Law Commons^™

The Doctor Requirement: Griswold, Privacy, And At-Home Reproductive Care, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

Supreme Court privacy jurisprudence has traditionally offered greater protection to activities when exercised within the home. This is true in common law as well as across a broad range of constitutional claims. For example, common law privacy identifies the home as a location of solitude and repose, often conceptualized as the “right to be let alone.” Speech, or the right to be free of unwanted messages, is enhanced when the claimant is within the confines of her or his home. Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure and the notion of the reasonable expectation of privacy are enhanced when the …

A Patient's Right Not To Hear: The Public Health Case For Challenging Pre-Abortion Ultrasound Description Mandates By Refocusing On The Listener, Juliana Shulman-Laniel

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

This Article argues for a reframing of the discourse surrounding abortion-specific informed consent laws, calling for scholars and practitioners to focus not solely on the physician’s right against compelled speech, but also a patient’s right not to listen. Although this right has not been firmly recognized by the courts, a growing body of case law and scholarly papers has begun to acknowledge the potential for this right. This Article begins by examining how bridging the First Amendment rights of doctors-as-speakers and patients-as-listeners within the context of the unique doctor-patient relationship may help to establish a patient’s right not to hear. …

My Body, Not My Say: How Roe V. Wade Endangers Women's Autonomy, Kisha K. Patel

Politics Honors Papers

When defining women’s rights to reproductive decisions in Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun fails to ensure protection for women by defining this right in the privacy doctrine. Justice Blackmun’s opinion allows the government to interpret and apply the doctrine to deny women access and availability to reproductive health. This can be shown by the subsequent Supreme Court decisions on privacy that allow the government to overrule the right of the individual woman. This allows for the government to effectively deny women the right to abortion and ultimately prevents women from making independent autonomous decisions. The laws and regulations against …

Potential Life In The Doctrine, Leah Litman

Articles

In their article, Abortion: A Woman’s Private Choice, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michele Goodwin seek to shore up the doctrinal basis for a woman’s constitutional right to end her pregnancy. While Chemerinsky and Goodwin are partly concerned about the status of abortion rights in the United States because of President Donald Trump’s promise prior to taking office to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade, they also maintain that some of the threat to abortion rights arises from an uncomfortable tension in the doctrine that recognizes states’ interest in potential life. I agree with Chemerinsky and …

Colb And Dorf On Abortion And Animal Rights, Mylan Engel Jr.

Between the Species

In their recent book, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf defend the following ethical theses: (1) sentience is sufficient for possessing the right not to be harmed and the right not to be killed; (2) killing sentient animals for food is almost always seriously wrong; (3) aborting pre-sentient fetuses raises no moral concerns at all; and (4) aborting sentient fetuses is wrong absent a reason weighty enough to justify killing the fetus. They also discuss strategies and tactics for activists: They oppose the use of graphic images by activists on tactical grounds, and they categorically oppose the use of violence by …

Unduly Burdening Women’S Health: How Lower Courts Are Undermining Whole Woman’S Health V. Hellerstedt, Leah M. Litman

Michigan Law Review Online

At the end of the Supreme Court’s 2016 Term, the Court issued its decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. One of the more closely watched cases of that Term, Hellerstedt asked whether the Supreme Court would adhere to its prior decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed that women have a constitutionally protected right to decide to end a pregnancy.

The state of Texas had not formally requested that the Court revisit Casey or the earlier decision Casey had affirmed, Roe v. Wade, in Hellerstedt. But that was what Texas was, in effect, asking …

Privatizing Bars On Abortion: Eviscerating Constitutional Rights Through Tort Remedies, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

State governments have devised a new means to evade the Constitution. Their new means is to enact tort statutes that, in effect, ban constitutionally protected conduct. In particular, some states have made the provision of an abortion a tort for which there can be no defense and no cap on the amount of liability. These states have made performing an abortion essentially illegal. Yet, because tort statutes are enforced through private litigation, rather than public prosecution, a number of courts have held that they lack jurisdiction to review these laws. Federal courts have concluded that standing doctrine and state sovereign …

Teenage Pregnancy, Parenting, And Abortion: Legal Limits On Adolescents' Reproductive Rights, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This chapter argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law's apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …

Side Effects Of The Abortion Wars, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Over the last several decades, as part of the movement against abortion rights, abortion has become increasingly stigmatized and isolated in women's health. The current segregation of abortion from the rest of women's 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's health. While it remains important to understand abortion access as necessary to sustaining women's right to equal citizenship, the public's …

The Abortion Closet (With A Note On Rules And Standards), David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

An enormous amount of information and insight is packed into Carol Sanger's About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First Century America. The book is anchored in post-1973 American case law. Yet it repeatedly incorporates examples and ideas from popular culture, prior historical periods, moral philosophy, feminist theory, medicine, literature and the visual arts, and more.

Grasping Fatherhood In Abortion And Adoption.Pdf, Malinda L. Seymore

Malinda L. Seymore