|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
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).
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|