernist and feminist essays in Ethics of the Body is that conventional bioethics is out of touch, despite its growing profile. It is out of touch with an ongoing phenomenological sense of bodies themselves; with the impact of postmodernist theory as it problematizes the certainties of binary thinking; and with a postmodern culture in which bioscientific developments force us to question what is meant by the notion of the human self. The authors demonstrate that the conventional normative framework of bioethics is called into question by issues as wide ranging as genetic manipulation, disability, high-tech prosthetics, and intersexuality. The essays show how both the theory and practice of bioethics can benefit from postmodernism's characteristic fluidity and multiplicity, as well as from the insights of a reconceived feminist bioethics. They address issues in philosophy, law, bioscientific research, psychiatry, cultural studies, and feminism from a "postconventional" perspective that looks beyond the familiar ideas of the body, proposing not a bioethics about the body but a radical ethics of the body. After exploring notions of difference in both feminist and postmodernist terms, the book considers specific issuesÔ++including HIV, addiction, borderline personality disorder, and cancerÔ++that challenge the principles of conventional bioethics. The focus then turns to questions raised by biotechnology: one essay rethinks the traditional feminist ethics of care in the context of new reproductive technology, while others tackle genetic and genomic issues. Finally, the book looks at embodiment and some specifically anomalous forms of being-in-the-body, including a consideration of intersex infants and children that draws on feminist, postructuralist, and queer theory.

Karpin, I.A. & O'Connell, K. 2005, 'Speaking into a Silence:The Australian Constitution and the Rights of Women' in Beverley Baines (ed), The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence, Cambridge University Press, New York, USA, pp. 22-47.
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Karpin, I.A. 2002, 'She's Watching the Judges:media Feedback Loops and Judicial Notice' in Margaret Thornton (ed), Romancing the Tomes: Popular Culture, Law and Feminism, Cavendish Publishing, London, pp. 47-68.

Karpin, I.A. 1999, 'Peeking Through the Eyes of the Body: Regulating the Bodies of Women with Disabilities' in Melinda Jones and Lee Ann Basser Marks (eds), Disability, Diversability and Legal Change, Kluwer International Law, The Netherlands, pp. 283-300.

Karpin, I.A., Fineman, M.A. & McCluskey, M. 1997, 'Pop Justice: TV, Feminism and the Law' in Martha Fineman and Martha t McCluskey (eds), Feminism, Media and the Law, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 120-135.

Karpin, I.A. 2012, 'The Legal and Relational Identity of the 'Not-Yet' Generation', Law, Innovation and Technology, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 122-143.
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Over the last two decades, biotechnological innovation in the field of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has significantly altered the regulatory landscape in Australia. Laws controlling the development and use of embryos created outside the female body concern how embryos may be 'made',' who may make them,^ for what purpose,' how long they may be stored,"* the manner of their disposal and destruction,^ and the genetic conditions for which they may be tested

Ellison, D. & Karpin, I.A. 2011, 'Death without Life: Grievability and IVF', The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 110, no. 4, pp. 795-811.
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Although in vitro fertilization patients faced with the problem of surplus cryopreserved embryos have a number of disposition options, we focus on one procedure known as +compassionate transfer.+ In this scenario the thawed embryo is placed in the patient's vagina, where it will not develop further, or it is transferred to the uterus without the benefit of fertility-enhancing hormones at a point in the menstrual cycle unreceptive to implantation. The embryo destined for disposal is removed from the realm of technological possibility and +returned+ to the female body for a homely death. Arguably this is consistent with related mourning rituals that rely on embodied contact between the living and the dead such as the practice of wearing a lock of hair from a child or loved one. We document some contemporary practices that reconstitute the dead in keepsake form, where they may reside both inside and outside the body of the mourner. Our focus, though, is on the commemoration of embryo disposition in the form of compassionate transfer, as a ritual confounding the conditions of grievability: this is not-yet-life succumbing to something that resembles death. While debates continue over the embryo's status as life, new forms of disposition practices such as compassionate transfer are developing in response to the emotional experience of embryo loss. As a death scene in progress, we take the measure of its fabrication, considering its form, significance, and legal and cultural complexity.

