Abortion Rights Research Articles

THE REJECTION OF ROE v WADE BY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT AFTER FIVE DECADES – A SEISMIC DECISION

The recent dramatic about-turn of the United States Supreme Court (USSC) in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (Dobbs) in May 2022 regarding the rights of women in the United States to an abortion has caused a major uproar. Overruling one of the most famous of all USSC cases, Roe v Wade (410 US 113 (1973) (Roe)), five decades after it was decided, has had major repercussions. To fully comprehend the impact that Roe had on the United States, it is opportune to give an overview of Roe, which was a dramatic judgment and became established law for 50 years. In revisiting Roe, it is difficult to understand why such a clear and well-reasoned majority judgment has been overruled.Roe raised serious legal, moral and religious issues. The central issue was whether a woman had a legal right to an abortion. The USSC by a majority of seven to two held that woman had a constitutionally protected right to an abortion. As will be seen, Roe based its decision on its interpretation specifically of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.All major cases before the USSC can be put into two categories – abortion cases and all others. Abortion remains the central legal issue before that court. It defines the judicial philosophies of the justices of the USSC. It dominates their nomination and confirmation processes. The abortion controversy is sensitive and emotional. It generates vigorous, opposing views. It inspires deep and absolute convictions. A person’s philosophy, experiences, exposure to the raw edges of human existence, religious beliefs, and attitudes towards family values, and the moral standards a person establishes and seeks to observe all influence their thinking about abortion.It arguably delineates the difference between the National Democratic and Republican parties. When, during the confirmation proceedings of the present Chief Justice Roberts, he was asked about his views on Roe, he was careful not to commit himself. His answer was that Roe was settled as a precedent of the court and entitled to be respected under the principles of stare decisis, but he added that the justices of the Supreme Court do sometimes reverse their own precedents.Abortion issues remain eternal. Does a woman have a legal right to an abortion? Is the termination of a pregnancy a decision to be made by a woman and her doctor, or is the protection of potential human life a legitimate interest of the State? At what point does an unborn person acquire legal rights that are protected under the law? The majority and dissenting judgments in Roe represent the full spectrum of legal approaches to these and related questions. However, no court decision exists in a vacuum and the controversial issues raised in Roe continue to be raised and debated in the legal and political life of the United States, as they do in other jurisdictions.

Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave—Unpacking (and Unpicking) the Majority Opinion in Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health et al. v. Jackson Women's Health Organization et al.

Abstract This paper evaluates the majority judgment in the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. It is suggested that much of what is said in the majority opinion ostensibly appears eminently defensible if viewed solely from a narrowly legalistic perspective. But closer analysis suggests that the majority's reasoning has some weaknesses when viewed within that limited paradigm. A further line of inquiry assesses whether adopting such a ‘legalistic’ approach to the question of abortion rights is in any event an appropriate position for the Court to adopt. The final section of the paper explores two additional contextual issues: the first relates to the personal ethical integrity of some of the majority judges; the second to the adequacy of State political processes as a means to address the abortion rights controversy.

Immigration Clashes, Party Polarization, and Republican Radicalization: Tracking Shifts in State and National Party Platforms since 1980

Abstract Studies of U.S. politics increasingly aim to make sense of two key trends: party polarization and Republican Party radicalization. Surprisingly, however, party divergences on immigration have been largely overlooked. Drawing on state and national political party platforms since 1980, we document the rise of attention to immigration, the polarization of substantive party positions, and the sharp GOP turn toward restrictive measures. After pinpointing the timing and relative trajectories of national and state-level agenda shifts, we explore potential drivers and establish two sets of flashpoint events worth further study: highly visible and mostly deadlocked congressional battles over immigration grand bargains, and bottom-up reverberations from the widespread 2006 immigrant rights protests and post-2008 Tea Party organizing. We find that grassroots Tea Party efforts were intervening accelerators rather than original causes of the Republican embrace of tough immigration restrictions. The article concludes by stressing the chronological layering of successive party polarizations—from 1960s divergences around civil rights, through clashes about abortion and LGBTQ rights from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and followed by immigration polarization in the 2000s. This process of layering polarizations on top of one another may have supercharged recent GOP turns toward ethnonationalism and tolerance for threats of violence.

Responsibility Arguments in Defence of Abortion: When One is Morally Responsible for the Creation of a Fetus

I argue against responsibility arguments that offer a defence of abortion even on the assumption that the fetus is a person. I focus on argumentation originally offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson and then later defended by David Boonin. I offer thought experiments meant to show that, under certain conditions, one bears moral responsibility for creating a fetus. I then offer a positive argument for when one is morally responsible for the creation of a fetus. This argument relies on the presence of other forms of sex that reasonably approximate the goods of penile-vaginal intercourse. Given the presence of these options, sexual partners who engage in penile-vaginal intercourse bear moral responsibility for the creation of the fetus. While I do not think this argument settles the abortion debate – there still may be other ways to successfully defend abortion – it does explain why responsibility arguments like those offered by Thomson fail.

