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 […]
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.” […]
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 […]
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 […]