This is a presentation of the case for challenging complacency and reconsidering the extent to which British law has interpreted abortion and constructed a medical model in such a way as to place the control over access to abortion services with the medical profession. Recognizing that abortion has slipped from the political (and specifically feminist) agenda, at least in the UK, the author argues that this systematic medicalization of abortion has rendered women powerless. She acknowledges that repoliticizing abortion - and recognizing how gender affects how power is exercised over women - creates its own risks and may mean that feminists face a potentially lethal backlash. But, she maintains, the failure to do so could close down avenues of choice and control at a time when fundamentalist pressures to eliminate abortion are becoming increasingly powerful. This critique of the medical, legal and political issues surrounding abortion in the UK, reflects the changes, both insidious and profound, in the range of medical technologies available (including RU486), in case law, legal theory and feminist thinking since Keown's 1988 study Abortion, Doctors and the Law.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The public and parliamentary debate about UK abortion law is often diverted away from key moral and political questions by dispute regarding basic questions of fact. And all too often, claims of scientific ‘fact’ are ideologically driven. With each chapter written by leading experts in the fields of medicine, law, reproductive health and social science, this book offers a concise and authoritative account of the evidence regarding the likely impact of decriminalisation.

The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.

Debates about the future of fatherhood have been central to a range of conversations about changing family forms, parenting and society. Law has served an important, yet often neglected, role in these discussions, serving as an important focal point for broader political frustrations, playing a central role in mediating disputes, and operating as a significant, symbolic, state-sanctioned account of the scope of paternal rights and responsibilities. Fragmenting Fatherhood provides the first sustained engagement with the way that fatherhood has been understood, constructed and regulated within English law. Drawing on a range of disparate legal provisions and material from diverse disciplines, it sketches the major contours of the figure of the father as drawn in law and social policy, tracing shifts in legal and broader understandings of what it means to be a 'father'and what rights and obligations should accrue to that status. In thematically linked chapters cutting across substantive areas of law, the book locates fatherhood as a key site of contestation within broader political debates regarding the family and gender equality. Multiple visions of fatherhood, evolving unevenly over time across diverse areas of law, emerge from this analysis. Fatherhood is revealed as an essentially fragmented status and one which is intertwined in complex ways with the legal, cultural and political contexts in which discourses of parenthood are produced. Fragmenting Fatherhood provides an important and unique resource, speaking to debates about fatherhood across a range of fields including law and legal theory, sociology, gender studies, social policy, marriage and the family, women's studies and gender studies.

The legal status, responsibilities and rights of men who are fathers - married or unmarried, cohabiting or separated, biological or social in nature - is a topic with a long and well-documented history. Yet recent developments in a number of countries suggest a growing politicisation of the relationship between law and fatherhood. In some countries, an increasingly vocal, visible and well-organised fathers' rights movement has been credited with influencing perceptions of the politics of family justice. Fathers, it is argued, have become the new victims of family law justice systems that have swung 'too far' in favour of mothers. Armed with such claims, fathers' rights activists have set out to achieve a range of legal reforms, most notably in the areas of child support law and contact and residence rights following separation. This book presents an attempt to understand these developments. Bringing together leading international commentators it provides a careful, critical and comparative analysis of the work of fathers' rights activists, the role law has played in their campaigning, their legal strategies, their success (or otherwise) in achieving legal reform, similarities and divergences with the women's movement, and the relationship between fathers' rights movements and the societies that frame them. In addition to Collier and Sheldon, contributors include: Susan B Boyd (University of British Columbia, Canada), Jocelyn Crowley (Rutgers University, USA), Maria Eriksson (Goteborg University, Sweden), Keith Pringle (Aalborg University, Denmark), Helen Rhoades (Melbourne University, Australia), and Carol Smart (Manchester University, UK).