The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars

Dov Fox, DPhil, JD, LLM will engage pressing challenges for biomedicine against the backdrop of our rapidly shifting legal, economic, social, and healthcare environments. More details coming soon! This event is co-hosted by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and the Petrie Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Support provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

Mar 05, 2026 09:00am ET - Mar 05, 2026 10:00am ET

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Pitched battles over abortion, puberty blockers, and assisted suicide have turned American healthcare into a legal minefield. Faced with mounting restrictions on medical practice, doctors and nurses who follow their conscience to provide standard treatments now risk being fined, fired, or even imprisoned. Meanwhile, clinicians who conscientiously deny evidence-based care are shielded without condition from any such consequences. Dov Fox, DPhil, JD, LLM argues that the lopsided law of medical conscience selectively burdens providers, drives vulnerable patients underground, and impoverishes the dynamic pluralism of medicine by ceding the moral vocabulary of conscience to refusers alone.

This presentation lays bare the broken system of medical conscience and set out to fix it. In his latest book, The Conscience of Care: The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars (Harvard University Press, 2026), Fox canvases a landscape of contested services that include IVF, IUDs, opioids, psychedelics, organ transplants, and advance directives. He develops practical reforms that rebalance conscience protection by introducing measured safeguards for providers and scaling back the categorical refuge afforded to refusers. Fox presents a vision of medicine that reclaims the lost promise of conscience to bridge social divides on matters of life and death, impairment and identity.

GUEST LECTURER:

Dov Fox, DPhil, JD, LLM

Herzog Research Professor of Law; Director, Center for Health Law Policy & Bioethics at the University of San Diego

An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Fox specializes in constitutional history, criminal law, and torts. His books include "The Conscience of Care: Navigating Health in the Culture Wars" (Harvard University Press, 2025) and "Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology are Remaking Reproduction and the Law" (Oxford University Press, 2019). Professor Fox is the author of more than 80 scholarly articles in leading journals of law (e.g., Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal), science (e.g., Nature, Science), medicine (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association), and public health (e.g., Foreign Affairs, American Journal of Public Health). His research is frequently discussed in popular magazines (e.g., Newsweek, Economist) and radio outlets (e.g., CNN, NPR). Fox also publishes opinion essays (e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal) and provides on-air analysis (e.g., Today Show, Good Morning America).

Professor Fox served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has also worked at the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; the consulting firm of McKinsey & Company; and the Civil Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Fox has served on advisory boards of the American Constitution Society, Appellate Defenders, the Law and Society Association, and the Association of American Law Schools. At the University of San Diego, he has chaired appointments and Dean search committees.

He has been recognized as professor of the year for both outstanding scholarship (2021, 2025) and teaching excellence (2017, 2022). In 2023-2024, he was also named University Professor, the highest academic honor bestowed on faculty in any field. His work with local communities has earned him recognition as a "San Diego Changemaker" and "Urgent Challenges Innovator." Professor Fox's audiobook "Donor 9623” was named Audible's #1 podcast of 2020 and submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism. The second season (Audible, 2023) examines social and legal developments in the aftermath of the original series. His audiobooks have been featured in interviews with The Atlantic and Armchair Expert.

Professor Fox was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University, where he earned his doctorate in political theory and served as a lecturer in politics and philosophy. He received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans to attend Yale Law School, where he was projects editor of the Yale Law Journal and all three years awarded the prize for best paper in law and science. Professor Fox's work in translational medicine, artificial intelligence, and public health policy has been funded by major grant awards from the federal government (e.g., National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities) and leading philanthropies (e.g., Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research).

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