Pro-life Research Articles

Circulation: Clinical Summaries

<i>Circulation:</i> Clinical Summaries

Political Action Versus Personal Action

Scholarship commonly treats the state as social movements’ default target and venue, explaining pursuit of change through nongovernmental channels in terms of lack of political opportunity. This article presents the “pregnancy help” branch of the American pro-life movement as a potential counterexample, as its recent growth has coincided with a seeming expansion of opportunities for the pro-life movement’s political wing. Using quantitative and qualitative data, this article explores the role of political opportunity in the founding, growth, and sustenance of these service-oriented pro-life organizations. I find that political opportunity concerns mattered little to the origins of the pro-life movement’s pregnancy help branch, but that they contributed somewhat to the path of its development over time. I argue that some social movements’ pursuit of change through nongovernmental channels may better reflect participants’ ideas, personalities, life situations, and orientations toward problem solving more than strategic assessment of the political opportunity structure.

Informed consent of the critically ill patient and drug therapy: legal aspects

Legal issues concerning the doctor-patient relationship are numerous, and belong to the wider field of professional liability in health care. This article will be dealt with the issues related to informed consent in patients temporarily unable to express consent, or patients who are in a state of temporary incapacity. If the patients are temporarily incapable, and therefore are not able to receive the information nor to express consent to treatment, the physicians’ duty to provide medical treatment and the patients’ self-determination should be considered: the patients can consent or refuse treatment only if able to understand the significance of their decision. If a patient is temporarily unable to give consent and the practitioner doesn’t have at his/her disposal a valid document reporting the patient’s wishes, it’s necessary to rely on the so called “amministratore di sostegno” (introduced in the Italian legal system by Law n. 6 of January 9th, 2004). But in the case of not deferrable treatment, as a lifesaving intervention, the rule is in dubio pro life meaning that a doctor is always legitimized by this situation of urgent need, regardless of the informed consent of the patient and/or third parties.

The pearl of the ‘Pro-Life’ movement? Reflections on the Kermit Gosnell controversy

The paper comments briefly on the recent controversy surrounding the criminal prosecution and conviction of rogue abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell in the USA, for, among other things, the murder of...

The Cadillac, the mother-in-law, and the ballot: Individual and contextual roots of ambivalence in Swiss direct democracy

Citizens may experience irreconcilable and conflictive values or feelings about a political issue. They may, for instance, both believe in a woman's right to autonomy over her body (pro choice) and that human life begins before birth (pro life). This conflictive situation – referred to as ambivalence in relevant literature – has detrimental effects on political choices. For instance, ambivalence may enhance instability in candidates' evaluations, delay the formation of vote intentions, and finally weaken predictions on vote choices.This being, literature has less looked at what may induce ambivalence, and especially on how informational context may affect it. Our paper aims to compensate for this lack, by assessing under which individual and contextual conditions ambivalence has more chances to be felt by citizens. Through a series of hierarchical estimations based on post-electoral data on Swiss direct democracy and original data retracing content of political campaigns, we will demonstrate that individual determinants (political sophistication, exposure to political campaigns, and heuristics) as well as political campaigning (intensity and negativism) strongly determine the existence of ambivalence.

Toward a Libertarian Theory of Evictionism

There are not two but rather three views regarding the issue of abortion. The first two, pro life and pro choice, are well known. The present paper is dedicated to an elucidation of the third, evictionism. In this perspective, the pregnant woman is allowed to evict her unwanted fetus, but, if it is viable outside of the womb, she is not legally permitted, also, to put it to death, as would apply to abortion. In other words, abortion combines two very different acts, eviction and murder, and only the former is licit, under libertarian law.

The changing governance of embryo research?

