PEALS Co-Director Jackie Leach Scully will be speaking at a conference entitled Reproducing Normality: Disability, Prenatal Testing and Bioethics at the University of Sydney on 7 December 2011. Jackie's talk, "Choosing disability, the law, and moral opinion" looks at the way in which it is generally assumed (or hoped) that the regulation and legislation of selective reproductive technologies, such as prenatal diagnosis and screening, will *reflect* the current professional and public consensus about the ethics of their use. The role played by the law in the *formation* of moral opinion about normality and normativity is more neglected. The talk draws on the example of what has become known as ‘choosing disability’, focusing on the debate prompted by the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008.
PEALS' Associate Dr Tom Shakespeare, currently working with the World Health Organization, Geneva, will also present at the conference. His talk is entitled "Nasty, brutish and short? The predicament of disability and embodiment."
Jackie's talk is part of a visit to Australia during December 2011, taking in periods at the University of Sydney, where she is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Medical Faculty, at Monash University, Melbourne, and research at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
published on: 6th December 2011