Antiabortion Laws Research Articles

Film and Democracy in Paraguay by Eva Karene Romero

Reviewed by: Film and Democracy in Paraguay by Eva Karene Romero Mario L. Cardozo Eva Karene Romero Film and Democracy in Paraguay. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiii + 169 pp. Ills., notes, and index. $99.99 cloth (ISBN 9783319448138); $79.99 electronic (ISBN 9783319448145). Paraguay’s film industry is small but has grown since Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship fell in 1989. Eva K. Romero’s book Film and Democracy in Paraguay makes the case that post-dictatorial Paraguayan films illuminate contemporary sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances, with emphasis on how historical traumatic events continue to shape today’s national reality. Although after Stroessner’s regime there has been artistic freedom to criticize the government, Romero paints a desolate picture of contemporary Paraguay through the lens of films produced in this new democratic era. The cinematic genres Romero has chosen — mainly documentaries and realistic social dramas — lend themselves to this sort of sociological film analysis. Most of the social groups Romero examines seem trapped in their subaltern condition, both within film narratives and related realities. Romero, who is both an academic and a documentary filmmaker, draws parallels between these films’ protagonists and their counterparts in Paraguayan society to underscore injustices within the country. Adding another level of analysis, the author suggests that, in some films, victimized characters represent Paraguay as a whole, highlighting ways in which other countries have wronged or damaged Paraguay. For instance, the 2008 documentary Frankfurt (dir. Ramiro Gómez) relates the experience of watching the 2006 Soccer World Cup in rural Paraguay. Romero comments on the juxtaposition of a relatively poor and remote audience sharing such experience through televised broadcast with the fans attending the matches in Germany, including wealthy Paraguayans. Rural children play soccer perhaps with the aspiration of one day becoming internationally recognized soccer players. Making a less [End Page 228] obvious connection, Romero finds narrative significance in Paraguayans watching a match between their team and England’s, an athletic rivalry that parallels the tensions that may have fueled the War of the Triple Alliance from 1864 to 1870. Allegedly, Britain financed Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay’s military campaign, which nearly decimated Paraguay’s population and took a large expanse of Paraguayan territory. Whether Frankfurt’s director intended such a commentary is irrelevant; it is still interesting and necessary to explore such connections between past and present, particularly when they reflect old wounds that have yet to heal within Paraguayan society. In fact, the traumatic legacy of militarism and warfare constitutes an important analytical thread throughout the book. In the lauded film Hamaca Paraguaya (dir. Paz Encina, 2006), an older campesino couple waits for their son to return from the Chaco War (1932–1935). Romero likens the film’s atmosphere of pending doom and endless waiting to that of a nearly inert, “feminized” nation that is still recovering — or may never recover — from losing most of its men during the War of the Triple Alliance. In the short films Karai Norte (dir. Marcelo Martinessi, 2009) and Noche Adentro (dir. Pablo Lamar, 2010), women face violent abuse, rape, and murder. While these films serve to denounce abuses of Paraguayan women, Romero also suggests that they constitute allegories of other nations ravaging Paraguay. Albeit with the consent of the Paraguayan ruling elite, Brazilians have contributed to the dismemberment of campesino villages and the felling of native forests while aggressively cropping soy in eastern Paraguay since the 1990s. Romero sees this as a continuation of Brazil’s territorial expansion into Paraguay, which began before the War of the Triple Alliance. Considering a more literal reading of rape, Romero contends that Karai Norte and Noche Adentro have much reason to bring attention to the abuse of women in Paraguay. Women raised Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance killed nearly half of the country’s population. Romero references revisionist historic perspectives on the emergence of the Paraguayan mestizo race as linked to the rape of indigenous women by Spaniards — instead of the more pacific miscegenation tropes often taught in Paraguayan classrooms. Only relatively recently were women allowed to vote (since 1961) and to sue for divorce (since 1991). Paraguayan anti-abortion laws are extreme, forbidding women to terminate...