Reproductive Justice as a Framework for Abortion Care.

This article presents an in-depth analysis of abortion access and rights within the Reproductive Justice framework, underscoring the health, social, and economic consequences of limited access. It emphasizes the critical role of abortion as essential, safe health care and highlights the complexities surrounding abortion decisions and the barriers faced by poor and historically marginalized populations. Amid the escalating access restrictions, the article concludes with a call to action for obstetricians and gynecologists and our allied health care providers to recognize, support, and advocate for safe, legal, and affordable abortion services as fundamental to health care equity and human rights.

Controversies and Solutions for Abortion Rights in the United States

This paper uses a case study approach to analyze the factors influencing abortion rights and how to use legal means to resolve the related controversies against the background of the widespread abortion problem in American society. The essence of the contradiction of abortion rights is that people do not want to ignore life but also want to respect women's basic rights. The law should play a role in regulating this conflict in society, so that it can be tightened and loosened. The "tightness" is reflected in the fact that the law needs to set a general direction for the abortion issue. The government can provide a certain degree of counseling according to the different conception situations of women, so that the government and related personnel can do their duty of counseling for the possible birth of life, which fully reflects the respect for life. "Loose" means that women can refer to the government's well-intentioned reminders, but ultimately control the decisions about their own bodies, and the law cannot interfere forcibly.

The influence of gerrymandering on abortion policy in the United States

Background: When the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overruled a five-decade old precedent and gave states the unfettered power to regulate or ban abortion, it did so while proclaiming the decision would return power over the issue to the people, and that women specifically were not without political influence to shape policies. Nowhere amid such language about the power of the people does the Court decision acknowledge the capacity for biased legislative district maps (i.e., gerrymandering) to influence resulting policies. Methods: Here I consider the state-level relationship between gerrymandering and abortion policy using logistic regression that controls for several variables including statewide public opinion, religion, and the number of women legislators. Data on abortion rules are derived from the Guttmacher Institute’s database as of January 1, 2023. Data on gerrymandering scores for each legislative map are derived from the Campaign Legal Center. Results: I find that states with a pro-Republican gerrymander were considerably more likely to impose a pre-viability abortion ban in 2023. Across the 50 states, the logistic regression results suggest an increase in the odds of an abortion ban by more than 40 times as a result of a pro-Republican legislative map gerrymander. Notably, a pre-viability abortion ban is in place in nine of the 10 states where public opinion favors abortion rights but where the legislative map is biased toward Republicans. Conclusions: The influence of mapmakers over the resulting policy clouds the Court’s sanguine assertions of the public’s influence and women’s political agency over this issue.

Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico by Elyse Ona Singer (review)

Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico by Elyse Ona Singer (review)

Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico by Elyse Ona Singer (review)

Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico by Elyse Ona Singer (review)

The Impact of a Supreme Court Decision on the Preferences of Americans Regarding Abortion Policy

We examine the effect of a U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding abortion laws on Americans’ preferences for political candidates. The decision was leaked in advance of the official announcement, and we track the evolution of political preferences from before to after the leak and, eventually, to after the formal announcement. The abortion issue was already very important to voters before the leak, but the Court’s decision did not simply make it more important for everyone. We find that the decision decreased the importance weight of abortion for Republicans, while increasing it for independents/nonvoters. Further, the decision increased Republican support for candidates who want to ban abortions although this effect is diminished for candidates that oppose exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s health. Nonaffiliated voters move sharply away from candidates who want to ban abortions without exceptions. The decision also resulted in a lasting polarization along gender lines whereby men became more likely to vote for a candidate that supports a ban on abortion, while women are less likely to support candidates that ban abortions. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, marketing. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4802 .

Polarization from the perspective of ambivalents: Feeling caught in the social crossfire of the U.S. abortion debate

AbstractIn polarized societal debates, it is often assumed that perceiving polarization leads individuals to take sides (e.g., “pro‐life” or “pro‐choice”). However, perceiving polarization can also make individuals ambivalent because they feel “caught in the social crossfire” of the debate. We conducted a survey study (Ntotal = 863 women) on ambivalents’ perspectives of the U.S. abortion debate. Findings supported the hypothesis that ambivalents’ perceived polarization related positively to their felt ambivalence. This relationship can be explained by their feeling of being “caught in the social crossfire”: they feel torn while also understanding both sides of the debate. Moreover, felt ambivalence was positively related to tendencies toward avoidance of the debate but also toward conciliatory efforts (e.g., to create mutual understanding between the groups). We discuss the implications of these findings for the relationship between perceived polarization and felt ambivalence among ambivalents.

