Bird-Pollan Reviews Davis's Elective Egg Freezing And The Future Of The Medical Expense Deduction

Jennifer Bird-Pollan (Kentucky; Google Scholar), Taxing the Brave New World: A Comment on Professor Tessa Davis's Article 'Freezing the Future: Elective Egg Freezing and the Future of the Medical Expense Deduction', 107 Ky. L.J. Online 1 (2019):

This short review piece examines Professor Tessa Davis's article in the Kentucky Law Journal called "Freezing the Future". Davis's piece explores the tax consequences of elective egg freezing and the discriminatory age and gender concerns associated with those tax consequences. Ultimately, Davis's piece gives us a fresh lens through which to think about tax as it plays out in the real world, and the way that the facially neutral tax code has meaningfully different impacts on certain groups of people.

One standard line of reasoning in the world of tax law scholarship claims that the tax law is objective, treating all taxpayers in the same way and ignoring the particularities that make taxpayers distinct from one another. Taxpayers are measured only by their income! Since all individuals are treated exactly the same, regardless of any distinguishing characteristics, nothing could be more objective than the tax law. Economic position is the only thing that matters! For decades, this model of objectivity has been held up as the standard in tax policy debates. However, in recent years, scholars have started to realize that assuming all taxpayers are (or should be) alike in the eyes of the tax law forces all taxpayers to conform to a norm.