In 2001, the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided a dispute between a divorced couple over cryopreserved preembryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) during the coupleÕs marriage. The former wife (J.B.) wanted the preembryos destroyed, while her former husband (M.B.) wanted them to be used for future implantation attempts, such as by an infertile couple. In J.B. v. M.B. (2001), the court declined to force J.B. to become a parent against her will, concluding that doing so would violate state public policy. Instead, the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided that agreements directing the allocation of cryopreserved preembryos will be enforced, unless one party changes his or her mind prior to the preembryosÕ use or destruction. Should a party revoke an earlier decision about the preembryos, New Jersey courts should weigh the partiesÕ interests with special weight given to an individualÕs right to not procreate.

The case of Smith v. Cote (1986) answered two important questions concerning law and childbirth: does the State of New Hampshire recognize a cause of action for what is defined as wrongful birth, and does the State recognize a cause of action for what is classified as wrongful life? In the case of Smith v. Cote, damages were permitted for wrongful birth, but not for the action of wrongful life.

Anatomical models have always been a mainstay of descriptive embryology. As the training of embryologists grew in the late 1800s, so too did the need for large-scale teaching models. Embryo wax models, such as those made by Adolf Ziegler and Gustav Born, were popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as a way to visualize, in three dimensions, the fine detail of embryos without the aid of a microscope. While these models were found in many university laboratories, museums of science, and even expositions and world's fairs, they were anything but easy to make or obtain. Wax modeling required skill, patience, and specialized tools. Small laboratories with only one or two embryologists often found the prospect of wax modeling too laborious, too difficult, and too expensive to make the pursuit worthwhile. As an alternative, Susanna Phelps Gage, an embryologist at Cornell University, perfected a technique of using stacks of absorbent blotting paper rather than stacks of wax plates for constructing embryo models. She first demonstrated her blotting paper method to other embryologists at the annual meeting of the Association of American Anatomists in 1905 and later at the International Zoological Congress, held in Boston in August 1907.

This influential opinion by famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was copied by courts throughout the United States. For over sixty years, courts refused to recognize a cause of action on behalf of a child who died before or after birth as a result of injuries suffered in the womb because the fetus was considered legally a part of its mother and thus did not possess personhood. This policy changed after the decision in Bonbrest v. Kotz in 1946.

As the third director of the Carnegie Institute of Washington s Department of Embryology, George Washington Corner made a number of contributions to the life sciences as well as to administration. Corner was born on 12 December 1889 in Baltimore, Maryland, near the newly established Johns Hopkins University. Although Corner was not exposed to science much in school at a young age, he developed an early appreciation for science through conversations with his father about geography and by looking through the family's National Geographic magazines.

The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals' 1984 decision United States v. University Hospital, State University Hospital of New York at Stony Brook set a significant precedent for affirming parental privilege to make medical decisions for handicapped newborns, while limiting the ability of the federal government to intervene. The ruling stemmed from the 1983 case involving an infant born with severe physical and mental congenital defects; the infant was only identified as Baby Jane Doe. After her parents opted against corrective surgery for some of her deformities, Baby Jane Doe became the epicenter of a national right-to-life debate that had been previously sparked one year prior with the case of Baby Doe, an Indiana infant born with similarly severe handicaps.

In the 1936 case United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City, New York, confirmed that physicians had the right to distribute contraceptives to patients for medical purposes. In January 1933, US Customs confiscated a package of contraceptives imported from Japan by US physician Hannah Stone. They claimed that the package violated section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which, like the 1873 anti-obscenity Comstock Act, granted the US government authority to seize contraceptive materials imported into the country or sent through the mail. The court ruled that US Customs was not justified in confiscating the package and ordered its return to Stone. United States v. One Package exempted physicians from the restrictions surrounding the distribution of contraceptives and contributed to the subsequent dismantling of the Comstock Act in later court cases.

In November 1921, US Congress passed the National Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, also called the Sheppard-Towner Act. The Act provided federal funds to states to establish programs to educate people about prenatal health and infant welfare. Advocates argued that it would curb the high infant mortality rate in the US. Many states accepted funding through the Sheppard-Towner Act, leading to the establishment of nearly 3,000 prenatal care clinics, 180,000 infant care seminars, over three million home visits by traveling nurses, and a national distribution of educational literature between 1921 and 1928. The Act provided funding for five years, but was repealed in 1929 after Congress did not renew it. Historians note that infant mortality did decrease during the years the Act was in effect. The Act also influenced provisions aimed at infant and maternity welfare in later legislation, such as the Social Security Act of 1935.

On 26 May 1994, US President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in to law, which federally criminalized acts of obstruction and violence towards reproductive health clinics. The law was a reaction to the increasing violence toward abortion clinics, providers, and patients during the 1990s. That violence included clinic blockades and protests, assaults on physicians and patients, and murders. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act established
criminal and civil penalties against people who obstructed or committed violence towards reproductive health clinics, and has supported women's access to safe reproductive healthcare.

In its 1993 decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the US Supreme Court established the Daubert Standard for evaluating the admissibility of scientific knowledge as evidence in US federal courts. When it began in trial court, the case addressed whether or not Bendectin, an anti-nausea medication taken during pregnancy, caused birth defects. However, after the trial court dismissed the case for lack of admissible evidence, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. advanced through appeals courts to the US Supreme Court, where the Justices defined the criteria by which scientific knowledge, which for them included a least theories based on evidence, expert testimony from scientists, and scientific techniques, could be introduced and used in court cases as evidence. The Daubert Standard states that the judge of a case is responsible for determining what claims are admissible as scientific knowledge and as evidence in the case. The admissibility should be determined by the falsifiability of the claims, by whether or not they had passed peer reviewed, by the general scientific acceptance of the claims, and for techniques, by their error rates of the techniques. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. set a landmark precedent in the US judicial system and influenced most subsequent legal cases that appealed to science to establish facts in trials.