Law Commons^™

The Polarization Of Reproductive And Parental Decision-Making, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making. Women’s abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive …

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 …

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 …

Book Review J. Shoshanna Ehrilich, Regulating Desire: From The Virtuous Maiden To The Purity Princess, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this effective and engaging book, J. Shoshanna Ehrlich uncovers the hidden agendas underlying the long history of the law's 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's sexuality, from the 1838 effort to criminalize seduction to the modem-day movement promoting abstinence-only sex education. Although the …

Minors, Parents, And Minor Parents, 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 Article 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 …

Griswold, Geduldig, And Hobby Lobby: The Sex Gap Continues, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In her article, The (Non)-Right to Sex, Professor Mary Ziegler excavates the fascinating legal history of the “sex gap” — the historical failure to address sexual liberty — in the constitutional canon and offers an important cautionary tale for contemporary advocacy of marriage equality. By surfacing lost efforts to expand sexual liberty, and by linking that liberty to intersectional concerns about class, gender, and racial equality, Professor Ziegler both explains why sexual freedom has received such limited constitutional protection and shows how incrementalist litigation strategies aimed at progressive legal change have inadvertently strengthened the state’s power to delimit sexual expression. …

The Consequences Of Abortion Restrictions For Women's Healthcare, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay challenges the false assumption that abortion care can be segregated from women’s medical care and targeted for special restrictions without any effects on women’s health more broadly. As a matter of medical reality, abortion cannot be isolated from the continuum of women’s healthcare. Yet policymakers and the public have failed to understand the interconnectedness of abortion with other aspects of women’s medical care. In fact, existing abortion restrictions harm women’s health even for women not actively seeking abortion care, but these impacts remain obscured. For example, antiabortion laws and policies have spillover effects on miscarriage management, prenatal care, …

Distorted And Diminished Tort Claims For Women, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Childbirth is distinctly characterized in tort law by the literal emergence of a potential putative plaintiff. This Article seeks to position the birthing woman — distinct from the pregnant woman or the parent — squarely within the negligence framework and, in doing so, to challenge prevailing assumptions dominating obstetric medical decision-making. The existence of two patients and two putative plaintiffs is unique to childbirth, yet largely unexamined in tort. This Article examines how the dominant focus on fetal harms in modern childbirth overshadows the birthing woman in tort and distorts the normative dualities of childbirth.

While theoretically childbirth falls within …

Offspring And Bodies: Dependency And Vulnerability In The Constitutional Jurisprudence Of Reproductive Rights, Ann Shalleck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this article, the author responds to Sherry Colb’s argument in "To Whom Do We Refer When We Speak of Obligations to “Future Generations”? Reproductive Rights and the Intergenerational Community," (77 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1582 (2009)). Colb offered a new way to consider reproductive rights by delineating two distinct and not always overlapping interests at stake in giving meaning to and shaping the contours of the rights implicated in reproductive decisions. Through differentiating interests in bodily integrity and offspring selection, Colb disentangled underlying justifications for legal advocacy and judicial decisions and offered an interpretive frame through which to consider …

Expanding The Feminist Imagination: An Analysis Of Reproductive Right, Edith L. Pacillo

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Human Rights Law And Reproductive Self-Determination Conference On The Interventional Protection Of Reproductive Rights, Rebecca J. Cook

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Comments Conference On The Interventional Protection Of Reproductive Rights: Civil & Political Rights And The Right To Nondiscrimination , Rachael N. Pine

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Draft Optional Protocol To The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women Conference On The Interventional Protection Of Reproductive Rights , Women In The Law Project, International Human Rights Law Group,And The Maastricht Centre For Human Rights Law

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remarks Conference On The Interventional Protection Of Reproductive Rights: Civil & Political Rights And The Right To Nondiscrimination , Anne Tierney Goldstein

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.