Evaluating Hospital Procedures for Authorizing Emergency Abortion with Nadia Sawicki

Add to Calendar: Add to Calendar: 2025-03-19 12:00:00 2025-03-19 13:00:00 Evaluating Hospital Procedures for Authorizing Emergency Abortion with Nadia Sawicki Event Description The Elena and Miles Zaremski Law Medicine Forum presents: Evaluating Hospital Procedures for Authorizing Emergency Abortion: All states that have banned or restricted abortion after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health offer some exception for abortions that are medically necessary to save a patient’s life during an emergency. However, the internal procedures for reviewing and approving requests for emergency abortion vary dramatically from institution to institution. In some hospitals, the treating physician can make this judgment on their own; in others, an ethics committee must review the decision; in others, hospital counsel may impose limits on physicians’ authority to terminate pregnancy. Prof. Sawicki will offer insights as to how well each of these decision-making procedures balance patient safety, clinical standards of care, medical ethics and legal risk, with the goal of encouraging hospital attorneys and health care providers to thoughtfully select approaches that best meet their patients’ needs. Speaker Bio Prof. Sawicki’s areas of expertise include torts, health law and bioethics. Her scholarly work addresses subjects including the law's role in shaping the informed consent process; tort law's limitations in protecting the rights of patients in the end-of-life and reproductive health contexts; the challenges of protecting patients' rights to safe and accessible medical care while also accommodating health care providers' conscientious beliefs; and the state’s role in enforcing ethical norms in medicine. In 2020, Prof. Sawicki was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. She has previously served as a member of the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on Bioethics and the Law, and co-chair of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities’ Law Affinity Group. Prior to joining Loyola, Prof. Sawicki held the inaugural George Sharswood Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught bioethics and public health law. She has also served as a lecturer in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences, practiced law with Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, and clerked for the Honorable J. Curtis Joyner of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Before attending law school, Prof. Sawicki worked as an analyst in the Nursing Executive Center at the Advisory Board Company. Students: Moot Courtroom (George Gund Hall, Room A59) All others: Virtual via Zoom School of Law School of Law America/New_York public