The ongoing debate over abortion serves as a clear indication that the Supreme Court decision of 1973 did little to settle the question of abortion's legitimacy. If anything, in fact, the debate has grown, with more strident voices and, in some cases, more violent dimensions than ever before. On both sides, the debate has been dominated by passionate but not always rational arguments. It seems as thought there are no tame opinions about abortion in this country, that public policy is the product of slogans, sound bites, and placards, instead of principled argument. By presenting the balanced, rational argument for the Catholic position on this highly charged subject, Abortion and Public Policy makes a major contribution to public policy discourse in our pluralistic society. R. Randall Rainey, S.J., LL.M., is Senior Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. Gerard Magill Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Health Care Ethics and Director of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University.

Civil Dialogue on Abortion provides a cutting-edge discussion between two philosophy scholars on each side of the abortion debate. Bertha Alvarez Manninen argues for her pro-choice view, but also urges respect for the life of the fetus, while Jack Mulder argues for his pro-life view, but recognizes that for the pro-life movement to be consistent, it must urge society to care more for the vulnerable. Coming together to discuss their views, but also to seek common ground, the two authors show how their differing positions nevertheless rest upon some common convictions. The book helps to provide a way forward for a divide that has only seemed to widen the aisle of public discourse in recent years. This engaging book will prove essential reading for students across multiple disciplines, including applied ethics, medical ethics, and bioethics, but will also be of interest to students of religious studies and women's studies.

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"Nelson presents the tip of the iceberg of the history of the involvement of women of color, specifically, African-American women and Latinas in the movements for rights."--"Conscience"

"This book is an important contribution to the growing reexamination of the women's health movement. This is a useful book, an interesting book, a book that tells our history."--"Politics, Social Movements, and The State"

While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus.

"A valuable contribution."
--"Feminist Collections"

Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible "for the revolution," and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics--including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty--for feminist discourse.

Abortion remains legal in the US, but access has been slowly eroded since prohibition was ruled unconstitutional nearly fifty years ago. Simultaneously abortion remains culturally stigmatised - it is kept secret and presumed shameful. But feminist activists are working to increase access and challenge this stigma. Numerous organisations and campaigns are challenging abortion stigma using the internet and social media and intersectional feminist sensibilities. From A Whisper to a Shout takes a closer look at four of these organisations - #ShoutYourAbortion, Lady Parts Justice, #WeTestify, and The Abortion Diary - and how they are integrating feminist tactics, social media, and political strategies to challenge abortion stigma and promote abortion access.

For the past forty years, prominent pro-life activists, judges and politicians have invoked the history and legacy of American slavery to elucidate aspects of contemporary abortion politics. As is often the case, many of these popular analogies have been imprecise, underdeveloped and historically simplistic. In Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, Justin Buckley Dyer provides the first book-length scholarly treatment of the parallels between slavery and abortion in American constitutional development. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study, Dyer demonstrates that slavery and abortion really are historically, philosophically and legally intertwined in America. The nexus, however, is subtler and more nuanced than is often suggested, and the parallels involve deep principles of constitutionalism.

Roe v. Wade came like a bolt from the blue, but support had been building for years. For many, the idea that life in the womb was not fully protected under the Constitution was simply not acceptable. Political campaigns were organized and protests launched, including the bombing of clinics and the killing of abortion providers. Questions about the protection and support of life continued after birth. This book is based on a hugely popular undergraduate course taught at the University of Texas, and is ideal for those interested in the social construction of social worth, social problems, and social movements. This book is part of a larger text, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides?, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415892476/

Examining the changing pluralities of contemporary abortion debate in Britain, this innovative and important book shows why it is necessary to move beyond an understanding of abortion politics as characterised in binary terms by 'pro-choice' versus 'pro-life'. Amery traces the evolution of political and parliamentary discourses from the passage of the Abortion Act in the 1960s to the present day, and argues that the current provision of abortion in Britain rests on assumptions about medical authority over women's reproductive decision-making which are unsustainable. She explores new arguments around sex-selective abortion, disability rights, pre-abortion counselling and the push for decriminalization, and radically reconceptualizes the debate to account for these new battlegrounds in abortion politics.