A Comparative Study on the Constitutionalization of Abortion in Korea, On The Busy Intersection of Morality and Law

This study presents a comparative overview of certain parallel aspects in the legal history of the abortion debate as it transpired historically in the key judicial opinions in the United States and Germany, and recently in the Korean Republic. The object is to elucidate the extreme difficulty that the learned Justices of the Courts in the United States and Germany faced in attempting to objectively measure the moral values involved in the determination of maternal and fetal rights, and their inability to provide rational explanations for the initial prioritization or ultimate balancing of the rights. As a result, the Courts failed to direct and stabilize abortion regulation because their frameworks were neither proven to be equitable nor legally workable. The primary method of this study is to highlight the questionable nature of the legal frameworks of the original abortion opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the German Constitutional Court to demonstrate that they were guided more by the personal moral convictions of the Justices than by the dictates of the law. The goal is to offer a comparative context that begins to explore the question, whether the Korean Constitutional Court has indeed found a way to resolve the abortion debate once and for all, or alternatively, whether all protagonists in Korea ought to shift course to help avoid weakening the authority of the rule of law and its legitimacy in the public eye, by delaying any further attempt in the resolution of this controversial issue until a national debate on the dialectic results in a consensus in the public, scholarly, and ultimately legislative discourse that properly values and balances the mother’s right of self-determination with the natural right of the fetus to life.

소수자 인권에 있어 Dobbs 판결의 의미와 반향

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court effectively removed the right to abortion from the list of fundamental rights under the U.S. Constitution in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The right to abortion had been considered a core right, derived from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment since its affirmation in Roe v. Wade in 1973, but it lost its constitutional value and stature in the U.S. federal legal system nearly half a century later. The debate and conflict surrounding the Dobbs decision echo the social unrest that the Roe decision, which first recognized abortion rights, initially induced.
 This article does not engage directly with the varied and contentious positions on abortion that rest on religious, moral, and political grounds. Rather, it seeks to discuss the impact of the Dobbs decision on the rights of minorities from the perspective of constitutional theory and judicial policy. The Dobbs decision not only directly affects the lives and rights of women in the United States, but it also potentially represents a critical turning point in the rights of minorities in general when viewed in light of the legal principles it espoused. Based on the Fourteenth Amendment (Due Process Clause, Equal Protection Clause), the U.S. Supreme Court has discovered a series of individual liberties and rights that are not explicitly stipulated in the constitutional text through interpretation, recognizing these as fundamental rights deserving of special constitutional protection. Restrictions or discrimination relating to fundamental rights are subjected to a high-intensity judicial review standard and are strictly controlled. The method and criteria for recognizing fundamental rights are extremely important in activating the human rights advocacy function of the U.S. Supreme Court and have a profound impact on minorities, who can only expect judicial protection as they cannot secure respect for their values and lifestyles in the political process governed by majority rule. The Supreme Court has long used ‘history and tradition’ as a key criterion in confirming fundamental rights, but the Dobbs decision applied this criterion in a more conservative direction. As a result, the decision curtailed the progressive trend observed in the fundamental rights analysis in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, leading to what can be seen as a counter-revolutionary conclusion - ‘evicting’ the right to abortion from the list of fundamental rights. From this point, the Dobbs decision can be assessed as a rupture in the constitutional progress that the Supreme Court has made based on the Fourteenth Amendment's fundamental rights analysis, as well as a fracture in the role and function of advocating for minority rights that the Supreme Court has emphasized.

The Status of an Unborn Child & Women Reproductive Rights in India

This paper reflects the concept of status of an unborn child and the reproductive rights of the women in India. This debate has been the very subject matter of discussion at both National level and international level. The pivotal issues that raise for concern is whether the unborn child can be given the status of a human being from its very origin and bestowed the status of a person or not. Apart from this, the role of medical termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 in monitoring various rights of a mother and the unborn child. There are many issues which have been highlighted. Notwithstanding these discrepancies, the Judiciary has made paramount steps in India regarding the reproductive rights of women. Each nation, however, has its limit and exclusions when it comes to abortion rights.

Rockefellers and Goldwaters: The effect of compulsory schooling on voting preferences

Research into the causal impact of formal education on political beliefs and ultimate voting behavior arrives at contradictory results. While some early work, e.g. Dee (2004) finds education induces more socially-liberal views, more recent works suggests that education makes individuals more fiscally conservative. We use quasi-experimental variation in schooling created by compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to reconcile these results. Following Marshall (2019), we first examine a pooled sample of voter and find that policy-induced increases in education lead to voters being more likely to identify as, and vote for, Republican candidates, largely due to concerns regarding taxes. Delving further into this result, however, we find highly heterogeneous impacts of education, which depend on the efficacy of CSLs. In particular, in states where CSLs significantly increased educational attainment, impacted individuals become more fiscally conservative, but also exhibit greater support for traditional Democratic social issues like abortion rights and environmental protection, creating so-called “Rockefeller” Republicans. By contrast, voters educated in states where CSLs have no measured impact on educational attainment exhibit generally more conservative attitudes toward non-economics and social issues, which are traits that are consistent with so-called “Goldwater” Republicans.

