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Full-Text Articles in Law

Abortion Rights Beyond The Medico-Legal Paradigm, Mariana Prandini Assis, Joanna Erdman Jan 2022

Abortion Rights Beyond The Medico-Legal Paradigm, Mariana Prandini Assis, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Abortion rights in international law have historically been framed within a medico-legal paradigm, the belief that regulated systems of legal and medical control guarantee safe abortion. However, a growing worldwide practice of self-managed abortion (SMA) supported by feminist activism challenges key precepts of this paradigm. SMA activism has shown that more than medical service delivery matters to safe abortion and has called into question the legal regulation of abortion beyond criminal prohibitions. This article explores how abortion rights have begun to depart from the medico-legal paradigm and to support the novel norms and practices of SMA activism in a transformation …


In The Name Of Public Health: Misoprostol And The New Criminalization Of Abortion In Brazil, Mariana Prandini Assis, Joanna Erdman Jan 2021

In The Name Of Public Health: Misoprostol And The New Criminalization Of Abortion In Brazil, Mariana Prandini Assis, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article explores the criminal regulation of misoprostol as a controlled drug in Brazil as a new form of abortion criminalization. A qualitative analysis of Brazilian case law shows how the courts use a public health rhetoric of unsafe abortion to criminalize the distribution of misoprostol in the informal sector. Rather than an invention of the local bench, this judicial rhetoric reflects global public health discourse and policy on unsafe abortion and the double life of misoprostol as both an essential medicine and a controlled drug. In contrast to previous studies, the article shows that abortion criminalization is not the …


An Abortion Law Preformed, Joanna Erdman Jan 2021

An Abortion Law Preformed, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article engages the transcribed testimony of Carolyn Egan and Janice Patricia Tripp in R v Morgentaler as a critical moment of lawmaking. There is something revealing, often amusing, and sometimes devastating, when a lawyer asks a non-lawyer, in this case, a social worker: “What is the law?” The article focuses on those moments in their testimony when Egan and Tripp answered questions about the 1969 abortion law that made the law itself, its rules and procedures, the subject of examination, and in doing so, constructed new meanings of the law and social action in relation to it in the …


A Constitutional Future For Abortion Rights In Canada, Joanna Erdman Jan 2017

A Constitutional Future For Abortion Rights In Canada, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In 2015, Abortion Access Now PEI legally challenged the restrictive abortion policy of Prince Edward Island. This article studies their challenge as a unique case in the building of a constitutional future for abortion rights in Canada. The article tracks how AAN PEI drew on classic rule of law arguments of transparency, accountability, and constitutional justice to shape and claim abortion rights as democratic rights, an entitlement to fully and equally participate in and benefit from the health care system as a fundamental social institution of the state.


Moving Forward With A Clear Conscience: A Model Conscientious Objection Policy For Canadian Colleges Of Physicians And Surgeons, Jocelyn Downie, Jacquelyn Shaw, Carolyn Mcleod Jan 2013

Moving Forward With A Clear Conscience: A Model Conscientious Objection Policy For Canadian Colleges Of Physicians And Surgeons, Jocelyn Downie, Jacquelyn Shaw, Carolyn Mcleod

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In 2008, one of us (JD) together with the former Dean of Law at the University of Ottawa (Sanda Rodgers), wrote a guest editorial for the Canadian Medical Association Journal on the topic of access to abortion in Canada. In the editorial, we argued, among other things, that "health care professionals who withhold a diagnosis, fail to provide appropriate referrals, delay access, misdirect women or provide punitive treatment are committing malpractice and risk lawsuits and disciplinary proceedings." In response to a series of letters to the editor written about our editorial, we wrote that, under the CMA Code of Ethics …


Principles And Passions: The Intersection Of Abortion And Gun Rights , Nicholas J. Johnson Jan 1997

Principles And Passions: The Intersection Of Abortion And Gun Rights , Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Nicholas J. Johnson explores the parallels between the right of armed self-defense and the woman's right to abortion. Professor Johnson demonstrates that the theories and principles advanced to support the abortion right intersect substantially with an individual's right to armed self-defense. Professor Johnson uncovers common ground between the gun and abortion rights - two rights that have come to symbolize society's deepest social and cultural divisions - divisions that prompt many to embrace the abortion right while summarily rejecting the gun right. Unreflective disparagement of the gun right, he argues, threatens the vitality of the abortion …