This article examines continuities and discontinuities in the governance of human embryo research in the UK from the 1980s to the present. The substantive success of researchers in securing permission to pursue a greater range of activities under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFE Act) 2008 as compared with the HFE Act 1990 is located in two factors: first, a commitment by Government to allow such work; second, the decline in influence of categorical opposition to embryo research, particularly the Pro Life perspective. We have moved from a framework centered on respecting the “special status” of the human embryo to one that includes this within a process-orientated governance framework that respects a plurality of views. Against this background, research scientists have expressed the hope, and critics the fear, that contemporary law and debate suggest that they are “escaping the tyranny of the embryo”. However, over the past 10–15 years in particular, the battle to influence governance and the outcome of this battle were characteristic of what is termed the new modes of governance, in the following sense: the governance of embryo research in the UK is still relatively “top down”, guided by a specific legal framework and a single regulator. But at the same time Government and the regulator, formally at least, embraced horizontal tools of governance, downplayed ideas of governance that are based on a view of government controlling the actions of others and adopted a highly consultative approach to policy-making. This created some novel and, for natural scientists, not entirely positive, outcomes. If one trend in the past 20 years has been in the direction of normalizing embryo research, a corollary of that trend is that some areas of research and innovation have become normally problematic.

Law's virtues: fostering autonomy and solidarity in American society

Preface Introduction Section I: Law as a Moral Teacher1. Autonomy, Solidarity, and Law's Pedagogy2. Law and Morality: Understanding the Relationship Section II: Life Issues and the Law3. The Pro-Life Movement and the Purpose of Law4. Bad Pedagogy, Bad Law: What FOCA Is -- and Isn't5. Genetic Information and Razian Autonomy6. Dying Gracefully7. Dying Well, Assisted Suicide, and Constitutional Law Section III: Voting, Morality, and the Law8. Voting and Faithful Citizenship9. Intrinsic Evil and Political Responsibility10. Voting and Complicity in Wrongdoing Concluding Reflections Index

“Pro-life” in the Czech Republic – What Kind of Europeanization Is Present?

This paper attempts to show what effects Europeanization has had on the pro-life movement in the Czech Republic. The first section of the text outlines a multifaceted concept of institutional theory based on historical institutionalist ideas. Next, it looks at one specific institutional process, Europeanization, informed by the work of Radaelli as well as della Porta’s and Caiani’s work on mobilization in the European Union. The following section defines the relevant actors in the Czech pro-life movement. Finally, the paper applies this concept of Europeanization of social movements to the Czech pro-life case. The paper concludes with observations that Europeanization of the Czech pro-life movement is uneven, manifesting itself among some actors, though not all, and in some areas of Europeanization. Charitable organizations as well as one highly visible activist group are highly associated with processes of Europeanization; on the other hand, in most cases, other activist groups in the pro-life movement in the Czech Republic are more highly influenced by more general trends in interest-group internationalization. These insights may pave the way for additional research on trends both of the European pro-life movement as a whole, as well as serving as a touchstone for improving such theoretical concepts as “Europeanization” vis-à-vis “globalization” or “European integration”.

Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies by Thomas Banchoff (review)

