In December 2021, the Global Observatory held an online workshop titled A Question of Life. We asked several of the panelists to shed light on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision by comparing the framings of abortion politics and constellations of rights and responsibilities across their respective countries of focus.
Sheila Jasanoff, Director, Global Observatory for Genome Editing reflects on how the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ignores scientific and cultural shifts in how we think about reproduction, life, and rights.
David Winickoff, OECD Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation, Division of Science and Technology Policy offers a few reflections on the capacities and incapacities of soft law as a mechanism for intervening in the complex landscape of global governance.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago expresses hope is that as we consider the establishment of norms for genome editing via a Global Observatory, we can build capacity for social imagination that is more comparative and less parochial than American socio-technical imaginaries currently tend to be.
Laurence Lwoff, Head Bioethics Unit, Council of Europe reflects on how the Global Observatory and its objectives echo some of the concerns that guide the Council of Europe’s work on the protection of human rights in biomedicine.
Peter Mills, Nuffield Council on Bioethics argues that what has been missing from public debate is a venue for the expression and comparison of excluded interests, insights and values that are often unrepresented in the preeminent venues of international dialogue on heritable genome editing.