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Law and Society

Boston University School of Law

Faculty Scholarship

Series

Abortion

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion, Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Jason Jackson, Benjamin Mason Meier, Cecília Tomori Oct 2023

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion, Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Jason Jackson, Benjamin Mason Meier, Cecília Tomori

Faculty Scholarship

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary …


Picturing Moral Arguments In A Fraught Legal Arena: Fetuses, Photographic Phantoms And Ultrasounds, Jessica Silbey Jan 2015

Picturing Moral Arguments In A Fraught Legal Arena: Fetuses, Photographic Phantoms And Ultrasounds, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates the movement in the U.S. that seeks to regulate the abortion decision by mandating ultrasounds prior to the procedure. The article argues that this reform effort is misguided not only because it is ineffective, but also because ultrasounds provide misleading information and are part of shaming practices that degrade the dignity of women. Both of these problems violate the main tenets of Planned Parenthood of Southern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). Central to the article’s argument and novelty is that the pro-ultrasound movement’s mistake is both legal and cultural. It misunderstands the nature of visual technology by failing …


Abortion Access In An Era Of Constitutional Infidelity, Khiara Bridges Jul 2013

Abortion Access In An Era Of Constitutional Infidelity, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

Abner Greene’s Against Obligation and Louis Michael Seidman’s On Constitutional Disobedience offer provocative, subversive, and frequently convincing arguments against wholesale fidelity to the Constitution. Greene makes the case that individuals, at times, have no duty to obey the Constitution as it has been interpreted and articulates a methodology for how the government should accommodate these legitimate acts of disobedience. Seidman, however, makes the case that we should abandon the “pernicious myth” that we are obligated to obey the Constitution at all. He argues that if the fiction of constitutional obedience was jettisoned altogether, the national discourse about the issues that …


Life In The Balance: Judicial Review Of Abortion Regulations, Khiara Bridges Apr 2013

Life In The Balance: Judicial Review Of Abortion Regulations, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, scholars have been preoccupied with the test that ought to be applied to abortion regulations. Debate has swirled around the question of whether laws that burden the abortion right should be reviewed with strict scrutiny, rational basis review, or some other multi-factor or categorical test and at what point during pregnancy these tests are appropriate. Moreover, since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court replaced Roe’s trimester framework with the undue burden standard, commentators have questioned the propriety of this new test. This Article argues that the most important change …