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These days, I’m a reproductive endocrinologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and teach at Harvard Medical School, but I have also practiced in my native Italy, including during the heartbreaking years of what was known as Law 40. In the spring of 2004, under a coalition government led by populist media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Parliament passed a shocking new law giving full personhood rights to the human embryo. In a Western republic with clear right-to-choice reproductive laws, a blatantly unconstitutional law was enacted. (Antonio Gargiulo, 2/26)

When my wife, Laurie, completed her ninth in vitro fertilization cycle in the spring of 2000, we had more than 150 fertilized embryos in frozen storage at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Medical College of Cornell University. We were not stockpiling them for later use. At the time, our son Henry was 5. At birth, he had been diagnosed with a fatal genetic disease, Fanconi anemia. We were using IVF together with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in hopes of having a healthy baby who could also save Henry’s life with a cord blood transplant. (Allen Goldberg, 2/27)

As a result of the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision permitting would-be parents to sue for wrongful death over the negligent destruction of I.V.F.-created embryos, the hope and miracles that I was blessed to experience are at risk for families whose clinics have suspended treatments. (Kristen Soltis Anderson, 2/27)

The Canadian surgeon and urologist Balfour Mount is considered the father of palliative care in North America. He was inspired and mentored by Cicely Saunders, a British nurse and social worker. Before she became a physician, Saunders developed the first modern hospice, St Christopher’s in London in 1967. Mount adapted and transplanted approaches to the care of the terminally ill he had learned at St Christopher’s to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. (Anand Kumar, 2/27)