Perswazja werbalna i niewerbalna w czarnym proteście

The black protest is a social phenomenon that started in 2016 when women went out on the streets to demonstrate their opposition to tightening the anti-abortion law. It was an event that aroused much controversy and emotions which were expressed through verbal and non-verbal messages. These were, among others, banners with strongly marked slogans that have been analysed and black colour appearing in the elements of women’s clothing and make-up. The symbolic layer was also umbrellas, hangers for clothes, black crosses on the lips and many more. The purpose of using these means was persuasion, used to change position of opponents and to achieve its own purpose in the form of the absence of an exacerbation of this law.

Krucjata moralna Solidarność

Kościelniak looks at the Solidarity movement (Solidarnośc) in the years 1980/81 form the perspective of women’s rights. He demonstrates that the moral discourse of the anti-Communist opposition, rooted in national and Catholic values, was a discourse of power. Focusing on reproductive rights, Kościelniak takes the so-called anti-abortion law introduced in 1993 as a point of departure. He analyses the discourse of the Church and of Solidarity in 1980-1981 in terms of Foucaultian genealogy.

Liberty and the Politics of Balance: The Undue Burden Test after Casey/Hellerstedt

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt represents the Supreme Court’s most important intervention in the constitutional politics of abortion. However, as this Article shows, Hellerstedt does not represent the clean break some commentators identify. Instead, the decision comes at the end of a decades-long movement-countermovement conflict about the meaning of an unconstitutional undue burden on a woman’s right to choose abortion. Positioning Hellerstedt in historical context matters because doing so underscores the Court’s ongoing responsiveness to popular views of what the Constitution says about abortion. The history studied in the Article also reveals what should happen in the next front of the abortion wars, when the Court considers fetal-protective, rather than woman-protective, antiabortion laws. To maintain the delicate balance created by Casey, the Court should require evidence that both fetal-protective and woman-protective abortion regulations are substantially related to their stated goal.

“Undue” Delegation: Private Delegation And Other Strategies To Challenge Admitting-Privileges Laws

INTRODUCTION In November 2015, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to Whole Woman 's Health v. Cole (1) the first reproductive rights case to reach the court since Gonzales v. Carhart (2) eight years before. In the intervening time, states have passed an astonishing number of laws and regulations that encroach on women's access to abortion. Many such laws ostensibly aim to protect the woman and her fetus. Yet these same laws do so by imposing medically unnecessary and onerous procedural requirements on women, (3) which can erect massive barriers to abortion access for individuals. Other state laws aim to regulate not the activities of women, but those of abortion providers, who are not a protected class. The reproductive rights movement terms these laws Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws. (4) State legislatures' passage of TRAP laws accelerated after the Supreme Court's decision in Carhart, which was taken to signal judicial willingness to uphold state laws that aim to protect an unborn fetus at the expense of reducing a woman's ability to choose. (5) This Note focuses on admitting-privileges laws, a type of TRAP law that requires physicians who provide abortions to obtain staff privileges at a hospital within a certain distance from their clinics. Without these required privileges, physicians performing abortions risk civil and criminal penalties. These laws are especially concerning because they give area hospitals an effective veto over a clinic's operations, effectively outsourcing the power to deny licenses to private entities. Admitting-privileges decisions are often discretionary for hospital administrators; a hospital's denial of admitting privileges also lacks state oversight or external appeals. Admitting-privileges laws are being ratified throughout many states, but have proven resistant to traditional substantive due process challenges. In addition to traditional undue burden analysis, a multipronged approach to reproductive rights litigation and advocacy is necessary. Part I of this Note sets forth a brief history of the right to choose an abortion and the current federal legal framework. Then, it details recent state legislative and ballot initiatives aimed at regulating abortion providers. Part II explains the complications of using the undue burden doctrine in constitutional challenges to state action, as illuminated by recent cases litigating admitting-privileges laws. It further introduces private-delegation challenges as an alternative method to examine the constitutionality of these laws. Part III looks at the history of private-delegation challenges with respect to admitting- privileges laws and touches on other possible avenues to challenge admitting-privileges regulations. I. Abortion in the Post-Roe Era In 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which recognized that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects a right to privacy that extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion. (6) Roe's effect was remarkable. Before Roe, each individual state regulated abortions and the accessibility thereof with their traditional police powers. At the time of the decision, four states had repealed anti-abortion laws, while thirteen had begun reforms of their abortion laws. (7) Almost all the rest banned abortion in most cases. (8) After the Supreme Court identified a right to choose an abortion grounded in the federal Constitution, the annual number of legal abortions rose through the 1970s, leveling off in the 1980s. (9) After Roe, the Supreme Court also decided Doe v. Bolton, (10) which assessed the elaborate procedural barriers to abortion erected by the state of Georgia and invalidated some of them for being not reasonably related to the state interest (11) or redundant. (12) Doe has been interpreted to signal that just as states may not prevent abortion by making the performance a crime, states may not make abortions unreasonably difficult to obtain by prescribing elaborate procedural barriers. …

