Is abortion of children with Down&#39;s syndrome legal in EU? In many countries of the European Union, abortions are performed on women after knowledge of down syndrome in the embryo. In some countries this disease has almost disappeared from the population. And according to MIT news in recent months, we are now on the verge of being able to detect other diseases such as some form of diabetes. We must not forget that we can also already suppress HIV in births, even if for this virus, the probability of seeing it disappear from the population is much lower. All this means that in a few years the countries of the European Union will be able to create populations almost disease-free at birth. The definition of eugenics is : the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics). And we already know that article 3 of EU charter of human rights prohibit &quot;eugenics practices&quot;. My first question is : Why does practices are not considered as eugenics practices following EU charter of human rights ? And my second question is : If it is proven that the constitution of human rights does not prevent such abortions, does this mean that it does not prevent abortions based on the probabilities of the height or IQ of the future child either?
It would appear the answer is &quot;it depends&quot;, based on where the abortion takes place. It's possible that France has a domestic law that prohibits aborting children with Down's syndrome — which would make such an act illegal if performed in France. I am not familiar with French law so do not know and cannot comment on that. More generally speaking, there is no EU-wide law that prohibits such abortions. For example, in the UK, such abortions are considered somewhat routine and there is no specific law prohibiting them. Indeed, they are explicitly permitted under the Abortion Act 1967. While there is a prohibition on eugenics in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the Charter), that would only seem to be engaged in the event some EU or domestic law was passed that mandated some form of eugenics. The European Convention on Human Rights has Article 2—the &quot;Right to Life&quot;—however, the rights established by this Article typically only apply to living beings and have not yet been held to firmly apply to foetuses (Vo v. France [2004] ECtHR, para 80.) and an unborn child can be held not to possess these rights until the moment of birth (Paton v. British Pregnancy Advisory Service Trustees [1979]) although it varies from Member State to Member State. Some Member States (e.g. Ireland) constitutionally guarantee unborn children the right to live, in which case such abortions would presumably be illegal, but unless there's a specific law that prohibits such abortions, in almost all Member States of the European Union, such abortions would not be illegal. In conclusion, are such abortions prohibited in the EU? Not as far as my research suggests.
To answer the last question, the court cannot order a DNA test, see Kumar v. Gupta, on privacy grounds: &quot;such tests impinge upon the right of privacy of an individual and could also have major societal repercussions&quot;. This is not a hard line, but it would be safe to conclude that in a case like the present, the Court’s decision should be rendered only after balancing the interests of the parties, i.e, the quest for truth, and the social and cultural implications involved therein See Puttaswamy v. India, the landmark case that established the constitutional right to privacy. DNA evidence is not absolutely barred, see Banarsi Dass V. Teeku Dutta and citations therein, finding most importantly that There must be a strong prima facie case in that the husband must establish non-access in order to dispel the presumption arising under Section 112 of the Evidence Act. Various rulings have clarified that Section 112 establishes a defeasible presumption, and not a mindless bar to evidence: It is rebuttable presumption of law that a child born during the lawful wedlock is legitimate, and that access occurred between the parents. In other words, yes and no. As summarized in that ruling, tests cannot be ordered routinely or as a form of discovery, &quot;There must be a strong prima facie case in that the husband must establish non-access in order to dispel the presumption arising under Section 112 of the Evidence Act&quot;, the court must balance the consequences of ordering such a test (&quot;branding a child as a bastard and the mother as an unchaste woman&quot;), and a person cannot be compelled to give a blood sample.
Trash is public property, see here for example: "The abandonment of property is the relinquishing of all title, possession, or claim to or of it". I think the assumption that a DNA code "belongs to you" is legally questionable. If you don't abandon it, you can own specific molecules of DNA. The only way to legally control replication of that pattern (garnerd via trash picking) would be via copyright or patent. But natually occurring DNA cannot be patented (Assoc. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.). As a natural fact, it is also not subject to copyright.