Reviewed by: Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies by Thomas Banchoff Simon A. Cole (bio) Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies. By Thomas Banchoff. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+294. $35. The first successful human in vitro fertilization, by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe at Cambridge University in 1968, generated some media attention but no ethical or political debate. As Thomas Banchoff notes in Embryo Politics, "the human embryo only slowly emerged as an object of ethical controversy" (p. 21). This lucid and well-written book relates a comparative history of this controversy in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Banchoff argues that two distinct periods can be discerned. In the first, from around 1968 through around 1996, the primary medical use of human embryos was for infertility treatment. Ethical debates centered around the moral status attributed to embryos as human life. The second period was shaped by the successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells, first accomplished in 1998 at the University of Wisconsin. This development shifted the discussion of the potential benefits of embryo research from relatively narrow applications in infertility treatment to potential blockbuster applications in disease-curing research and therapeutic cloning. In this period, an "ethic of healing" (p. 172) and worries about the dystopian possibilities posed by cloning dominated the debate. Banchoff compares developments in these two periods across four "Atlantic democracies." He argues that "National historical and institutional legacies" (p. 13) generated quite different politics in the four countries. In the first phase, a powerful anti-abortion movement in the United States linked the issue of embryo personhood to the abortion issue, resulting in public-private split: a ban on federally funded, but not on privately funded, research. Germany, which associated embryo research with Nazi eugenic and medical abuses, adopted the most conservative regime: a total ban on embryo research. France also adopted a ban, though based on a secular humanist commitment to human rights and dignity. The United Kingdom [End Page 430] took the most liberal approach. Anti-abortion forces, though present, were not nearly as strong as in the United States, the Catholic population was smaller, and even British conservatives were excited by the medical potential of embryo research. In the second phase, anti-research forces lost ground. Pro-research forces were able to promise potential cures for a wide variety of devastating diseases, and to represent the curing of disease as just as "pro-life" as the protection of embryos. France changed the most, moving from a total ban to a five-year trial period in which the derivation of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes would be permitted. The United States maintained its peculiarly American public-private split, with President George W. Bush's famous 2001 decision to limit federal embryonic research funding to sixty existing stem-cell lines. Germany remained the most conservative, allowing research on imported embryos but not the domestic derivation of embryonic stem cells. The United Kingdom remained the most liberal regime. Of particular interest were the attempts to control the debate through language, such as proposals to call therapeutic cloning "nuclear substitution" and to call a cloned embryo a "clonote," an "activated egg," an "ovasome," or a "pre-embryo" (pp. 146-47). Banchoff argues that "in keeping with the idea of a value-free social science," it is important that he not take a position on the debate over embryo research. On one issue, however, he does take a normative position: he argues forcefully that the quality of the debate eroded in the second phase. He contends that in the first phase both sides acknowledged that their adversaries had compelling interests as well. In the second phase, the debate "degenerated too often into charges and countercharges." (p. 237) Research proponents, Banchoff argues, refused to acknowledge the moral status of embryos. And opponents of research ignored embryonic stem-cell research's compelling potential to alleviate human suffering. Embryo Politics aims to be a "straight history": it does not seek to use its case study to explicate the relationship between science and technology and politics, as does, for example, Sheila Jasanoff 's shorter treatment of the second-phase...

The Politics of Information: Informed Consent in Abortion and End-of-Life Decision Making

The politics of reproduction dominate the political landscape now more than ever. One area of controversy has been informed consent statutes for abortion, which have been praised by the pro-life movement but derided by the pro-choice movement. More recently, legislatures have begun to enact informed consent statutes with respect to end-of-life decision making, an area almost as politically controversial as abortion. Like many abortion disclosure laws, some of these have been entitled "Right to Know" statutes. Yet, the supporters and opponents of each set of statutes tend not to be the same, aligning to a large extent based on their place in the culture wars over life and death. In this Article, I strive not only to show the remarkably similar critiques each side marshals but also to use these concerns to think in more nuanced ways about the goals of informed consent and whether the disclosure mandates achieve those goals. I first argue in favor of the aspirational goals of informed consent as a process that allows patients to participate in their medical decision making. While conceding the inherently political nature of abortion and end-of-life care, I also contend that the significance of decisions regarding those matters warrants, at least in theory, legislative efforts to ensure that patients have the opportunity to engage in deliberative and informed decision making. In describing and responding to the similar critiques of both sets of laws--the political bias of the statutes; the efforts to persuade, especially with non-medical information; the potential vulnerability of the targeted audience; and the interference with physician discretion--I uncover and challenge some of the presumptions about informed consent inherent in those critiques. Although information that persuades or influences is not per se problematic, I argue that disclosure of information that is inaccurate, untrue, or emotionally inflammatory harms informed consent. Even well-crafted informed consent mandates, however, are insufficient to promote truly deliberative decision making because they oversimplify the complexity of these decisions and fail to respond to the fact that informed consent is a process that requires more than simply the delivery of information; it also requires dialogue and discussion. This Article ends with suggestions for ways to try to promote such a dialogue.