Update on abortion policy.

To review the status of antiabortion restrictions enacted over the last 5 years in the United States and their impact on abortion services. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of antiabortion laws enacted across the United States. In total, various states in the union enacted 334 abortion restrictions from 2011 to July 2016, accounting for 30% of all abortion restrictions since the legalization of abortion in 1973. Data confirm, however, that more liberal abortion laws do not increase the number of abortions, but instead greatly decrease the number of abortion-related deaths. Several countries including Romania, South Africa and Nepal have seen dramatic decreases in maternal mortality after liberalization of abortion laws, without an increase in the total number of abortions. In the United States, abortions are incredibly safe with very low rates of complications and a mortality rate of 0.7 per 100 000 women. With increasing abortion restrictions, maternal mortality in the United States can be expected to rise over the coming years, as has been observed in Texas recently. Liberalization of abortion laws saves women's lives. The rising number of antiabortion restrictions will ultimately harm women and their families.

For the Greater Good: The Subordination of Reproductive Freedom to State Interests in the United States and China

This Article provides a comparative analysis of two very different restrictions on reproductive freedom that have startling parallels and similarities. Both China and the United States impose limits on reproductive freedom: China restricts the number of children that families can have, often in ways that violate international law, while some U.S. states have attempted to restrict access to abortion in ways that violate the precepts of Roe v. Wade as well as international law. Both China and U.S. states impose restrictions on reproductive freedom in order to achieve compelling state goals: protecting development and sustainability in China, and protecting prenatal life in the United States. Finally, both China and the United States have means other than severe restrictions on reproductive freedom at their disposal to achieve the governments’ goals: broad access to birth control and sex education. This Article uses the lens of international human rights law to evaluate the concept of subordinating individual reproductive choice to a perception of the common good. Part II provides an overview of the major international instruments addressing individual rights and how they interact with the rights and responsibilities of the state. Part III discusses anti-abortion laws in the United States and the anti-abortion movement’s rationale that protecting prenatal life justifies limiting reproductive choice. Part IV discusses China’s vast and population control system and the government’s rationale that providing a controlled, sustainable population justifies limiting reproductive choice. Part V examines three levels of coercion – compulsory sex education and unrestricted access to contraception, monetary incentive and disincentive programs, and forced abortion and forced child-bearing – and analyzes whether they are consistent with international human rights principles. Finally, the Article concludes that in light of modern access to education and contraception, and the ability to reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancies via those means, more coercive means are unnecessary (in the case of monetary incentives and disincentives) and unjustifiable (in the case of forced abortion and forced child-bearing).

Will rejecting woman-protective justifications for antiabortion laws increase harassment and violence?

