The law of choice and choice of law: abortion, the right to travel, and extraterritorial regulation in American federalism.

State laws differ, and they differ on issues of tremendous importance to the ways that we conduct our lives. Abortion and the right to die are two issues on which state law intersects with deeply held moral convictions, and on which state laws vary. With so much hanging in the balance, it is not surprising that those who find themselves outvoted or outmaneuvered in local political processes sometimes seek a legal climate more compatible with their beliefs about human decency and dignity. The right to vote with one's feet to travel or move to another state and trade a law one finds repugnant for a better one is defined and circumscribed by the constitutional limitations peculiar to the conflict of laws.

Around one-quarter of Australian women will have an abortion during their lifetime but access is affected by the way health care providers interpret the law about abortion. In Queensland and New South Wales abortion is a criminal offence although it is defensible in certain circumstances. Drawing on interviews with 22 doctors who provide abortion services to women in New South Wales and Queensland, this article examines doctors' responses to two common scenarios in which women may request an abortion. The two scenarios discussed in this article are a request for a first trimester abortion in circumstances where the woman does not feel ready to have a baby; and a request for abortion in the second trimester where the fetus has been diagnosed with an abnormality. This article explores doctors' understanding of the law related to the provision of abortion in these two States and their views about the effect of the law on their practice.

Extraterritoriality for cross-border reproductive care: should states act against citizens travelling abroad for illegal infertility treatment?

Conflict of Constitutions? No Thanks: A Response to Professors Brilmayer and Kreimer

Reproductive tourism is the travelling by candidate service recipients from one institution, jurisdiction, or country where treatment is not available to another institution, jurisdiction, or country where they can obtain the kind of medically assisted reproduction they desire. The more widespread this phenomenon, the louder the call for international measures to stop these movements. Three possible solutions are discussed: internal moral pluralism, coerced conformity, and international harmonisation. The position is defended that allowing reproductive tourism is a form of tolerance that prevents the frontal clash between the majority who imposes its view and the minority who claim to have a moral right to some medical service. Reproductive tourism is moral pluralism realised by moving across legal borders. As such, this pragmatic solution presupposes legal diversity.

The law of above averages: leveling the new genetic enhancement playing field.

The absence of agreement on the ethical legitimacy of abortion does not entail the impossibility of finding a consensus on the best policy on abortion. This consensus is affordable because nobody doubts that, regarding the methods of birth control, contraception is better than abortion, abortion is better than infanticide and abortion is worse the later and the less safe it is performed. Because the complete elimination of abortion is not possible, the most relevant realistic political objectives that can be proposed are reducing the abortion rate, reducing the gestational age of abortions and making the remaining abortions safer. Restrictive policies do not contribute to lowering the abortion rate while are associated with unsafe abortions and higher women's morbidity and mortality. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

My thinking on the subject of extraterritorial regulation of abortions was sparked originally by two events that occurred about a year ago. The first was the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari1 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 2 to address the question of whether Roe v. Wade3 remained the law of the land. At the time, the betting was that, with the substitutions of Justice Thomas for Justice Marshall and Justice Souter for Justice Brennan, the Court would answer no; abortion would be remitted entirely to the political process. The expected green light created the risk of a checkerboard of abortion rights, with some states dedicated to the total elimination of abortion and others equally committed to the protection of reproductive autonomy, either as a matter of statute or of state constitutional law. This result appeared likely to reinstate the pattern that existed in the years immediately before Roe, under which more than forty percent of abortions were performed for women outside of their home states. Women with resources traveled from restrictive states to more liberal ones to obtain abortions.