Arguing Abortion: The New Anti-Abortion Discourse in Canada

Abstract.This article analyzes the nature of contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada. Based on a rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis of the public discourse of a wide variety of influential actors, this study shows that contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada is quite different than the portrait offered by traditional accounts. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that the new anti-abortion discourse aims at changing cultural values more than legislation; is explicitly framed as ‘pro-woman’; largely avoids appealing to religious grounds; and relies on a new ‘abortion-harms-women’ argument that has supplanted and transformed traditional fetal personhood arguments. The article argues that these findings are important as they provide a more accurate account of the political discourse surrounding one of the most contentious issues in politics today and because they illustrate broader ideological patterns that are increasingly characteristic of Canadian political discourse.Résumé.Cet article propose d'analyser la nature du discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada. Fondée sur une analyse qualitative et quantitative rigoureuse du discours public d'une grande variété d'acteurs influents, cette étude démontre que le discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada se distingue de manière caractéristique du portrait qu'il en a traditionnellement été donné. Notre analyse révèle en particulier que le nouveau discours sur l'anti-avortement vise plutôt à transformer les valeurs culturelles que la législation; qu'il est explicitement formulé comme étant « pro-femme »; qu'il évite de faire appel à des motifs religieux; et qu'il déploie un nouvel argument, « l'avortement-nuit-aux-femmes », qui évince et transforme les arguments traditionnels qui cherchaient à accorder le statut de personne au fétus. Cet article argumente alors que ces constats sont importants non seulement parce qu'ils permettent de brosser un tableau plus complet du discours politique qui touche à l'une des questions les plus controversée de la politique contemporaine, mais également parce qu'ils mettent en évidence des tendances idéologiques de plus en plus caractéristiques du discours politique au Canada.

Abortion in a Progressive Legal Environment: The Need for Vigilance in Protecting and Promoting Access to Safe Abortion Services in South Africa

The importance of South Africa as a model for reproductive self-determination in Africa cannot be underestimated. Abortion has been legal since 1996, and the country has some of the most developed government systems for the provision of abortion care on the continent. Yet in the same way opponents of abortion in the United States have whittled away at access with increased bureaucracy, South Africa faces similar assaults that leave women without safe care and threaten to turn back achievements made during the past 16 years. I explore the history of the law, subsequent legal challenges, and new threats to women's access to abortion services, including service delivery issues that may influence the future of public health in the country.

A Rawlsian Pro-Life Argument against Vegetarianism

A Rawlsian Pro-Life Argument against Vegetarianism

Choosing the Right to Choose: &lt;em&gt;Roe v. Wade&lt;/em&gt; and the Feminist Movement to Legalize Abortion in Martial-Law Taiwan

Choosing the Right to Choose: &lt;em&gt;Roe v. Wade&lt;/em&gt; and the Feminist Movement to Legalize Abortion in Martial-Law Taiwan

In the Name of the Mother: Renegotiating Conservative Women’s Authority in the Crisis Pregnancy Center Movement

AbstractThe majority of crisis pregnancy centers are part of an evangelical pro-life movement, which assumes the assumption that meeting the material and spiritual needs of women with problematic pregnancies will convince them to forgo abortions. The movement is unusual in the evangelical Christian context because the vast majority of lay activists and leaders are women. Furthermore, there are multiple sites of negotiation within the movement indicating that gender hierarchy is neither absolute nor taken for granted. These conflicts are enabled by gender essentialism, yet they destabilize the patriarchal bargain between women and men at both the national and local levels. First, the movement as a whole comes into conflict with the larger evangelical context as activists claim that, as women, they have legitimate authority to determine the authentic Christian response to crisis pregnancy and abortion. Thus, they compete with evangelical leaders by constructing gendered interpretations of religious doctrine...

