Erin Heidt-Forsythe
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, Political Science | Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA, UNITED STATES
Erin Heidt-Forsythe received a PhD in Political Science, with a focus on Women and Politics, from Rutgers University
Industry Expertise (2)
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (6)
Social Policy
Assisted Reproductive Technologies
Political Science
Gender
Bioethics
Feminist Bioethics
Biography
Erin Heidt-Forsythe received a PhD in Political Science, with a focus on Women and Politics, from Rutgers University. Her work examines the intersections of gender, political science, and bioethics. Employing mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, she studies US state legislation and policymaking about assisted reproductive technologies. She has published on assisted reproductive technologies, feminist bioethics, and social policy. Her areas of specialization include science, medicine, and health; reproduction and the body; American state politics and policy; interest groups and representation. From 2012-13, she was a grant-funded faculty research associate at the Center for Genetic Research Ethics and Law (CGREAL) at Case Western Reserve University. She joined the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Science as an Assistant Professor in August 2013
Education (3)
Rutgers University: Ph.D., Political Science 2013
Major Field: Women and Politics Minor Field: American Politics, Public Policy
Rutgers University: M.A., Political Science 2009
Occidental College: B.A., Politics 2005
Cum Laude
Links (3)
Articles (4)
Morals or markets? Regulating assisted reproductive technologies as morality or economic policies in the states
AJOB Empirical Bioethics
Erin Heidt-Forsythe
2016 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.
You can go your own way: State regulation of oocyte donation in California and New York
BioSocieties
Erin Heidt-Forsythe
2016 State regulation of oocyte donation in the context of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has increased since California’s landmark passage of Proposition 71 and the establishment of the first state-funded stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Scholarship has largely focused on California’s regulation of stem cell research as a patchwork of private sector and state regulations, reflecting major debates about the social contract for science. Given California’s political exceptionalism, how does examining alternative state histories, political structures, and institutions at the state level illuminate the ways that bio-innovation is being regulated in a federal regulatory vacuum? Examining state management of oocyte donation in the context of hESC research, this article considers New York and California as comparative sites of stem cell science regulation, which enriches our understanding of how regulation of stem cell science arises out of an engagement with representative politics and the private sector in the United States. Employing a process tracing of policy development in New York and California, this article highlights alternative democratic pathways to the management of oocyte donation in research contexts: given differences in direct democratic action, legislative representation, executive leadership, and publicly funded state stem cell research institutions, distinct regulatory outcomes occur with important bioethical implications for publics and participants in stem cell science at the state level.
Whose Right to Know? The Subjectivity of Mothers in Mandatory Paternity Testing
The American Journal of Bioethics
Erin Heidt-Forsythe & Michelle L. McGowan
2013 Although anonymous gamete donation is the norm in the United States, recent scholarship has queried whether Western European prohibitions on anonymity could or should be applied in the states.
Gendered Eugenics and the Problematic of Free Market Reproductive Technologies: Sperm and Egg Donation in the United States
Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Cynthia R. Daniels and Erin Heidt-Forsythe
2012 Emerging reproductive technologies raise bioethical dilemmas for feminist theory and practice. While they have opened doors to alternative family formation, they have also perpetuated new forms of stratified reproduction. This article explores this dilemma through a study of the sperm banking and egg donation industries in the United States, arguing that free market reproductive choice has produced a form of gendered eugenics, which perpetuates beliefs in the genetic foundation of interwoven gender, race, and class hierarchies. In the United States, in vitro fertilization centers aggressively recruit donors with lures of cash and gifts, like iPods and movie tickets. Their marketing practices collapse genetic and nongenetic traits into a package that can be purchased by reproductive consumers. Online data banks hock sperm and eggs with information about donor race, ethnicity, skin tone, hair texture, grade point average, religion, and nationality. This article compares the social and physical traits of 1,515 sperm and egg donors to national averages for males and females to illustrate the ways in which donor selection and marketing practices perpetuate stratified norms of gender, race, and class. It argues that processes of human commodification and geneticism have combined with feminist resistance to state regulation of reproductive technologies to produce this more subtle form of eugenics. It contends that financial lures offered to donors act as a form of positive eugenics and should be prohibited. It calls for a new feminist repro-ethics based on principles of bodily integrity and reproductive empowerment that would shift from market-based to gift-based reproductive relations.
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