HOW CAN A STATE CONTROL SWALLOWING?
Medical Abortion and the Law
About the project
Medical abortion (where a pregnancy is ended using pills) provides a readily available, very safe, highly effective means of procuring a termination, with little need for technical assistance from third parties unless complications arise. Medical abortion now accounts for over half of all terminations reported in British clinics. Further, there are clear indications that the pills are in use in Ireland and Northern Ireland outside of formal health care services.
This project considers the challenges that medical abortion poses for law. It asks what impact medical abortion might have on how we understand abortion (for example: does its operation, in pill form early in pregnancy, blur perceived boundaries between abortion and contraception?). It will also assess the extent to which it challenges the ethical underpinning of those legal models that have liberalised access to abortion under very strict medical control (such as the British Abortion Act). Such laws are often said to have been introduced with the twin aims of taking control of a morally controversial procedure, and ensuring that women are not dying in illegal, backstreet procedures. Yet if the public health argument drops away (if there is no clinical requirement for strict medical control), then an uneasy compromise regarding the need for medical supervision of abortion is disrupted.
Perhaps most fundamentally, medical abortion poses serious challenges for the enforcement of any prohibition of abortion, raising serious issues for detection, proof and prosecution. 'How', asks one commentator, 'can a state control swallowing'? But if the state cannot stop women from ordering pills on line in order to terminate pregnancies, then what responsibility does a state have to offer protection against any risks to their health?
The research is funded by an AHRC Research Fellowship 'How Can a State Control Swallowing?': Medical Abortion and the Law (AH/L006537/1).
image ©Emma Campbell (2015) Passport Butterfly 2
Ulster University/Alliance for Choice
University of Kent - © University of Kent
The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 764000
Last Updated: 25/11/2015