In 1967, when abortion was either illegal or highly restricted in every U.S. state, a group of ministers and rabbis formed to counsel women with unwanted pregnancies-including referral to licensed physicians willing to perform the procedure. By 1973, when the Roe v. Wade court decision made abortion legal nationwide, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS) had spread from coast to coast, referred hundreds of thousands of women for safe abortions without a single fatality, become a medical consumer advocacy group, and opened its own clinic in New York City. As religious leaders spoke out on issues of civil rights, peace, or poverty, CCS members were also called to action by the suffering of women who had approached them for help. Overwhelmingly male, white, affluent, and middle-aged, these mainline Protestant and Jewish clergy were nonetheless outspoken advocates for the rights of women, particularly poor women. To Offer Compassion is a detailed history of this unique and largely forgotten movement, drawing on extensive interviews with original participants and on primary documents from the CCS's operations.

Vigorously demonstrating the relevance of reasoning to important moral problems, the participants in this dialogue resist the temptations of strident emotional appeal in an effort to present the most honorable and intellectually sophisticated sides of their arguments. This effort leads them to consideration of ante-bellum slavery, to a comparison of the notions of absolute truth in ethics versus mathematics, and to constructive discussions of genetics, artificial intelligence, euthanasia, personal identity, human sexuality, and Roe v. Wade.

Birth control offers women the opportunity to prevent pregnancy, plan and space their births, or have no births at all. And yet, in the United States, half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and access to birth control is beset by inequities in education, access, and coverage. Research indicates that women are familiar with the range of contraceptive methods available today. But the persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy, combined with common dissatisfaction and discontinuation, suggest that women's contraceptive needs continue to be unmet. Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know will offer more than a user's guide to available means of contraception: it will examine how supported family-planning infrastructure impacts society as a whole. Through reviews of policy, scientific literature, and supplemental interviews with women, it will uncover women's concerns and apprehensions about contraception, as well as the ways birth control empowers women and increases access to educational and professional opportunities. It will provide an overview the history of birth control, the risks and benefits of contraception, the role of menstruation, and the future of birth control. The goal of this book is to provide accurate, unbiased scientific information about contraception in the context of women's lived experiences and the realities of how individuals make decisions about birth control.

This book presents a collection of studies by top scholars on leading cases from twelve different jurisdictions defining the legal status of unborn human life. The cases under study pertain to three distinctive cultural and constitutional systems: Latin American Constitutional Courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, European Constitutional Courts and the European Court on Human Rights, as well as Common Law jurisdictions. With a special conclusion by Professor John Finnis, drawing together the many treads of the individual chapters into a comprehensive whole, this book lays the basis for further comparative study of the legal and moral reasoning underlying judicial decisions which either recognize or deny legal personhood and/or equal dignity to unborn human beings. Robert P. George McCormick, Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University: "Pilar Zambrano and William L. Saunders have done a great service by giving us a thorough compilation of the law of various jurisdictions concerning the status and rights of the unborn. They have brought together an impressive group of scholars and obtained from them work of the highest intellectual caliber." Prof. Carlos Massini-Correas, University of Mendoza and University of Buenos Aires: "In undertaking the very unusual task of analyzing both the legal and the moral horizon of interpretation underlying leading judicial decisions, this book represents an exceptional shortcut to the bulk of constitutional and philosophical arguments in favor of the enhancement of the value of unborn human life to the status of a right. This mixed perspective of study allows us to avoid the usual fallacy of both sides of the abortion debate, to overlook either its moral or its legal framework."

What are the contemporary issues in abortion politics globally? What factors explain variations in access to abortion between and within different countries? This text provides a transnationally-focused, interdisciplinary analysis of trends in abortion politics using case studies from around the Global North and South. It considers how societal influences, such as religion, nationalism and culture, impact abortion law and access. It explores the impact of international human rights norms, the increasing displacement of people due to conflict and crisis and the role of activists on law reform and access. The book concludes by considering the future of abortion politics through the more holistic lens of reproductive justice. Utilising a unique interdisciplinary approach, this book provides a major contribution to the knowledge base on abortion politics globally. It provides an accessible, informative and engaging text for academics, policy makers and readers interested in abortion politics.

