Book Review J. Shoshanna Ehrilich, Regulating Desire: From the Virtuous Maiden to the Purity Princess

In this effective and engaging book, J. Shoshanna Ehrlich uncovers the hidden agendas underlying the long history of the law\u27s regulation of female adolescent sexuality. Ehrlich persuasively demonstrates that a multitude of laws purporting to protect public health in one form or another in fact encode the value of female virtue into law based upon a set of assumptions about their sexuality (3). The book spans a wide time period, moving chronologically through a series of legal reform movements targeting young women\u27s sexuality, from the 1838 effort to criminalize seduction to the modem-day movement promoting abstinence-only sex education. Although the book does not discuss some of the most heated issues surrounding young women\u27s sexuality todaysuch as rape and abortion-Ehrlich\u27s careful historical. storytelling illuminates how gendered sexual purity norms drive much of the law regulating adolescent sexuality

Rights, Remedies and Facial Challenges

In a few short years, the Roberts Court has managed to severely restrict the use of facial challenges across substantive areas of constitutional law. Caitlin Borgmann\u27s article, Holding Legislatures Constitutionally Accountable Through Facial Challenges, provides a compelling analysis of the vexing distinction between as applied and facial challenges in constitutional litigation and the impact that limiting facial challenges has on constitutional rights. Borgmann argues that facial challenges are necessary to keep legislatures in check, particularly when legislatures deliberately or recklessly infringe individual rights of those who lack political power. Facial challenges are needed in this context not only to protect important individual rights, but also to ensure that legislatures do not unfairly shift their constitutional responsibilities to the courts. Legislatures have in the past skirted their constitutional duties by passing blatantly unconstitutional laws in order to pander to public sentiment, leav[ing] the courts to do their dirty work of conforming the legislation to the Constitution

Interjurisdictional Abortion Wars in the Post-Roe Era

The Supreme Court appears poised to overrule fifty years of precedent holding that pre-viability prohibitions on abortion are unconstitutional. In a leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women Health Organization, Justice Alito proclaims that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey must be overruled and abortion left to the states to regulate. During oral argument in Dobbs, Justice Kavanaugh suggested that overturning Roe would return the Court to a postion of neutrality on abortion. Justice Kavanaugh\u27s assertion falls in line with claims by anti-abortion jurists that reversing Roe would simplify abortion law by returning the issue to the states and getting the federal courts out of the hot-button issue of abortion

Hein and Goldilocks Principle

Two weeks into his presidency, George W. Bush issued an executive order establishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) to encourage religious groups to provide federally funded social services. In particular, the OFBCI and its corresponding centers in various executive agencies sought to help religious organizations obtain federal grant monies by providing technical assistance to help them navigate the often byzantine bureaucracy surrounding federal grant-making. The OFBCI achieved its goal of increasing federal grants to religious organizations, in part by funding workshops and conferences designed to aid religious groups pursuing federal financing. Concerned that the Bush Administration was using taxpayer dollars to support religious activity, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), a Wisconsin organization that works to defend the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, filed suit in federal court seeking to enjoin the activities of the OFBCI as violative of the Establishment Clause. FFRF asserted that it had taxpayer standing to challenge the OFBCI program

Side Effects of the Abortion Wars

Over the last several decades, as part of the movement against abortion rights, abortion has become increasingly stigmatized and isolated in women\u27s health. The current segregation of abortion from the rest of women\u27s medical needs brings us full circle back to questions raised by Roe v. Wade. Although Roe was rightly criticized as over-medicalizing the abortion decision and empowering doctors rather than women, we have now shifted to the opposite extreme of severing abortion completely from the realm of women\u27s health. While it remains important to understand abortion access as necessary to sustaining women\u27s right to equal citizenship, the public\u27s perception of abortion as a medical issue has receded to the point that we have lost sight of abortion care as health care-and this shift in framing has contributed to the loss of access to care. One way we can recover the notion of abortion as health care is to focus on the side effects of anti-abortion laws on women\u27s health care. This essay challenges the false assumption that abortion care can be segregated from women\u27s medical care and targeted for special restrictions without any ripple effects on women\u27s health more broadly. As a matter of medical reality, abortion cannot be isolated from women\u27s health care more broadly. In fact, existing abortion restrictions harm women\u27s health even for women not actively seeking abortion care, but these effects remain obscured. This essay unmasks the ripple effects of abortion restrictions that, perhaps unintentionally, impede the provision of basic health care other than abortion. Focusing the public\u27s attention on the broader effects of abortion restrictions on women\u27s health could help make visible the links between abortion and health care. Uncovering these links could also create stronger support for access to abortion and thereby better promote full health care access for women. Repositioning the law to recognize access to abortion care as integral to women\u27s medical needs remains critical for protecting women\u27s health

Commentary on Geduldig v. Aiello

This chapter of FEMINIST JUDGMENTS: REWRITTEN OPINIONS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT (Linda Berger, Bridget Crawford & Kathryn Stanchi, eds. 2016) provides commentary on Lucinda Finley’s rewritten majority opinion in Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974). This commentary chapter complements the rewritten opinion, providing background material, analysis of the feminist judgment, and reflections on the implications of the feminist judgment for what the law of sex equality could have been. In Geduldig, the United States Supreme Court infamously held that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Geduldig decision upheld a California state disability insurance program that denied benefits for pregnancy-related disability, while granting benefits for virtually every other disabling event ranging from prostatectomies to cosmetic surgery. Despite sustained criticism, the Geduldig decision has never been explicitly overruled and continues to constrain women’s access to substantive equality and reproductive liberty. Lucinda Finley’s feminist judgment responds to the faulty formalist logic of the original opinion in several important, distinctively feminist ways. Finley’s feminist judgment reaches beyond the formal appearance of justice and seeks substantive fairness for women in the public sphere. The landscape of sex equality law would look dramatically different if the Court had adopted Lucinda Finley’s feminist judgment — a tantalizing possibility since the intellectual foundations for this feminist judgment existed at the time.https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_bk_contributions/1409/thumbnail.jp

The Ripple Effects of \u3cem\u3eDobbs\u3c/em\u3e on Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion

The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy. This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion care could help fend off further restrictions on abortion. Post-Dobbs, abortion policy is largely in the hands of voters, as state legislation and ballot initiatives now dictate the fate of abortion rights. Exposing Dobbs’s ripple effects on forms of health care that are less stigmatized than wanted abortion care could help educate the public on the links between abortion and a wide array of health care issues. Informing the public about the wide-ranging health care consequences of overturning Roe could help reframe abortion bans as government mandates that interfere with the physician–patient relationship and harm women’s health. Reframing abortion as a core health care concern for the public—as opposed to a debate about a constitutional right to privacy—is a potentially powerful strategy for resisting anti-abortion legislation post-Dobbs