#My(white)BodyMyChoice

This article explores the circulation of #MyBodyMyChoice in a series of deeply divisive political debates – abortion rights and mask wearing during COVID-19. We trace the appropriation of this slogan for differing ideological purposes, and its shifts from collective political action concerning pro-choice to the rights of individuals to refuse to comply with mask mandates. Underpinning the values of each is a white liberal racism that operates to uphold dominant gender, class and economic structures.

The Rights of Man: Libertarians’ concern for men’s, but not women’s, reproductive autonomy (A summary and recontextualization of existing research)

Libertarians claim individual autonomy as their central political principle, but historical and current evidence suggests this principle has been applied selectively. Reproductive decisions such as abortion can uniquely stress the concept of individual autonomy by placing into conflict the claimed rights of each biological parent to choose. We conducted two identical studies demonstrating that among US participants, libertarianism is associated with opposition to women’s reproductive autonomy but support for men’s. Self-identified libertarians tended to oppose women’s abortion rights, and support men’s right to both prevent women from having abortions (male veto), and withdraw financial support for a child when women refuse to terminate the pregnancy (financial abortion), and hostile sexism may account for libertarians’ selective support for men’s and not women’s reproductive autonomy. These results are discussed in the context of the recent reversal of the Roe vs. Wade supreme court ruling in the United States, imperiling a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.

Abortion, euthanasia, and the limits of principlism.

Principlism is an ethical framework that has dominated bioethical discourse for the past 50years. There are differing perspectives on its proper scope and limits. In this article, we consider to what extent principlism provides guidance for the abortion and euthanasia debates. We argue that whilst principlism may be considered a useful framework for structuring bioethical discourse, it does not in itself allow for the resolution of these neuralgic policy discussions. Scholars have attempted to use principlism to analyse the ethics and legality of abortion and euthanasia; but such efforts are methodologically problematic. We close with a consideration of the proper scope of principlism in bioethics-a vision that is more modest than the manner in which principlism is often deployed in contemporary academic bioethics and medical education.

Political Barriers to Abortion Access in New Brunswick: A Qualitative Exploration of a Political Hot Potato

New Brunswick has been an outlier concerning abortion access for decades. In 2015, the Liberal government under Premier Brian Gallant made significant legislative changes to regulation 84–20 to make abortions more easily accessible in the province. Despite these changes, the Liberal government fell short of publicly funding community-based abortions outside hospitals. This qualitative study aimed to examine the political dynamic and pressures explaining why New Brunswick remains behind on abortion access compared to other Canadian provinces. From September until November 2020, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 participants. Participants were a mix of past and present politicians, health care leaders, and high-ranking public officials identified as key stakeholders in the abortion debate in New Brunswick. Some participants shared their challenges separating their personal views on abortions and admitted wanting to limit access to make it difficult for people to get an abortion. At the same time, other participants described concern for the most vulnerable segments of the New Brunswick population who may struggle with accessing abortions, leading to undue stress and anxiety levels. Ultimately, this article describes the challenges politicians face with power dynamics within their parties and the balance between managing political risks to maintain popularity within the New Brunswick electorate without infringing on people’s right to medical care.

Step by Step in Argentina: Putting Abortion Rights into Practice.

In December of 2020, the Argentine Congress legalized abortion through 14 weeks, vastly increasing access to abortion care in the country. The law's passage followed years of advocacy for abortion rights in Argentina - including mass public and civil society mobilization, vocal support from an established pool of abortion providers who offered abortion services under specific legal exceptions prior to the new law, and the growth of community groups such as the Socorristas en Red who provide support for people to self-manage abortions. Aided by ample political will, the number of health facilities offering services increased substantially after the law was passed, and the public visibility around the law has helped assure people seeking abortion that it is their right. Proyecto mirar is an initiative focused on both gathering and using qualitative and quantitative data to inform stakeholders about the progress and obstacles of the law's implementation. In this review, we present an overall summary of the first two years of implementation of the abortion law in Argentina based on proyecto mirar data and contextualized through the historical processes that have contributed to the law's passage and application. While we see increases in abortion services and improved public perception around abortion rights, inequities in access and quality of care persist throughout the country. Specifically, providers in some regions are well trained, while others create obstacles to access, and in some regions health services provide high quality abortion care whereas others provide substandard care. To be sure, the implementation of public policies does not happen overnight; it requires government support and backing to tackle obstacles and solve implementation problems. Our findings suggest that when new abortion laws are passed, they must be supported by civil society and government leaders to ensure that associated policies are well crafted and monitored to ensure successful implementation.