The term "reproductive politics" was coined by feminists in the 1970s to describe contemporary Roe v. Wade-era power struggles over contraception and abortion, adoption and surrogacy, and other satellite issues. Forty years later, questions about reproductive rights are just as complex--and controversial--as they were then. Focusing mainly on the United States, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know(r) explores the legal, political, religious, social, ethical, and medical dimensions of this hotly contested arena.
Tracing the historical roots of reproductive politics up through the present, Rickie Solinger considers a range of topics from abortion and contraception to health care reform and assisted reproductive technologies. Solinger tackles some of the most contentious questions up for debate today, including the definition of "fetal personhood," and the roles poverty and welfare policy play in shaping reproductive rights. The answers she provides are informative, balanced, and sometimes quite surprising.
Offering a wide range of information in an accessible and engaging manner, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know(r) orients readers and provides the knowledge necessary to follow the debates in this important and continually evolving field.
What Everyone Needs to Know(r) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Pres

The right to life is a core human right which has not yet received the detailed legal analysis that it requires. This book provides detailed, critical analysis of the controversial human right to life and, in particular, assesses the weight of conflicting interests which could and/or should serve to override the right. This contemporary study of the right to life focuses on the legal, as well as ethical, issues raised by the value of life in modern day society. It seeks to analyze the development, meaning and value of the fundamental human right to life in the context of its conflicts with other competing interests. The book begins with an overview of the right to life in which the concept of life itself is first analyzed, before both the right and its legal protection and enforcement are subjected to historical, philosophical and comparative analysis. The remainder of the book identifies, and assesses the merits of, various competing interests. These comprise armed conflict; prevention of crime; rights of others; autonomy; quality of life; and finite resources.
The right to life is unusual in having potential application to so many of today's ethically controversial questions. This new work investigates specific topics of current political, legal and ethical concern such as the right to life during international conflicts, the role of lethal force in law enforcement, the death penalty, the right to life of a foetus in the context of legalized abortion, and the significance of quality of life and autonomy issues in respect of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Fifteen years ago, New Jersey became the first of over twenty states to introduce the family cap, a welfare reform policy that reduces or eliminates cash benefits for unmarried women on public assistance who become pregnant. The caps have lowered extra-marital birth rates, as intended but as Michael J. Camasso shows convincingly in this provocative book, they did so in a manner that few of the policys architects are willing to acknowledge publicly, namely by increasing the abortion rate disproportionately among black and Hispanic women. In Family Caps, Abortion, and Women of Color, Camasso (who headed up the evaluation of the nations first cap) presents the caps history from inception through implementation to his investigation and the dramatic attempts to squelch his unpleasant findings. The book is filled with devastatingly clear-cut evidence and hard-nosed data analyses, yet Camasso also pays close attention to the reactions his findings provoked in policymakers, both conservative and liberal, who were unprepared for the effects of their crude social engineering and did not want their success scrutinized too closely. Camasso argues that absent any successful rehabilitation or marriage strategies, abortion provides a viable third way for policymakers to help black and Hispanic women accumulate the social and human capital they need to escape welfare, while simultaneously appealing to liberals passion for reproductive freedom and the neoconservatives sense of social pragmatism. Camasso's conclusions will please no one along the political spectrum, making it all the more essential for them to be studied widely. A classic example of what can happen to research and the researcher when research findings become misaligned with political goals and strategies, Family Caps, Abortion and Women of Color is sure to foment a contentious but vital discussion among all who read it.

How do people become activists for causes they care deeply about? Many people with similar backgrounds, for instance, fervently believe that abortion should be illegal, but only some of them join the pro-life movement. By delving into the lives and beliefs of activists and nonactivists alike, Ziad W. Munson is able to lucidly examine the differences between them.
Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion--in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism.
"The Making of Pro-life Activists" provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.

Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but it has rarely been subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences. While the legalization of abortion has brought it into the public domain, it still remains a sensitive topic in many cultures, often hidden from view and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowy existence. Drawing on reports gathered from hospital settings and in-depth interviews with women who have had abortions, Luc Boltanski sets out to explain the ambiguous status of this social practice. Abortion, he argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals a contradiction at the heart of the social contract: the principle of the uniqueness of beings conflicts with the postulate of their replaceable nature, a postulate without which no society would achieve demographic renewal. This leads Boltanski to explore the way human beings are engendered and to analyze the symbolic constraints that preside over their entry into society. What makes a human being is not the foetus as such, ensconced within the body, but rather the process by which it is taken up symbolically in speech - that is, its symbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption presupposes the possibility of discriminating among embryos that are indistinguishable. For society, and sometimes for individuals, the arbitrary character of this discrimination is hard to tolerate. The contradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a grammatical categorization: the "project" foetus - adopted by its parents, who use speech to welcome the new being and give it a name - is juxtaposed to the "tumoral" foetus, an accidental embryo that will not be the object of a life-forming project. Bringing together grammar, narrations of life experience and an historical perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh light on a social phenomenon that is widely practised but poorly understood.

