The regulatory cliff edge between contraception and abortion: the legal and moral significance of implantation

In regulating the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, English law has accorded particular significance to two biological events. First, ‘viability’, the moment when a fetus is said to acquire the capacity for independent life, plays an important role in grounding restrictions on access to legal abortion later in pregnancy. Second, equally significantly but far less frequently discussed, ‘implantation’ marks the point in pregnancy from which abortion laws apply. This paper focuses on this earlier biological event. It suggests that an unquestioning reliance on implantation as marking an appropriate moment of transition between two radically different legal frameworks is deeply problematic and is rendered still less sustainable in the light of the development of new technologies that potentially operate shortly after the moment of implantation

Religion and healthcare in the European Union : policy issues and trends

92 p. ; 24 cm.Libro ElectrónicoThe impact of religious doctrine on the law, policy and practice of healthcare is becoming increasingly significant for a whole range of issues – from euthanasia to fertility treatment; from belief-based exemption from performing abortion for doctors to the medication and dietary needs of religious patients; from organ donation to contraception; from circumcision to suicide. The relationship between religion and healthcare has a long history of evoking tension and debate in Europe. While developments in medical technologies and techniques question the religious beliefs of policy-makers, practitioners and patients across the European Union, research into the legal and policy responses by EU member states on such issues remains underdeveloped. The challenge of health policy, which is common across the European Union, is to balance fundamental human rights such as the right to equality, the right to health and the right to freedom of religion while adhering to secular principles. This report aims to map out the major issues at stake and to initiate a broader discussion on how the religious needs of the community, religious doctrine and religious practices across the European Union affect public health policy.Preface: The ‘Religion and Democracy in Europe’ initiative 7 About the authors 8 Introduction 9 Background 9 Purpose and conceptual framework 10 Terms, scope, methodology and structure 13 Summary of recommended main policy questions for further development 16 1 The legal and policy context in the European Union 17 1.1 European Union law 17 1.2 National law and policy 18 2 The influence of religion on national healthcare policy development 21 2.1 Conflict of duty in health‑service provision 22 2.1.1 Does national healthcare policy permit belief‑based exemption? 23 2.1.2 Scope and limits of belief‑based exemption in healthcare 23 2.1.3 Safeguards 27 2.2 Euthanasia 27 2.2.1 Active euthanasia 29 2.2.2 Passive euthanasia 30 2.2.3 Conflict of duty and safeguards related to euthanasia 32 2.3 Belief‑based patient decisions 34 2.3.1 Organ transplant and donation 34 2.3.2 Refusal of medical treatment 36 2.4 Emerging policy trends and outstanding policy questions 413 Healthcare policy and religious diversity 43 3.1 Healthcare policy and accommodating religious needs in hospitals 45 3.1.1 Religious assistance and faith space 45 3.1.2 Medication and dietary needs 47 3.1.3 The sex of the health practitioner and hospital clothing 48 3.1.4 After‑death issues: post‑mortem and burial 49 3.2 Healthcare policy and accommodating religion outside hospitals 50 3.2.1 Training of healthcare professionals 50 3.2.2 Substance abuse 52 3.3 Emerging policy trends and outstanding policy questions 53 4 Religion and sexual and reproductive healthcare 56 4.1 Contraception, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases 56 4.1.1 The influence of religion on contraception policy 57 4.1.2 The influence of religion on HIV/AIDS education and prevention policies 58 4.1.3 The4.1.3 The influence of religion on other STD policy 60 4.2 Abortion and sterilization 61 4.2.1 Some religious positions on abortion 61 4.2.2 National policy positions 62 4.2.3 Safeguards when abortion is denied 63 4.2.4 Sterilization 65 4.3 Fertility treatment and reproductive techniques 65 4.4 Circumcision 68 4.5 Female genital mutilation 70 4.6 Emerging policy trends and outstanding policy questions 71 5 Religion and mental healthcare 73 5.1 The European policy context and the influence of religious institutions 74 5.2 The influence of religion on mental illness 77 5.2.1 Diagnosis of mental illness 77 5.2.2 Treatment of mental illness 78 5.3 Emerging policy trends and outstanding policy questions 82 Conclusion 84 Appendix A Roundtable participants 86 Appendix B Belief‑based exemption from healthcare provision 87 Appendix C National policy on euthanasia in some EU states 88 Appendix D National policy on abortion in some EU states 8

Sedition, January 10, 1972

Volume 1, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sedition/1007/thumbnail.jp

Defending biomedical authority and regulating the womb as social space. Prenatal testing in the Polish press

The issue of abortion has been the topic of heated and frequent debate in post-Communist Poland. Parliamentary debate in 1998—9 centred around a legislative attempt to restrict prenatal testing, specifically amniocentesis, in order to further reduce the numbers of abortions carried out, as it was argued to inevitably result in the termination of pregnancy. Medical professionals are rarely visible as subjects of and authorities on the abortion debate in the Polish context. However, in this debate around prenatal testing, the medical community appear as key commentators and meaning-makers. This article asks the following questions: What role do the medical profession and biomedical knowledge play in the debate around prenatal testing, when abortion is highly politicized? Second, what social meanings and consequences are attributed to prenatal testing? How do these construct the relationship between foetus, pregnant woman and doctor, and what agency and 'rights' are attributed to women in the process of prenatal testing

The Right’s Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protective Anti-Abortion Argument

The Lecture offers a provisional first account of the rise and spread of WPAA. It traces the development of gender-based antiabortion advocacy, examining the rise of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) claims in the Reagan years and the first struggles in the antiabortion movement about whether the right to life is properly justified on the ground of women’s welfare. My story then follows changes in the abortion-harms-women claim, as it is transformed from PAS—a therapeutic and mobilizing discourse initially employed to dissuade women from having abortions and to recruit women to the antiabortion cause—into WPAA, a political discourse forged in the heat of movement conflict that seeks to persuade audiences outside the movement’s ranks in political campaigns and constitutional law. I tell a story in which social movement mobilization, coalition, and conflict each play a role in the evolution and spread of this constitutional argument, in the process forging new and distinctly modern ways to talk about the right to life and the role morality of motherhood in the therapeutic, public health, and political rights idiom of late twentieth-century America

The Polish Parliament and the making of politics through abortion : nation, gender and democracy in the 1996 Liberalization Amendment Debate

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive rights in Poland, as evidenced by continuing debate around the legal status of abortion, are in this postcommunist context intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood, identity and citizenship. Focusing on the connections between discourses of Polish nationhood, gender and democracy, this article offers a detailed and critical engagement with debate in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the Polish parliament) during the second reading of the 1996 liberalization of abortion amendment. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the article argues that abortion is a symbolic issue through which anxieties about postcommunist reform are raised, nationalist pasts and futures are imagined and through which political projects are articulated