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

Compelling Interests and Contraception

On the eve of Griswold v. Connecticut’s fiftieth anniversary, employers are bringing challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to federal laws requiring them to include contraception in the health insurance benefits that they offer their employees. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, five Justices asserted that the government has compelling interests in ensuring employees access to contraception, but did not discuss those interests in any detail. In what follows, we clarify those interests by connecting discussion in the Hobby Lobby opinions and the federal government’s briefs to related cases on compelling interests and individual rights in the areas of race and sex equality. The government’s compelling interests, we argue, are best understood from within two horizons: they encompass not only core concerns of the community in promoting public health and facilitating women’s integration in the workplace, but also crucial concerns of the employees who are the intended beneficiaries of federal law’s contraceptive coverage requirement—interests that sound in bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and equal citizenship. Further, as we show, a full accounting of the government’s compelling interests attends both to their material and expressive dimensions. This more comprehensive account of the government’s compelling interests in providing employees access to contraception matters both in political debate and in RFRA litigation as courts determine whether the government has pursued its interests by the least restrictive means. The more comprehensive account offered here is less susceptible to compromise and tradeoffs than is an account focused only on material interests in public health and contraceptive cost

Contraception as a Sex Equality Right

Challenges to federal law requiring insurance coverage of contraception are occurring on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. It is a good time to reflect on the values served by protecting women’s access to contraception. In 1965, the Court ruled in Griswold that a law criminalizing the use of contraception violated the privacy of the marriage relationship. Griswold offered women the most significant constitutional protection since the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, constitutional protection as important as the cases prohibiting sex discrimination that the Court would decide in the next decade—perhaps even more so. Griswold is conventionally understood to have secured liberty for women. But the right to contraception also secures equality for women, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw clearly in the 1970s and as the Court eventually would explain in Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Pregnancy and Sex Role Stereotyping: From Struck to Carhart

The guarantee of equal protection of the laws extends to women as well as men. Yet for the first 100 years of the Fourteenth Amendment’s life, the Supreme Court never found a law unconstitutional on the grounds that it discriminated on the basis of sex. Between 1970 and 1980, social movement advocacy and brilliant litigation by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others changed our constitutional law. Over the course of the decade, the Court extended the anti-stereotyping principle from discrimination on the basis of race to discrimination on the basis of sex. But fidelity to the principle had its limits. In short, the Court’s 1970s cases hold that the antistereotyping principle constrains laws that classify by sex, but do not find the principle violated where government regulates pregnancy. Our Essay unsettles this familiar story by making three points. First, we show that in the 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the women’s movement argued that the antistereotyping principle applied to pregnancy; the movement viewed the regulation of pregnant women as a paradigmatic site of sex-role stereotyping. Second, we show that even though the Court initially had difficulty seeing that sex role stereotypes were sometimes implicated in cases concerning the regulation of pregnancy, the Court’s constitutional decisions have increasingly come to recognize the relationship between pregnancy discrimination and sex discrimination. Third, we suggest that the Court and other constitutional interpreters should revisit Geduldig and read the decision’s holding more precisely—and narrowly—as recognizing that, while there are legitimate reasons for regulating pregnancy, such regulation can be animated by invidious or traditionally stereotypical judgments. This understanding has implications for both equal protection and reproductive rights cases

Kombucha microbiome as a probiotic: a view from the perspective of post-genomics and synthetic ecology

Probiotics are essential for establishing and maintaining optimal immune health. The probiotic therapy is known from alternative medicine for ages; however, the recent demonstration of the normal microflora to induce innate immunity has introduced the science-based concept of therapeutic application of potentially beneficial probiotic microorganisms for a treatment of functional disorders. Traditionally, probiotics are associated with dairy products, however, novel formulations are needed, first of all, originated from naturally occurring symbiotic microbial communities as the most robust assemblages. Especially, safe and robust probiotics are needed for long-term expeditions, outposts, extraterrestrial permanently-manned bases, where humans are exposed to adverse environmental factors. Kombucha beverage is Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) and associated with health-promoting effects. Kombucha tea/mat is being in use in human livings within millennia as a probiotic drink for healing and health prophylaxis effects, however, new research opportunities promise its «renaissance», going to be used pharmacologically

FTIR spectroscopic and theoretical study of matrix-isolated (E)-1-(cyclopropyldiazenyl)naphthalen-2-ol

Photochromic systems are important due to their industrial applications in variable optical transmission materials and optobioelectronic devices. For such applications, the organic photochromic compounds involved are usually incorporated in polymers, liquid crystalline materials, or other convenient host matrices [1, 2]. Herein, a photochromic compound, (E)-1-(cyclopropyldiazenyl)naphthalen-2-ol (show in Figure 1), which was synthesized by a published method [3] and characterized, was isolated in a cryogenic argon matrix and its structure as well as UV-induced phototransformations were characterized by IR spectroscopy. The structures of the starting compound and of the generated photoproducts were identified by comparison of their experimental IR spectra with the spectra theoretically calculated at the DFT (B3LYP)/6-311++G(d,p) level for several possible tautomeric and rotameric forms.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Revealing selection in cancer using the predicted functional impact of cancer mutations. Application to nomination of cancer drivers

Every malignant tumor has a unique spectrum of genomic alterations including numerous protein mutations. There are also hundreds of personal germline variants to be taken into account. The combinatorial diversity of potential cancer-driving events limits the applicability of statistical methods to determine tumor-specific "driver" alterations among an overwhelming majority of "passengers". An alternative approach to determining driver mutations is to assess the functional impact of mutations in a given tumor and predict drivers based on a numerical value of the mutation impact in a particular context of genomic alterations. Recently, we introduced a functional impact score, which assesses the mutation impact by the value of entropic disordering of the evolutionary conservation patterns in proteins. The functional impact score separates disease-associated variants from benign polymorphisms with an accuracy of ~80%. Can the score be used to identify functionally important non-recurrent cancer-driver mutations? Assuming that cancer-drivers are positively selected in tumor evolution, we investigated how the functional impact score correlates with key features of natural selection in cancer, such as the non-uniformity of distribution of mutations, the frequency of affected tumor suppressors and oncogenes, the frequency of concurrent alterations in regions of heterozygous deletions and copy gain; as a control, we used presumably non-selected silent mutations. Using mutations of six cancers studied in TCGA projects, we found that predicted high-scoring functional mutations as well as truncating mutations tend to be evolutionarily selected as compared to low-scoring and silent mutations. This result justifies prediction of mutations-drivers using a shorter list of predicted high-scoring functional mutations, rather than the "long tail" of all mutations