Personhood and the Presidential Debates
UFL Member Michael New has a short post, Abortion and the 14th Amendment, over at NRO. He describes GOP presidential candidates’ responses to the question of whether they would support legislation, under Section Five of the 14th Amendment that would restore legal protection for unborn children. Professor New notes that only Mitt Romney failed to […]
Political Change and Abortion
SSRN has a new article The Civic Underpinnings of Legal Change: Gay Rights, Abortion, and Gun Control. Written by Professor Palma Joy Strand (Creighton), her thesis is that legal change occurs when individuals seeking change share their stories of how the failure to change harms them. These stories facilitate the crafting of a group identity, […]
Law blog post on fetal personhood
Today seems to be the day to consider the legal status of the unborn – first the Nebraska law suit and now this post over on Prawfsblawg, Why Does it Matter if a Fetus is a Person? I think Professor Horwitz’s analysis is rather simplistic in his claims that fetal personhood decides the question of […]
Returning the question of abortion to the people
Ed Whelan has posted a short article, Defend our Laws: Justice Matters as part of the ten-part series on Liberty, Justice and the Common Good at Public Discourse. He presents a strong prolife agenda for the next president. Whelan writes: “They should educate the public that Roe imposes a radical regime of unrestricted abortion, for […]
United States of America v. Richard Retta
Yesterday’s Lifesite News carried an opinion piece by Brad Mattes criticizing the increase in federal prosecutions for violations of the Free Access to Clinic Entrance Act (FACE) by the current Department of Justice. He used the case of Richard Retta as an example of the harassing nature of the new complaints by DOJ. You can […]
Why abortion is still the most important political issue
UFL member, O. Carter Snead (Notre Dame), has a terrific new article on the Public Discourse blog, Protect the Weak and Vulnerable: The Primacy of the Life Issue. In the article, he first establishes that the debates over abortion and embryo destructive research are really about membership in the human family and the reach of […]
Important series on major issues for 2012 election
Today Public Discourse introduced a ten-part series examining the ten key issues that should shape voters’ decisions in the 2012 election. Ryan T. Anderson explains the structure of the series in “Liberty, Justice, and the Common Good:Political Principles for 2012 and Beyond.” I suspect almost all of the essays will interest UFL members. Here is […]
Are women legislators more liberal on abortion?
The Culture Wars Meet State Politics: Gender, Representation and Abortion Policy provides an interesting analysis of the fact that the number of women in a state legislature increases the likelihood that a state will have more liberal abortion policies. The authors find a difference in the manner in which women candidates are recruited in the […]
How the Court Made Political Compromise Impossible
Randy Beck has just posted a new piece entitled Fueling Controversy on SSRN. He responds to a recent Yale Law Journal article by Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions about Backlash, in which they question the received wisdom that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade generated […]
Contraception, health, and desire
Andrew Haines makes basically the same point apropos of Tollefson’s essay as I did the other day. And here’s just one more way of putting it that occurred to me this morning. I think it’s safe to say that we have a natural desire for health (and even a natural inclination to health – I […]