Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Abortion, Informed Consent, And Regulatory Spillover, Katherine A. Shaw, Alex Stein

Indiana Law Journal

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right.

This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other …

The Health Exception, Monica E. Eppinger

All Faculty Scholarship

The abortion doctrine laid out in Roe v. Wade permits a procedure necessary to preserve the life or the health of the pregnant woman, setting out what has come to be called the “life exception” and the “health exception.” This Article investigates the background and antecedents of the health exception, identifying three periods of formation and change up to the drafting of the Model Penal Code in 1959. It argues that theories of health lie at the heart of legal doctrine, shaping common-law treatment of abortion and persisting in nineteenth- and twentieth-century statutes. This account reveals origins of a health …