Ellison, D. & Karpin, I.A. 2011, 'Embryo Disposition and the New Death Scene', Cultural Studies Review, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 81-100.
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Bennett, B. & Karpin, I.A. 2008, 'Regulatory Options for Gender Equity in Health Research', International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 80-99.
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It is clear that where a disease affects men and women differently, research on potential therapies or cures should include both men and women and should examine whether the therapy is effective and safe for both sexes. In this paper we consider whether there is an appropriate role for law in regulating to ensure an examination of these sex- and gender-specific aspects in health research. We consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of pursuing a regulatory approach to achieving gender equity in the field of women's health by exploring first, the meaning of gender equity, and second, the regulatory mechanisms that might be best suited to promoting the goal of gender equity. Within our examination of different regulatory forms and mechanisms, we also interrogate the shift from gender-neutral provisions relating to sex in favor of generalized notions of fairness that remove any specific consideration of sex.

Karpin, I.A. & Mykitiuk, R. 2008, 'Going Out on a Limb: Prosthetics, Normalcy and Disputing the Therapy/Enhancement Distinction', The Medical Law review, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 413-436.
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The development of genetic technologies, nano-technologies and technologies related to artificial intelligence have provoked discussion about the different uses to which they may be put; namely, their potential for therapeutic and non-therapeutic use. Resisting claims that individuals should be free to use these technologies as they see fit to alter their own physical, psychological and intellectual capacities, lifespan and morphologies or those of their existing or future children, some authors contend that both ethical and regulatory limits should be placed on this exercise of free choice.1 A number of academics have suggested that the therapy/enhancement distinction can perform both moral and regulatory work in assisting us with resolving the tricky issue of which uses of these technologies to permit and which to discourage or ban.

Savell, K. & Karpin, I.A. 2008, 'The Meaning of "Serious Disability" in the Legal Regulation of Prenatal and Neonatal Decision Making', Journal of Law and Medicine, vol. 16, pp. 233-245.
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The concept of "serious disability" appears to play a significant role in circumscribing treatment-limiting decisions in neonatal care, prenatal counselling, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and abortion following prenatal diagnosis. However, there is no legal definition for this concept and its meaning varies among members of the community and the medical profession. Legal and policy responses to "serious disability" consist of an assortment of ethical guidelines, specific legislative frameworks and longstanding provisions of the criminal law, some of which were neither enacted nor developed with modern medical practices and dilemmas in mind. In addition, many of these regulatory frameworks and prohibitions vary between State and Territory jurisdictions. This leaves service providers, families wishing to utilise (or avoid utilising) diagnostic technologies and the broader community uncertain about the legal limits. This uncertainty has implications for women's autonomy in reproductive decision-making. For instance, services may be withheld, or their use encouraged, depending on differing understandings of the concept of "serious disability". The time has arrived for governments to consider whether it is appropriate to introduce a uniform set of guidelines and/or regulations across Australia for guiding clinical determinations of "serious disability".

Karpin, I.A. 2007, 'Choosing Disability: Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and Negative Enhancement', Journal of Law and Medicine, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 89-103.
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Instances where preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is used to select an embryo for the presence of a particular disease or disability - the child would share characteristics with the parent - in Australia there appears to be consensus that PGD should only be used to select against serious disability - how we define disability - ethical issues surrounding "negative enhancement".

Karpin, I.A. & Bennett, B. 2006, 'Genetic Technologies and the Regulation of Reproductive Decision-Making in Australia', Journal of Law and Medicine, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 127-134.
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This article provides a critical analysis of the current Australian regulatory landscape at the interface between genetics and reproductive decision-making. The authors argue that a comparative analysis with other countries and international law and a contextual examination of the way law regulates concepts such as disease and health, abnormality and normality is necessary before we can develop appropriate policy and legislative responses in this area. Specific genetic testing technologies are considered including prenatal genetic testing, preimplantation genetic diagnosis and inheritable genetic modification. An increasing number of members of the Australian community are using genetic testing technologies when they decide to have a baby. The authors argue that as concepts of disease and health vary among members of the community and the potential to test for traits other than illness increases, a new tension arises between an ethic of individual choice and a role for government in regulating reproductive decision-making.