For abortion rights supporters, the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt is nothing but wonderful news. After years of legislative encroachments on the right to choose, the Court’s opinion sent a strong message that legislatures cannot impose a heavy burden on the right to abortion without having support from evidence-based medicine. This is an unequivocal victory for reproductive rights.That does not mean, however, that the future will be all rosy for abortion provision because of this decision. Rather, this decision poses a possible risk for abortion provider and clinic safety. In the past, abortion restrictions have been justified on two different theories - protecting the fetus and protecting the woman. In Whole Woman’s Health, the Supreme Court erected a huge barrier in the way of legislatures seeking to restrict abortion in order to protect the woman. In response, anti-abortion organizations and legislatures may be forced to abandon this justification and rely exclusively on fetus-protection. Historically, there has been a connection between fetus-protection justifications for abortion restrictions and extreme violence and harassment against abortion providers and clinics. This article explores this connection and argues that the decision in Whole Woman’s Health may increase this risk going forward.

The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 by Sam Mitrani

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 by Sam Mitrani Anthony R. DeStefanis Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2013) This book is about the development of the Chicago police department and how and why the city’s business elite was able to mould the police into an institution that would protect its interests. Mitrani locates the development of police forces in the United States in the mid-to-late 19th century. His main question is: why did police forces spring into existence when they did? He argues that the Chicago police department emerged from the alliance between the city’s political leaders and its capitalist class as both tried to create and maintain their vision of order and to protect capital’s interests in a rapidly growing, multi-ethnic city. Mitrani also seeks to understand the development of the Chicago police, and by implication, all big-city police departments, as a crucial step in the development of the American state. He demonstrates that by the end of the 19th century, the Chicago police “had developed professional leadership that removed crucial aspects of police policy from politics and portrayed their activities as a politically neutral municipal service.” (3) The Chicago police would act to protect capital’s interests, but the “deeper question of whether or not municipalities should maintain massive organizations of armed men to enforce order on the population was effectively removed from the political debate.” (4) Mitrani succeeds admirably in accomplishing his goals in a book that is clearly written and persuasively argued. Mitrani sees the work that Chicago’s elites did to organize themselves to meet the challenge that a multi-ethnic and increasingly united working class posed as crucial for understanding the development of the city’s police department. [End Page 348] Chicago grew rapidly from a small outpost in the 1830s to the second largest city in the United States by the 1890s. This swift development meant that the city did not have the entrenched elite that characterized Boston, New York, and Philadelphia when the Second Industrial Revolution got underway in earnest in the years after the American Civil War. While Mitrani charts the development of the Chicago police, he also shows how the city’s capitalists organized themselves as a class and exerted more and more influence over the city’s governance. In Chapters 4 and 5, for instance, he explores the new organizations the city’s capitalist class founded during the 1870s – the Committee of Seventy, the Citizens’ Association, and then the Chicago Commercial Club – to exert influence on who had authority over the police, what and who the Chicago police would police, and how the city’s government operated more broadly. Mitrani also focuses on how Chicago’s working class perceived the police. He shows how the police helped break the 1877 railroad strike in Chicago, but also contends that by the late 1870s, the police “had yet to prove that they could attain the legitimacy and respect from the city’s workers that they needed to enforce everyday order. ” (133) Mitrani argues that Mayor Carter Harrison instituted reforms in the 1880s that were aimed at helping the policy achieve legitimacy. Mitrani characterizes Harrison as a machine politician who implemented civil service reforms aimed at professionalizing the police department as well as establishing a political alliance with the city’s working class. He directed the department to become more ethnically diverse in hiring and moved the police away from keeping order through the use of force and toward doing more social service work in the city’s neighbourhoods. Such work, however, created a different kind of coercion as the police became increasingly involved in enforcing anti-abortion laws and more generally enforcing middle-class and native-born ideas about sex, sexuality, and the consumption of alcohol. On the other hand, Harrison stopped using the police to break strikes. With this new policy in place during the first half of the 1880s, the city’s workers won several strikes, but Harrison then revoked this policy in 1885 as the city’s elite...

