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Abortion Rights And Federalism: Some Lessons From The Nineteenth Century United States, Kate Masur
Abortion Rights And Federalism: Some Lessons From The Nineteenth Century United States, Kate Masur
ConLawNOW
The Dobbs decision, which gives states complete control over abortion laws, has unleashed conflicts that resemble the battles that arose when enslaved people fled slave states for free states, and enslavers, in turn, mobilized state and federal power to get them back. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has prompted frequent allusions to slavery and the antebellum United States. The history of those struggles reminds us of the corrosive impact of interstate conflict and of the importance of federal protections for freedom and individual rights. The history of the United States in the nineteenth century …
Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie R. Abrams
Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie R. Abrams
ConLawNOW
This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence” to garner insights to inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America. While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies. In so doing, they …
Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: An Embryo Is Not A Person: Rejecting Prenatal Personhood For A More Complex View Of Prenatal Life, Cynthia Soohoo
Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: An Embryo Is Not A Person: Rejecting Prenatal Personhood For A More Complex View Of Prenatal Life, Cynthia Soohoo
ConLawNOW
This essay considers current claims for prenatal personhood after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It first explains how the Dobbs decision unnecessarily adopts a binary view of prenatal life, suggesting that the only option for courts and legislatures is to recognize prenatal personhood or deny protection for prenatal life. This ignores popular understandings that certain laws can and should protect prenatal life, especially where criminal or tortious actions are concerned, but not grant full legal personhood. The Dobbs decision also refused to draw meaningful lines about the value of prenatal life in …