“Religion and Nonviolence in American History”

AbstractNonviolence has long been an important aspect of American religion. Understanding the tradition of religious nonviolence helps illuminate such subjects as the growth and limits of state power, the character of political dissent, and the significance of race in the nation’s history. In the colonial period, Quakers tried to square the nonviolent ideal with the vagaries of pluralism and cultural conflict. Nineteenth‐century nonresistants led by William Lloyd Garrison tied the problem of violence to the injustice of slavery. The connections between peace and justice were revitalized in the decades after the First World War, when Mohandas Gandhi’s efforts in India suggested the viability of nonviolent direct action as a practical strategy for social change. That modern form of nonviolence achieved great success in the civil rights movement, as Martin Luther King, Jr. and other African American innovators used it to defeat white supremacy. Religious nonviolence was also at the center of antinuclear protests and the campaign to end the Vietnam War. More recently, nonviolence has appeared in the prolife movement and the opposition to United States military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anti-Abortion Movement Led by Obstetrician/Gynecologists in South Korea.

Abortion has been regarded as one of the methods for birth-control in South Korea for decades, since the 1970s when the government encouraged people to choose abortion for the sake of population control during its industrialization process. Most abortions used to be easily performed because doctors or women undergoing abortions were not prosecuted even though abortion was illegal. Even following economic development, such a trend of encouraging abortion was prevalent in our society, and as a result, women used to be compelled by social pressure to undergo abortion.

Ellen McCormack for President: Politics and an Improbable Path to Passing Anti-abortion Policy

Ellen McCormack for President: Politics and an Improbable Path to Passing Anti-abortion Policy

Misappropriating Women's History in the Law and Politics of Abortion

“Without known exception, the early American feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms.” This claim about women’s history has been used by pro-life advocates for twenty years to control the political narrative of abortion. Conservatives, led by the group Feminists for Life, have used feminist icons from history to support their anti-abortion advocacy. Federal anti-abortion legislation has been named after feminist heroines, like the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnancy and Parenting Students Act (co-sponsored by Rick Santorum) and the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Act of 2011. Amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court quote women’s rights leaders in support of abortion regulation and political forums popularize the notion. This political narrative, however, misconstrues the historical evidence. It invents rather than describes history, blatantly ignoring the text, context, and spirit of the work of the women it appropriates.The need to create a history of anti-abortion feminists seems important today because abortion has come to be equated with women’s rights. The appeal to historical figures in the abortion debate is powerful because it utilizes the gravitas of feminist heroines to challenge the existing legal and political assumption that abortion is a cornerstone of sex equality. The appeal to feminist history by pro-life advocates offers a counter narrative in which women dedicated to improving the economic and educational rights of women reject abortion as a gender-based right. The lack of popular knowledge about the lives and ideologies of these women leaders contributes to the ease and utility of co-opting their images for political purposes.This Article tests the veracity of the political and legal claims of a feminist history against abortion by focusing on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the brilliant chief philosopher and leader” of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. Stanton has quite literally been the poster child for FFL’s historical campaign against abortion, appearing on posters, flyers, and commemorative coffee mugs. This research offers a detailed account of Stanton’s views related to abortion based on original historical research into the archives of Stanton’s papers. Like other works of legal history, it is fundamentally concerned with recovering all of the legally relevant facts and placing those facts in appropriate historical and legal context. The evidence shows that Stanton did not talk about abortion per se. She did not respond to the public campaign for the criminalization of abortion led by the medical profession with attacks on the growing autonomy of women. Instead Stanton turned this debate to her priority of women’s rights, framing the question as one of the “elevation of woman” through equal legal and social rights. Stanton’s theory of “enlightened motherhood” placed women as the “sovereign of her own person” with sole responsibility for deciding when and under what circumstances to bear children. She defended women accused of infanticide, exposing the gendered legal system of all-male juries, legislatures, and judges that condemned them. Stanton’s life work labored for radical change to the patriarchy of society seeking liberal legal reforms of equal rights for women. Her ideology was about the “self-sovereignty” of women and against the regulation of women by men or the law. Stanton thus makes an unlikely spokesperson for the modern anti-abortion movement committed to opposite ends.