Webinar: 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 (Professor of Sexuality, Women's, and Gender Studies at Amherst College) 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.