Karpin, I.A. 2006, 'The Uncanny Embryos: Legal Limits to the Human and reproduction without Women', Sydney Law Review, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 599-623.
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Law through both regulation and prohibition carries us forward in the imaginary leap that is necessary to take us from the embryonic being to the post-human being. Such beings include the hybrid, the chimera, the genetically enhanced, the inheritably genetically manipulated, the embryo with three genetic progenitors and the embryo produced by the fusion of same sex gametes. In this paper I explore how the law, by prohibiting the creation of certain kinds of embryos, is nevertheless giving legislative life to entities that are yet to be made. I consider how the law currently defines these entities and how it would define them if they were developed from the embryo to a fully birthed (human) being.

Karpin, I.A. & O'Connell, K. 2002, 'Intimate Strangers: law, genetics, Globalisation and the 'Human Family'', Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol. 17, no. December, pp. 63-82.
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MatriLineTM, one of the services offered by the Oxford Ancestors project, a genetic mapping exercise carried out by Professor Brian Sykes of Oxford University, offers women the opportunity of using 'the proven power of mirochondrial DNA to probe into the deep past') MatriLine analyses individual DNA to locate women in relation to a framework of European maternal ancestors, linking them 'to one of seven women: Ursula~ Tara, Helena, Katrine~ Velda, Xenia or Jasmine'

Karpin, I.A. 2000, 'The Genetic Connection - Owning our Genetic Heritage', Journal of Law and Medicine, vol. 7.

Karpin, I.A. 1994, 'Reimaging Maternal Selfhood: Transgressing Body Boundaries and the Law', Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol. 2.

Karpin, I.A. 1992, 'Legislating the Female Body: Reproductive Technology and the Reconstructed Woman', Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 325-349.

Karpin, I.A. & Bennett, B. 2008, 'Freedom to Choose? Embryo Selection, Reproductive Decision Making and the Role of the State', Precedent, vol. 88, pp. 4-8.

Karpin, I.A. 2006, 'Finding a place for altruism in Australian stem cell debates', Human Rights Defender, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 17-19.

Karpin, I.A. 2008, 'The Uncanny Embryos: Revisited after the Passing of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Act(2006)' and 'Better than Normal: choosing to self-construct' including commentary', York Institute for Health Research, Toronto, Canada, pp. 1-49.
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Research Background This research paper developed from a two part invited lecture series for the York Institute for Health Research (YIHR) Spotlight On Health Research Seminar Series. It includes two articles with separate commentary by experts in other disciplines. The first article revisits earlier research (published in Sydney Law Review) examining amendments to the Prohibition of Human Cloning [for Reproduction] Act (2002) and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act (2002). The second article brings together two areas separately considered elsewhere; regulatory regimes around the use of PGD to choose an embryo with an abnormality and the use of body modification technologies for non-therapeutic or enhancing purposes. Research Contribution The first paper explores the legal regulation of biotechnologies that make it possible to create varying embryonic forms including clones and hybrids. It raises questions about the meaning of legal "personhood" and the role of women in the gestation of prohibited embryos. The second paper explores the role for law in regulating the use of genetic and cosmetic modification technologies where it is to achieve outcomes that do not conform to traditional ideals of normalcy. Research Significance This research interrogates the values we apply when regulating to limit or prohibit production of certain kinds of humans. The legal and ethical dilemmas posed by this regulatory task are novel and require a new degree of scrutiny that explores the underlying assumptions and motivations behind the law. This research begins an important international and cross-disciplinary discussion about the appropriate role for law in this context. The report appears both online and in CD form and has been distributed through the Canadian YIHR network. Further development of the ideas appears in Australia as part of Chapter 5 in B Bennett, T Carney and I Karpin (eds) The Brave New World of Health (Federation Press, Sydney 2008).