Categories
Abortion

The Rape Exception

“On Abortion and Defining a ‘Person’” by Notre Dame Professor Gary Gutting is a provocative discussion of the implications of the recent defeat of Mississippi’s personhood amendment “for the logic of the abortion debate.”  Although most of the essay focuses on what the measure’s defeat reveals about people’s attitude toward the personhood of a fertilized […]

Categories
Abortion Clinic regulation Politics

Abortion Clinic Regulation

As the present battles in Kansas and Virginia show, controversies over abortion clinic regulation seem certain to continue.  According to A. Barton Hinkle [Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 4, 2011], conventional labels like “conservative” and “liberal” are not predictive of where one stands on this issue.  “[M]any so-called conservatives believe in limited government everywhere except the uterus.” […]

Categories
Fetal pain Late-term abortion

forthcoming article of interest

Two pro-choice advocates are publishing an article of interest in The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics: Glenn Cohen and Sadath Sayeed, Fetal Pain, Abortion, Viability and the Constitution (forthcoming April/May 2011). One significant point is that the authors implicitly corroborate the irrelevance of viability to the personhood of an infant born alive in an […]

Categories
Abortion Constitutionality Health exception Mental health

Roe’s life-or-health exception

A recently published article by Professor Stephen Gilles does an excellent job of revealing the Supreme Court’s failure to articulate a clear meaning for Roe v. Wade’s life-or-health exception: Roe’s Life-Or-Health Exception: Self-Defense or Relative-Safety?, 85 Notre Dame Law Review 525 (Feb. 2010). As many of you know, Roe allows states to prohibit abortions of […]