State Abortion Policy and Unintended Birth Rates in the United States

Restrictive state abortion laws make it more difficult and costly for women to obtain an abortion. The fundamental law of demand posits that an increase in the cost of an abortion should cause the number of abortions to decrease. This suggests that restrictive state abortion laws should cause women with unintended pregnancies to have fewer abortions and concomitantly more unintended births. This paper investigates the impact four restrictive state abortion laws—No Medicaid Funding, Parental Involvement, Mandatory Counseling and Waiting Periods—have on the unintended birth rates of the 50 US states for the year 2006. Using a variety of methodologies, the empirical results show that, contrary to the theoretical prediction, these four antiabortion laws do not have a significant positive effect on unintended birth rates.

“Criminal Operations”: The First Fifty Years of Abortion Trials in Portland, Oregon

Although Oregon adopted its first anti-abortion law in 1854, Portland's first prosecution of a “criminal operation” (abortion) did not occur for nearly twenty years. The Oregonian coverage of abortion trials from 1870 to 1920 reveals many obstacles prosecutors faced during that time, including lack of sufficient evidence and ambiguities in the state's anti- abortion law. Through case studies and data collected from Oregonian articles during that time period, Michael Helquist explores Portland's early abortion trials that highlight “the nuanced and disparate reactions of physicians who found themselves on the front lines of abortion services, policies, and enforcement.” Helquist argues that “an understanding of the conflicts over reproductive policy [is] as important to women's and the nation's history as the struggle to achieve woman suffrage and other rights of citizenship.”

The Impact of Antiabortion Criminal Activities and State Abortion Policies on Abortion Providers in the United States

This study empirically examined whether acts of antiabortion criminal activities and restrictive state abortion laws had an impact on the number of abortion providers. Using a unique data set, the Feminist Majority Foundation’s 2000 survey of antiabortion criminal acts directed at clinics, providers, healthcare workers and patients, the empirical results showed that acts of violence and harassment reduced the number of abortion providers offering abortion services. An increase in the likelihood of violence or harassment by 10 % reduced the number of abortion providers per 100,000 women of reproductive age by 5.6 and 3.7 %, respectively and the number of abortion providers per 100,000 pregnancies by 7.8 and 5.9 %, respectively. In addition, antiabortion criminal acts were more likely in states with greater economic participation by women, higher levels of sexual violence against women, and western states.

Analyzing the Impact of U.S. Antiabortion Legislation in the Post-CaseyEra: A Reassessment

AbstractMarshall Medoff and Christopher Dennis identify some errors in National Abortion Rights Action League's (NARAL) data on the effective start dates of various state-level antiabortion laws. However, they misunderstand the purpose of my 2011State Politics and Policy Quarterlyarticle which was to measure the impact of a range of antiabortion laws—not analyze competing theories as to why the abortion rate has fallen in the United States. Furthermore, their analysis contains a number of critical measurement, and methodological and estimation errors. When these errors are corrected, the empirical results add to the substantial body of peer-reviewed research which finds that public funding restrictions, parental involvement laws, and properly designed informed consent laws all reduce the incidence of abortion.

A Critical Reexamination of the Effect of Antiabortion Legislation in the Post-Casey Era

AbstractMichael J. New, in a recent article in this journal, argues that a major reason for the decline in the incidence of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was the increased number of antiabortion laws—parental involvement laws and informed consent laws—enacted at the state level. However, New's analysis contained critical data, measurement, methodological and estimation errors. This article details all the errors and then reexamines the effect of restrictive state abortion laws on the incidence of abortion over the period 1985–2005. The empirical results find little evidence that the decline in the number of abortions performed since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision was due to the increase in the number of informed consent and parental involvement laws enacted.

The effect of anti-abortion legislation on nineteenth century fertility.

Using nineteenth century legal information combined with census information, I examine the effect of state laws that restricted American women's access to abortion on the ratio of children to women. I estimate an increase in the birthrate of 4 % to 12 % when abortion is restricted. In the absence of anti-abortion laws, fertility would have been 5 % to 12 % lower in the early twentieth century.