There is not uniformity of law on this question, which is usually decided in the period after a death, but before a will is admitted to probate or an executor is appointed (typically in three to five days). As a result, the legal jurisdiction (usually a country or sub-national state or autonomous region) involved matters a great deal. For example, Italy used to presume that you did not want organ donation if you didn't execute a document during life saying that you did, and now has the opposite presumption. Similarly, many jurisdictions used to give a blood relative priority over a same sex partner, but now recognize a civil union or same sex marriage as having priority over a blood relative. Some jurisdictions give you some say over, for example, whether your body's organs will be donated or your body will be used for medical research. Some have formal documents that can be drafted and there are such things as "negative" provisions that are documents saying who cannot do something with your body. Other jurisdictions, as user6726 suggests, have a fixed priority system for determining who is next of kin and that applies strictly. Needless to say, a critical issue is how any such directive would be enforced. Obviously you, being dead, can't do that, and documents don't simply crawl out of desk drawers and walk themselves into court houses after your death either. Your wishes will never be enforced unless someone takes it upon themselves at the critical moment, to take action, and in that case, local law determines under what circumstances that person's statement regarding your wishes will be honored. Often, the person who might step up to take action doesn't learn of your death and of the location of your body until it is too late. If you die in circumstances where your identity is unknown, or where no relatives can be located and no directives can be located, some public official or whomever else ends up in possession of your body (often a corner) will have to decide for themselves what to do without your input.
Can Alice still get child support, or will she be denied because she can not definitively prove which man is the child's biological father? The legal standard is a preponderance of the evidence (i.e. more likely than not) and there is plenty of evidence that can be offered in addition to DNA evidence, such as testimony under oath from people in a position to know who was having sex with whom at the relevant times. Contrary to a common misconception, testimony under oath is still solid evidence that can support a verdict on appeal. Alice had neither a long standing romantic relationship with Bob nor anyone that was a witness to the sexual act, thus making the question of who she slept with difficult to prove. It isn't that hard to prove. Q to Alice's physician: Based upon an ultrasound, when did Alice conceive? A: April 5-8, 2021. Q to DNA expert: Based upon the DNA test, who could the father be? A: Billy or Bob. Q to Alice: Did you have sex with Billy between April 5-8, 2021? A: No. Q to Alice: Did you have sex with Bob between April 5-8, 2021? A: Yes. Q to Billy: Did you have sex with Alice between April 5-8, 2021? A: No. Q to Billy: Why not? A: I was at the Shuffleboard World Cup in Tibet, I have time stamped pictures. Q to Bob: Did you have sex with Alice between April 5-8, 2021? A: -- if Yes, judge says he believes Bob and Alice and the case is over. -- if No, the judge decides who among Bob, Billy, and Alice the judge believes based upon other evidence. Ultimately, the judge has to rule between the two based upon non-genetic evidence and resolve credibility disputes just as in any other case that doesn't involve DNA evidence (which is the vast majority of cases). Also, the edge cases are few are far between. Identical twins are rare to start with, and few women have sex with more than one identical twin in the several day period when she could have conceived or didn't know which twin she had sex with. It has happened at least once in history (post-DNA testing), but you can probably count the number of times that it has ever happened on one hand. For example, presumptions from cohabitation, marriage, and claims of paternity often resolve paternity disputes without DNA evidence. Further, to the extent that there is good faith uncertainty (perhaps everyone agrees that the mother has sex with both twins on the only possible day of conception and nobody really knows), the downsides to a mistake in the larger cosmic sense of the overall paternity law system are minimal, as identical twins very rarely become deeply alienated from each other and instead tend to be close and intensely cooperative once they discover each other, and tend to be similar to each other in almost every respect depriving the child of little if the court gets it wrong. Realistically, identical twins are particularly likely to settle out of court so the judge doesn't have to decide. In one of the only two actual cases I could locate that went to trial (in Brazil), both twins were ordered to pay child support because the evidence showed that they actively conspired with each other to confound the mother and the court regarding who the father was, and conspiracies can support joint and several liability. The other case reported in a news story had convincing circumstantial evidence supporting one identical twin over the other that probably establish a presumption of paternity for one twin and not the other. One of the twins, who cannot be named for legal reasons, went to court last summer in the hope of forcing the mother to grant him access to the child. Although his name is not on the birth certificate, he claims he is the only father the boy has known, cared for him every other weekend, provided financial support and was even known to him as 'papa'. But then the man's relationship with his girlfriend broke down and the visits halted. When he began legal proceedings to prove his paternity, the mother made her claim that she had been sleeping with his twin at around the same time. The twins have said they knew they were both having sex with the woman, but argue that only one had sex during the period of conception. Both refused to undergo a DNA test: the complainant refused to pay the £335 charge while his brother, who has since married and fathered children, does not consider himself involved in the dispute. Now, however, Judge Jolin has asked the complainant to take a DNA test by 1 December to ensure he can claim even possible paternity, while his brother may also be tested. (The second case is in Quebec and the cost of the test in pounds is apparently a currency conversion value.) (It is possible in principle to distinguish even identical twins from each other with high coverage whole genome tests that would reveal a few random mutations in each twin out of billions of possible mutations, but it is currently prohibitively expensive to do so.) Can she even get a paternity test given that it would not be definitive proof which man was the father? Yes. This rules out all 4 billion men in the world minus two of them. It has great probative value, narrowing the list of possible fathers down to two.
