“Doing it Our Way” Participation and Kinship in Traditional Surrogacy Narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand

The practice of traditional surrogacy gives rise to multiple discourses around women’s autonomy and kinship practices globally. In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, traditional surrogacy (where the surrogate donates her own egg as well as gestating the foetus) is legal only on an altruistic basis. Furthermore, it is subject to neither medical nor state oversight, unlike gestational surrogacy which is heavily regulated. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, this article focuses on both traditional surrogates in Aotearoa New Zealand who have children of their own and those who have chosen a childfree life. Their narratives reveal multilayered motivations that align with and diverge from the ‘help’ narrative often associated with altruistic surrogacy. By drawing on and contributing to current debates on surrogacy globally, I show that traditional surrogates take on their role with clear ideas about kinship and different interpretations of reproductive participation. Their narratives bring to the fore the under-researched topic of traditional surrogacy, and in particular of women who do not want children of their own but choose to donate their eggs and gestate the foetus for another woman. I argue that their negotiation of stigma to make/resist kin disrupts pervasive heteronormative modes of kinship.

Adverse effects of regulation on buprenorphine prescribing and its impact on the treatment of opioid use disorder

Problem: Drug addiction and misuse is a medical and societal problem that has exacted a heavy toll on the United States, and, indeed, the world. In the United States, opioids are currently the main driver of drug overdose deaths. Despite the proven safety and efficacy of medically assisted therapy (MAT) using buprenorphine for the treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD), as well as the fact that its use is regulated by US Federal Law, many states have enacted separate and often burdensome regulations that restrict the prescribing of buprenorphine beyond those required by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) under the provisions of the DATA 2000 Act, and unnecessarily reduce the availability of effective treatment of OUD in those states.Purpose: The purpose of this article is to review the pharmacology of both buprenorphine (and naloxone as an additive) and the risks associated with the misuse of buprenorphine products and to consider if such additional state oversight and restrictions improves or is deleterious to public safety in the face of this national epidemic.Conclusion: We conclude that the placing of unnecessary and unscientific restraints on the treatment of patients with OUD is inconsistent with the principles of harm reduction, and such restraints should be removed unless/until they can be supported by real evidence.

Safety Orange

Safety Orange first emerged as a legal color standard in the US in the 1950s in technical manuals and federal regulations; today, it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. The color is a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures coded as worthy of care – and those deemed dangerous and expendable. This article uses the color orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in 21st-century US public life and to ponder what orange tells us about the relationship between phenomena often viewed as unrelated: information networks, climate data science, pandemic crisis, neoliberal policy, racist violence, and socially engaged art.

On the oversight activity with regards to carpooling and exercising federal state supervision in the area of road safety to its participants

The subject of this research is the normative legal acts that regulate responsibility for nonobservance of mandatory requirements on ensuring road safety in the context of using online services for joint trips (carpooling), law enforcement practice, and consideration of the author’s perspective on the improvement of carpooling. The object of this research is the public relations that emerge while using online services for joint trips that involve personal vehicles with partial compensation for driver’s expenses (carpooling). The goal of this article is to improve legislation in the area of state oversight over the activity of individuals operating vehicle for the purpose of obtaining commercial profit and organizers of the operation of vehicles without concluding transport agreement or a charter contract. The scientific novelty lies in proposing amendments to the current legislation in the sphere of exercising state supervision of ensuring road safety and interpretation of the Article 20 of the Federal Law No.196-FZ “On The Road Safety” in a new revision. The introduced changes would allow state supervision of the individuals operating vehicles for the purpose of obtaining commercial profit and organizers of the operation of vehicles without concluding transport agreement or charter contract. The adopted measures may contribute to elimination of factors that lead to commission of administrative offenses.

CSO s in Sustainable Development in Ethiopia: Past Practices and New Trajectories

We researched how CSO s working in the area of sustainable development responded to regulatory restrictions on advocacy work using Ethiopia as a case study. We found that the restrictive laws had a severe impact: many CSO s had to shut down or limit their operational capacity to service delivery only. Those that survived continued to do advocacy work, disguised as service delivery. This shows that northern stakeholders should not adhere to a strict division between advocacy and service delivery in their funding policy. They also should focus on long-term CSO engagement and long-term CSO funding. In 2019, regulatory reform reopened political space to some extent. The new law envisions a greater role for self-regulation in the civil society sector while still maintaining some degree of State oversight through registration, reporting and funding allocation requirements. Despite these improvements, the sector is still in need of international support and consistent and reliable funding.

