Heidt-Forsythe Erin
a Departments of Women's Studies and Political Science, Pennsylvania State University.
AJOB Empir Bioeth. 2017 Jan-Mar;8(1):58-67. doi: 10.1080/23294515.2016.1209595. Epub 2016 Jul 12.
The availability of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the medical marketplace complicates our understanding of reproductive public policy in the United States. Political debates over ARTs often are based on fundamental moral principles of life, reproduction, and kinship, similar to other reproductive policies in the United States. However, ARTs are an important moneymaking private enterprise for the U.S. biotechnology industry. This project investigates how the U.S. states regulate these unique and challenging technologies as either moral policies or economic policies.
This study employs ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to estimate the significance of morality and economic policy variables on ART policies at the state level, noting associations between state-level political, economic, and gender variables on restrictive and permissive state-level ART policies.
Economic variables (reflecting the biotechnology industry) and advocacy for access to ART on behalf of infertility patients increase the chances of states passing policies that enable consumer use of ARTs. Additionally, individual ART policies are distinct from one another in the ways that morality variables increase the chances of ART regulations. Surprisingly, the role of religious adherence among state residents varied in positive and negative relationships with individual policy passage.
In general, these results support the hypothesis that ART laws are associated with economic as well as moral concerns of the states-ARTs lie at the intersection of issues of life and reproduction and of scientific innovation and health. What is most striking about these results is that they do not follow patterns seen in the legislation of abortion, contraception, and sexuality in general-those reproductive policies that are considered "morality policy." Similarly, economic variables are not consistently significant in the expected direction.
医疗市场中辅助生殖技术（ARTs）的可获得性使我们对美国生殖公共政策的理解变得复杂。关于ARTs的政治辩论通常基于生命、生殖和亲属关系的基本道德原则，这与美国的其他生殖政策类似。然而，ARTs对美国生物技术产业来说是一个重要的盈利性私营企业。本项目调查美国各州如何将这些独特且具有挑战性的技术作为道德政策或经济政策进行监管。
本研究采用普通最小二乘法（OLS）回归来估计道德和经济政策变量对州一级ART政策的重要性，同时注意州一级政治、经济和性别变量与限制性和宽松性州一级ART政策之间的关联。
经济变量（反映生物技术产业）以及代表不孕患者争取获得ARTs的倡导活动增加了各州通过允许消费者使用ARTs政策的可能性。此外，在道德变量增加ART监管可能性的方式上，各项ART政策彼此不同。令人惊讶的是，州居民的宗教信仰程度在与个别政策通过的关系中呈现出正负不同的作用。
总体而言，这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即ART法律与各州的经济以及道德关切相关——ARTs处于生命与生殖问题以及科学创新与健康问题的交叉点。这些结果最引人注目的是，它们并不遵循堕胎、避孕和性取向等一般生殖政策（那些被视为“道德政策”的政策）立法中所呈现的模式。同样，经济变量在预期方向上并不总是显著的。