In the US, the most wide-spread proscription against a medical treatment (broadly construed) is that only 10 of 50 states allow physician-assisted suicide. In Washington v. Glucksberg (one of the states that subsequently made such suicides legal), SCOTUS affirms that such a law does not violate the Due Process Clause. Given a historical analysis, the court concludes that an &quot;asserted 'right' to assistance in committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause&quot;. O'Connor in her concurring opinion further states that &quot;There is no dispute that dying patients in Washington and New York can obtain palliative care, even when doing so would hasten their deaths&quot;, but this falls short of a ruling that a person has a protected liberty interest in seeking medical care. Cruzan v. Director affirms that &quot;[a] competent person has a liberty interest under the Due Process Clause in refusing unwanted medical treatment&quot; (also noting that &quot;informed consent&quot; may derive from common law or specific state constitutions). Reciting prior reasoning on Due Process and medical treatment and referring to Jacobson v. Massachusetts (smallpox case), they note that &quot;the Court balanced an individual's liberty interest in declining an unwanted smallpox vaccine against the State's interest in preventing disease&quot;. There seems to be a dearth of cases affirming a protected liberty interest in seeking a particular medical procedure. Were the court to announce a fundamental right to seek some medical treatment, that right could still be subordinated to the states compelling interest in preventing some harm associated with a medical procedure, with legal review being carried out under a strict scrutiny standard. It should be borne in mind that Congress does limit access to drugs and devices, hence there is no constitutionally-protected right to take LSD as a treatment for mental problems. To the extent that a procedure relies on a (not-yet approved) device, that device must be approved by the FDA.
According to a Politico article from July this year EU Parliament lets companies look for child abuse on their platforms, with reservations The European Parliament on Tuesday approved a controversial law that would allow digital companies to detect and report child sexual abuse on their platforms for the next three years. Tuesday's vote was the final hurdle for the bill, and will allow companies to scan their platforms for explicit material without fear of violating Europe's strict privacy laws. The bill pitted the European Commission, who proposed the bill, and children's rights activists against the Parliament and Europe's privacy regulators, who fear the bill could undermine the EU's privacy rules. The results showed 537 MEPs voted in favor of the bill, with 133 against and 24 abstaining. Despite the result, [some] European lawmakers warned that the rules are &quot;legally flawed&quot; and could crumble in front of a court. [...] MEPs also said that the blanket scanning of private messages of European citizens to look for evidence of child grooming could clash with another set of privacy rules protecting personal data, the GDPR. To allay the Parliament's concerns, EU countries agreed to modify the Commission’s law to add additional safeguards, including bringing in Europe's network of privacy watchdogs to advise on what technologies should be used to do the scanning, and how they should be used. They also left out audio messages from the bill. The changes prompted Sippel, who was negotiating on behalf of the Parliament, to sign off on the bill. So YMMV, but insofar it looks pretty legal unless a court decides otherwise. It seems Apple went public with their plan after this EU law was passed, so they probably took it into account. For what's that worth, there's an analysis from someone at Cambridge (in the Compliant and Accountable Systems Group, Department of Computer Science and Technology) that: EU law would require that Apple obtain the consent of individual iPhone users for on-device scanning. This consent would need to be opt-in, rather than opt-out; there would need to be a real possibility for users to refuse consent; users’ access to iCloud could not be made conditional on giving consent to CSAM Detection; and users must be able to withdraw consent without suffering loss of iCloud service. This may place a