This book offers a oral history of pro-life direct activism in America from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Through the stories of leaders and followers, men and women, Catholics and evangelicals, Carol Maxwell explores the complex beliefs and desires that gave rise to this activism, sustained, and eventually undid it. She offers a unique view of the minds of individual protestors and an important account of the direct action movement--as its initial commitment to Ghandian non-violence was broken down by the lethal acts that accompanied its end.

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges that assessment by exploring how NIPT can actually constrain pregnant women's options. Prospective parents must balance a complicated array of factors, including the familial, social, and financial support they can reasonably expect to receive if they choose to carry a disabled fetus to term and raise after birth, causing many pregnant women to "choose" termination. Focusing on the US, the book explores the intent and effects of prenatal screening in connection to women's bodily autonomy and disability rights, addressing themes at the intersection of genetic medicine, policymaking, critical disabilities studies, and political theory. Knight and Miller shift debates about reprogenetics from bioethics to political practice, as well as thoroughly critiquing the neoliberal state and the eugenic technologies that support it. Providing concrete suggestions for reforming medical practice, welfare policy, and cultural norms surrounding disability, this book highlights sites of necessary reform to envision how prospective parents can make truly free choices about prenatal genetic testing and selection abortion.

The Ethics of Pregnancy, Abortion and Childbirth addresses the unique moral questions raised by pregnancy and its intimate bodily nature. From assisted reproduction to abortion and 'vital conflict' resolution to more everyday concerns of the pregnant woman, this book argues for pregnancy as a close human relationship with the woman as guardian or custodian. Four approaches to pregnancy are explored: 'uni-personal', 'neighborly', 'maternal' and 'spousal'. The author challenges not only the view that there is only one moral subject to consider in pregnancy, but also the idea that the location of the fetus lacks all inherent, unique significance. It is argued that the pregnant woman is not a mere 'neighbor' or helpful stranger to the fetus but is rather already in a real familial relationship bringing real familial rights and obligations. If the status of the fetus is conclusive for at least some moral questions raised by pregnancy, so too are facts about its bodily relationship with, and presence in, the woman who supports it. This lucid, accessible and original book explores fundamental ethical issues in a rich and often neglected area of philosophy in ways of interest also to those from other disciplines.

Merle Hoffman's life story is riveting. A former classical pianist, a self-made millionaire, and a feminist who found her life's work providing abortions, she has been a fearless crusader for women's right to choose.

Over the years, Hoffman has used her entrepreneurial spirit to build one of the most comprehensive women's medical centers in the country. In 1971 (two years before the "Roe v. Wade" Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationally), Hoffman founded Choices, an abortion clinic in New York. As a medical provider, she pioneered "patient power," encouraging women to participate in their own health care decisions. And going against even her own expectations for her life after fifty, she adopted a child and writes about her experience as a mother.

Whether addressing the murder of abortion providers like Dr. George Tiller or challenging women to understand their own power over their bodies and the language used to wield such power, Merle Hoffman has been on the front lines of the feminist movement, a fierce warrior in the battle for choice.

Merle Hoffman is an award-winning journalist, activist, and women's health care pioneer. In 1971, she founded Choices, one of the first ambulatory abortion centers, which has become one of the nation's largest and most comprehensive women's medical facilities in the United States. She is also the publisher of On the Issues, an online feminist magazine.

Using a wide range of prosecution and trial records, along with more recent newspaper coverage of court proceedings, this book furnishes a fascinating insight into the relationship between the law, sex, and society in modern Scotland. Case studies of sex-related offences, including abortion, bestiality, brothel-keeping, child sexual assault, and wilful HIV transmission, reveal how far the legal process both reflected and reinforced contemporary moral panics and how far it was shaped by the interplay between law officers and forensic experts, by the prejudices of the local community and civic leaders, and by Scotland's distinctive legal and moral identity. The law in practice is seen to have sustained important norms of sexual behaviour and masculinity along with an enduring double moral standard with respect to female sexuality. This volume thus affords a remarkable new perspective on the sexual behaviours and ideologies of Scottish society across the twentieth century and into the new millennium.