Making the Best of Semen: Prospects for Law and Regulation

Argues that regulation of the substance that creates life and spreads harm is crucial in a post-Roe America

Controls on sexual reproduction are so familiar. Check out any authority over human lives--religious, medical, sociopolitical, familial, psychological--and you’ll find teachings about what people must, shouldn’t, may, and may not do with their reproductive organs. In this landscape of control, one active participant has been escaping its share of deserved attention. Semen is the quintessential hazardous substance, a fluid that delivers unique benefit along with unique risk, but until now nobody has set out to control it.

In Making the Best of Semen Anita Bernstein sets out to manage a significant fluid that calls for much more attention that it receives. The benefits and harms that semen delivers when it travels onto mucosa are not only extraordinary: they also lie within the reach of regulation. Bernstein lays out the problem of unmentionability that shields semen from controls and documents the upheavals for which this substance is responsible. As the first book to broach regulation of semen, Making the Best of Semen focuses on the rendering of good things that semen regulation could furnish.

Anita Bernstein is Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and the author of many books, including Questions and Answers: Torts, now in its third edition, The Common Law Inside the Female Body, and Marriage Proposals: Questioning a Legal Status.