welcome brake on the deployment of on- device CSAM detection in the EU. However, these barriers may be removed by future EU or Member State legislation – just as similar potential barriers for automated CSAM detection by certain messaging services have already been removed by EU legislation. So it seems that there would be a way for Apple to do this &quot;device scanning&quot; even in the EU with user (clickwrap) agreement... The paper enumerates the things than can be made implicit (bundled) in a GDPR agreement, and then goes on to argue that probably none of these apply to Apple's CSAM on device, and so they'll probably need a separate checkbox for CSAM... which the paper's author is pretty sure the users would not check. Importantly, because consent must be specific, consent to one purpose (such as processing to detect CSAM) can’t be presumed from consent to another purpose (such as processing for cloud backup). Nor can consent to processing to detect CSAM be ‘bundled’ with consent to cloud backup. GDPR strongly indicates that ‘bundling’ – the practice of making access to a service conditional on giving consent to processing that is not necessary for that service – is not permitted. [...] It is unlikely in the extreme that even minimally informed holders of CSAM would give consent to Apple’s CSAM Detection system. The paper more tenuously (IMHO) argues then that Apple needs do the same for their server-side scanning in the EU, i.e. get explicit consent, because it's somehow tied to the on-device scanning via the iCloud account. (The author also makes their personal disapproval of CSAM in all forms more explicit towards the end of the paper.) But still that someone who disapproves of CSAM entertains that it might be deployed via clickwrap user consent (albeit with a separate checkbox) is noteworthy. In this context I'll note (even though the paper doesn't), that there is a 2019 CJEU decision that pre-checking certain kinds of checkboxes (like for &quot;nonessential&quot; cookies) is not legal. I suspect CSAM will fall in this kind of category... so they won't be able to have the checkbox for it pre-checked, unless Apple does something more devious and make it so that image hashes become &quot;essential&quot; to something else that the user would more readily like to agree to... Also, looking at a current (August 1) Apple description of their system, it seems they only plan to run the image hashing on the device (and upload a threshold-encrypted version of the result, so that only multiple, cumulative &quot;hits&quot; on several images would be detectable/decryptable on the server), which would basically make their system (as currently envisaged) inoperable without the local hash step. I've also looked at Commission's 70-page impact assessment for their most recent proposal (the one discussed at the beginning of this answer), but it only discusses things like PhotoDNA and server-side hashing. So I guess they were unware that someone might plan to do [only] client-side hashing as part of a CSAM design. If this goes to an EU court, I guess an issue will be when and why iOS would create those (threshold-encrypted) vouchers that contain the images hashes, e.g. if they'd be considered an essential part/step of an otherwise approved purpose...
Although abortion is legal in the US, not everyone is allowed to perform an abortion. In Washington, the law allows a physician to terminate a pregnancy, and recognizes a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. An abortion performed by anyone else is not legal, and performing an illegal abortion is a class C felony. There are "plan B" pills which are legal in the US and levonorgestrel is available without a prescription, but the mifepristone and misoprostol regime is not available without a doctor's orders. In this scenario, the partner will have performed an illegal abortion, and is guilty of a controlled substances crime. In some states, there is a separate crime of fetal homicide. In Washington, this is covered under 1st degree manslaughter, a class A felony, if one "intentionally and unlawfully kills an unborn quick child by inflicting any injury upon the mother of such child". "Any injury" does not require "great violence" or "striking". It is also the class B felony of poisoning which includes slipping in a harmful substance with intent to harm another person, as well as assault.