To mitigate the risks associated with prescription opioid use, most states have implemented laws requiring clinicians to obtain informed consent prior to prescribing opioids in at least some circumstances. Informed consent is defined as a communication between a patient and clinician in which the patient agrees to a medical intervention after being informed of the risks, benefits, and alternatives.
Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania
In this article in AMA Journal of Ethics, Scott Burris and Evan Anderson outline the pandemic-era failures around the use of law for public health and offer recommendations and observations to facilitate a change in the culture and leadership of public health.
Published in the American Journal of Public Health, this article written by staff at the Center for Public Health Law Research identifies and categorizes US state legislation introduced between January 1, 2021, and May 20, 2022 that addresses emergency health authority. The COVID-19 pandemic called for quick, decisive action to limit infections, and when the next outbreak hits, new laws limiting health authority may make such action even more difficult.
State laws setting the scope and limits of emergency authority are crucial to an effective public health response. This suite of legal data captures details of legislation that addresses emergency health authority introduced between January 1, 2021, and May 20, 2022, in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
This dataset presents state-level statutes and regulations on prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) laws covering reporting requirements, mandates requiring providers to check PDMP databases before prescribing controlled substances, and provisions regulating access.
On an array of health concerns, policymakers have rejected science in favor of lawmaking based on ideology, politics, and religion, to the detriment of public health. This is particularly true of stigmatized health areas such as reproductive health, and especially abortion care.
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned nearly 50 years of precedent protecting the right to an abortion prior to viability. Under Roe v. Wade, the legal landscape of abortion was a complex patchwork of state laws and court decisions regulating access to the procedure. The Dobbs decision further compromised abortion access by allowing states to ban all or most abortions.
The Center for Public Health Law Research is home to one of the leading research teams focused on understanding the role and effects of laws related to sexual and reproductive health on population health, well-being, and equity. The Center’s resources reflect the varied and ever-changing landscape of regulations and restrictions on abortion, access to contraception, and other issues related to sexual and reproductive health in the United States and worldwide.
