When adolescents seek emergency contraception in the emergency room, social judgment on the part of clinicians can hamper treatment.

The opportunity to make choices about family planning has outpaced our ability to reach consensus on what constitutes the ethical use of new technology.

The Department of Health and Human Service's decision to include a religious exemption to its requirement that private health plans cover contraception without patient cost-sharing raises questions about whether such an exemption appropriately balances the needs, beliefs, rights, and obligations of all affected.

More anti-abortion legislation was passed in 2011 than in any other year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. In the first half of the year, more than 80 abortion-related restrictions were enacted across the United States.

Most discussion about using prenatal interventions to choose traits of children involves selecting traits that will contribute to intelligence, athleticism or strength, resistance to disease, and longevity, outcomes many of us would find desirable for ourselves.

Doctors should do everything they can to protect an adolescent's confidentiality, but lying to the patient's parents is not acceptable.

A substantial proportion of patients seen by physicians have had an abortion or will have one in the future, yet acquiring the necessary skills to care for 30 percent of the female patient population has been made challenging for future physicians by a number of laws and amendments.

Physicians must maintain a delicate balance between patient autonomy and preventing harm when faced with patients who refuse treatment.

While sex selection of children for nonmedical reasons is not prohibited in the United States, the authors believe that sperm sorting should not be used until more safety data are available.

How can we educate individual patients and the public so they can differentiate the science from the rhetoric about vaccines?