Development Strategy for Audit Services Quality Supervisors

The issue of improving the financial reporting auditing process has been an important development of the financial services market for many years. The wave of claims to the quality of auditing findings has led to reform not only in the profession itself, in the form of the reworking of international auditing standards (ISA), but also to the review of the organization of state oversight and supervision of the quality of audit. Currently, the auditing supervision authorities in the Russian Federation are building their work in accordance with the agreements formed at the international level, including the documents of the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators (IFIAR — International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators). At the annual forum taken place in April 2018, a number of organizational decisions were adopted, including the first-ever Strategic Plan for 2018–2021, which aims to ensure the quality of audits in cooperation with the global and regional networks of auditing organizations, standards-setting bodies and other key stakeholders. In order to ensure such interaction, the development strategy of auditing regulators in other IFIAR member states is of particular importance.

POLICE SUPERVISION OF RELEASES FROM PRISON

It is provided the concept and features of police supervision; its correlation with administrative supervision is considered; the supervision of the behavior of previously convicted persons and legal acts regulating its implementation are analyzed. Given the central role of supervision in shaping police agency outcomes, the purpose of this paper is to understand ratings of supervisor performance overall and on several distinct dimensions. The description of the police as the strong arm of the State oversight reflects their authorization to enforce laws and policies defined by State institutions. It is concluded that there is a necessity to amend the Law of Ukraine "On the Administrative Supervision of Releases from Prison", other legal acts regulating the issue of supervision and probation.

Hospital Mergers and Public Accountability: Tennessee and Virginia Employ a Certificate of Public Advantage

Rapid health care consolidation has led to rising health care prices, diminished access to care, and reduced incentives for quality improvement. States have a variety of tools to address these adverse consequences of the loss of health care competition, ranging from state antitrust enforcement to global budgets or provider rate-regulation. One of the tools is a “certificate of public advantage” (COPA) or cooperative agreement under which the state approves a health care merger and shields it from antitrust enforcement in exchange for state oversight and supervision of the merged entities’ conduct. COPAs are controversial. The Federal Trade Commission and economists vehemently oppose COPAs, citing evidence that health care consolidation leads to higher prices and does not yield efficiencies, savings, or improved quality. The risks of COPAs are that they create, in essence, a state-sanctioned monopoly that could significantly raise prices, reduce consumer choice and access, and disinvest in essential services that may be less profitable but are critical for population health. Nevertheless, particularly in rural areas, health care providers seek to consolidate to weather mounting financial challenges. In response, states are exploring COPAs as a tool to exercise oversight over the merging parties’ health care prices, secure commitments for investments in population health, promote beneficial health care integration, and maintain access to rural health care providers. This report, published by the Milbank Memorial Fund, describes the twin COPAs approved by Tennessee and Virginia in 2017 to allow health systems, Wellmont Health System and Mountain States Health Alliance, to merge to form Ballad Health System, a combined entity that holds a near-monopoly in southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. This case study highlights the unique features of the Ballad Health COPA, involving two states’ COPA laws, and describes the legal authority, factors and commitments secured for approval, and the states’ resources and coordination for ongoing supervision. It remains to be seen whether the states can implement the COPAs with sufficient rigor and oversight to ensure the benefits of COPAs outweigh their risks. COPAs are a risky policy solution because they permit health care mergers that would not pass antitrust scrutiny and may result in untenable price increases and other adverse effects. On the other hand, COPAs may offer potential benefits in terms of population health and access particularly for struggling rural communities. Stringent, well-resourced, and long-term state oversight is key to avoiding the risks of monopoly and enforcing the commitments to population health and cost control. Whether states can prevent the adverse outcomes and reap the potential benefits under a COPA remains an open question, but Tennessee and Virginia are poised to try.Suggested citation: ERIN C. FUSE BROWN, MILBANK MEMORIAL FUND, HOSPITAL MERGERS AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY: TENNESSEE AND VIRGINIA EMPLOY A CERTIFICATE OF PUBLIC ADVANTAGE (2018), https://www.milbank.org/publications/hospital-mergers-and-public-accountability-tennessee-and-virginia-employ-a-certificate-of-public-advantage/.