Contextualizing Consequences: A Socio-Legal Approach to Social Movement Outcomes in Professional Fields

Social movement consequences have become an increasingly important area of study, but the current literature overlooks implementation and treats law, organizations, and culture as separate areas of inquiry. This study offers a new perspective on consequences by taking a socio-legal approach that considers how law is constructed and enacted in professional fields and how legal and professional logics intersect to influence professional decision making. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, surveys, and content analysis about the Emergency Contraceptive Pill (ECP) conflict in pharmacy, I find that professional logics largely supersede legal ones to influence decision making and that organizational positioning and perceived policy affect collective goods distribution. These forces diminish the power of pro-choice and anti-abortion laws as professionals interpret, construct, and ignore the law in daily practice. The concluding discussion emphasizes the importance of considering professionals as targets of social movement action, reconceptualizing collective goods and implementation, and using field theory as methodology.

ALTERATION OF GENERATIONS IN HUMANS

A biologist argues against the logic of anti-abortion laws.

Profile of abortion in Chile, with extremely restrictive law

Chile, together with El Salvador, Malta and Nicaragua has the most restrictive abortion laws. In these countries there is very little information on pregnancies that end in abortions. An analysis is made of official information regarding hospital discharges for abortion in Chile between 2001 and 2010, classified according to age and according to the WHO ICD 10. The Chilean Ministry of Health’s Statistics Office (DEIS) collected the data. In 334,485 hospital discharges for abortion, Ectopic Abortion (O00), the Hydatidiform Mole (O01) and Other Abnormal Products of Conception (O02) corresponded to 37.2% of hospital discharges. Spontaneous Abortion (O03) reached 15% and Non Specified Abortion (O06) reached 35.5% and most probably included complications of induced abortions. 77% of hospital discharges corresponded to women between 20 and 34 years of age. Adolescents correspond to 11% of hospital discharges. In the annual average of 33,500 hospital discharges, Other Abnormal Products of Conception (O02), Other Abortions (O05), and Non Specified Abortions (O05) contribute to 72.7% of hospital discharges. This is explained by incomplete diagnoses, by means of the omission of induced abortion as this would mean jail for the woman and legal red-tape for the health personnel involved. Maternal mortality has not fallen. Abortion Mortality and Fatality rates do not change. There is a discrepancy between the law and hospital discharge diagnoses for abortion. The antiabortion law remains unheeded and obeys an ideological bias that brings damage and abuse to Chilean women. The aim of this study is to gain better information from a country that does not allow abortion under any circumstance, and its usefulness to countries in similar situations, together with its negative consequences on woman’s health and rights.

The Personal Scope of the Right to Life Under Article 2(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights After the Judgment inA, B and C v. Ireland

The right to private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention, or ECHR) is one of the widest rights in European human rights law. Applicants often rely on the norm when they seek to justify all kinds of behavior, which may be limited or even outlawed through domestic law. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that in the case ofA, B and C v. Ireland, which was decided by the European Court of Human Rights in December 2010, the applicants relied on Article 8 to complain about the restrictive anti-abortion law in the Republic of Ireland. Contrary to predictions thatA, B and C v. Irelandcould become “Europe's Roe v. Wade,” referring to the U.S. case which led to the permissibility of abortion under U.S. law, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) held that Article 8 did not include a right to have an abortion.

Finnis, Dworkin and Restrictions on Liberty

Subjects of ongoing public controversy such as abortion and homosexuality mark the watershed between the arguments of John Finnis and Ronald Dworkin. For Finnis, the purpose of government is to create the conditions ideal for the pursuit of the common good. For Dworkin, the purpose of government is to respect and protect individual rights. Finnis would therefore class an anti-abortion law as a legitimate restriction on intentionally destructive individual action: action that, if permitted, would undermine the common good. Dworkin, on the other hand, would hold that abortion should be allowed for the sake of individual rights, even if it involves the killing of innocent human beings and fundamental harm to society. Any common ground between the two legal philosophers is overshadowed by this fundamental disagreement on the role and limits of government. This paper will set out the areas of agreement and disagreement between Finnis and Dworkin, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, and conclude with some thoughts on whether government is entitled to restrict liberty based on judgments about the value of a particular way of life.