What do oral contraceptive pills have to do with human rights abuses in sport?

Sport may seem an unexpected place to find oral contraceptive pills at the centre of alleged violations of human rights and medical ethics. However, this is precisely the case in ongoing legal challenges to “sex testing” regulations that restrict eligibility for the women’s category of athletics competition. In order to remain in competition, women targeted by the regulations must submit to unwanted and medically unnecessary interventions to lower their natural testosterone levels below a specified threshold. World Athletics,  which governs the sport of track and field worldwide, promotes oral contraceptive pills as the primary method for meeting this condition of eligibility.

With two important upcoming cases (before the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the European Court of Human Rights), we urgently revisit how faulty assumptions about oral contraceptive pills—introduced by World Athletics and their recruited experts, and then readily accepted by the courts—have led to the sidestepping of human rights and medical ethics and, in so doing, allowed sex testing regulations to persist. As a result, a class of drugs so key to women's bodily autonomy has come to be instrumental in curtailing that very right in the context of sport. Illuminating the problematic assumptions in the factual record produced in the central case challenging sex testing regulations, brought by South African runner Caster Semenya, reveals the human rights violation and unethical medical practice at the core of these regulations: a coerced “medical” intervention.

Please join us on May 6, 2024, at 9:00 AM EST for an important discussion about the misuse of oral contraceptive pill science in upholding sex testing regulations in sport. 

The webinar will be moderated by Professor Alice M. Miller, J.D. (co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership of Yale Law and Public Health Schools) and will feature speakers including the authors of a recently published SRHM paper on this topic, Katrina Karkazis and Michele Krech, J.S.D. (Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at University of Chicago Law School), alongside other experts at the intersection of sport, gender, human rights, and medical ethics.

Moderator:

Alice Miller is an Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School and the Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. She is also an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Yale School of Public Health and a Lecturer in Global Affairs at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. An expert in gender, sexuality, health and international human rights, Miller previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she was faculty director of the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development, and at Columbia University, where she was co-director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights. She holds a B.A. from Harvard and a J.D. from University of Washington School of Law. 

Panelists: 

 

Katrina Karkazis is a cultural anthropologist working at the intersection of science and technology studies, theories of gender and race, social studies of medicine, and bioethics. Her research and teaching examine—and challenge—scientific and medical beliefs about gender, sexuality, and the body across a range of topics. She is Professor of Sexuality, Women’s, and Gender Studies at Amherst College and a Senior Research Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. She previously held appointments at Stanford University and as the Carol Zicklin Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She has also served as a Visiting Professor at Emory University.

Michele Krech is a Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and transnational law, global governance and institutions, and critical legal theory. Her work examines evolving structures and modes of transnational regulation from interdisciplinary perspectives, giving particular attention to the role of private authorities in shaping global norms. Michele's recent writing and teaching have focused on global sport governance and feminist legal theory. 

Michele has worked with various UN entities and international NGOs, frequently serving as a consultant in high-profile legal cases and advocacy initiatives addressing human rights and the regulation of gender in international sport (e.g., Caster Semenya v. World Athletics). She served as a law clerk at the International Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal for Ontario. 

Recorded statements:

Dr. Otmar Kloiber is the Secretary General of the World Medical Association. He has been an international medical relations and collaboration leader for more than 20 years, with expertise in medical ethics, health policy, government affairs and management of relationships with patients, other health professionals, manufacturers and other medical stakeholders. He has been the chief executive of the WMA since 2005.

Dr. Payoshni Mitra is an Athlete Rights Defender and Executive Director of Humans of Sport. A former badminton player, Dr Mitra is a prominent athlete’s rights activist and leading campaigner in the abolition of sex testing policies in women’s sport, working closely with affected athletes across Asia and Africa to enable them to address human rights violations in sports.

Annet Negesa is a Ugandan former middle-distance runner, three-time national champion, gold medallist at the 2011 All-Africa Games.