As anti-choice adherents have transitioned from a scattered movement in the early twentieth century to an organized political interest group in recent decades (Mohr 1978), American abortion politics has moved to medical rather than political ground. Accordingly, advocates of safe, legal abortion have become mired in interpretative debates over abortion's medical necessity rather than its political value. To be sure, this turn was not the product of a strategic plan hatched by pro-choice feminists, but was foisted upon them by judicial and legislative developments that created political contexts to which they were forced to react. Nonetheless, these medical necessity debates have obscured—and sometimes eclipsed—more forceful political arguments, replacing self-authorizing political claims—such as political and human rights, choice, reproductive freedom, and bodily autonomy—with arguments for abortion's medical necessity.

Conjuring up images of nineteenth-century London à la Charles Dickens, the Wall Street Journal recently featured an article entitled “Welcome to Debtors' Prison, 2011 Edition.” The Journal was not using the term debtors' prison as a figure of speech but, rather, was documenting a recent spike in the use of arrest warrants by debt collectors to prosecute borrowers who cannot or will not repay small amounts of money. Indeed, over the past several years, and particularly following the most recent economic crisis from which the United States and the global economy have still not fully recovered, debt-buying firms have increasingly relied upon the state's legal system as a means of compelling individuals behind on their credit card payments, auto loans, and other bills to meet their obligations. In the past year alone, judges have signed off on more than 5,000 arrest warrants, incarcerating Americans for debts as small as $250.

Countries with Muslim-majority populations often are viewed as places where women are particularly oppressed. To a degree, this perception reflects reality. Fish (2002) demonstrates that, relative to Catholic countries, Muslim countries are associated with larger male–female literacy gaps, higher male–female population sex ratios (which can reflect poorer treatment of females), and lower scores on the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP's) Gender Empowerment Measure, which focuses on political participation, economic influence, and income. Looking at the developing world, Cherif (2010) finds that Muslim countries are associated with inheritance and nationality laws that are discriminatory toward women. Some suggest that Islam itself is responsible for limitations on women's economic, political, and social freedoms. Whether referring to the substance of Islamic (shari'a) law, which treats men and women differently, or to the ways in which politicians defer to conservative interpretations of shari'a law in order to build and/or consolidate their legitimacy, or to contemporary regimes' need to appease (or at least not inflame) important Islamist constituencies who favor a subordinate role for women, many accounts of gender inequality in Muslim countries assert that “prevailing interpretations of Islamic law . . . and the attitudes it informs” are a key culprit (Cherif 2010, 1145).

One question at the heart of the analysis of gender and politics is whether women and men act and speak in different ways to significant political effect. In terms of political representation, this issue is particularly important. Arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament, for example, are not about an abstract numerical parity, but rest on a claim about the distinctive voice and experience that women bring to political debate and decisions. For some, the difference turns on the view that women bring a more empathetic and less adversarial style to politics. A number of feminist scholars have suggested that the quality of deliberation is correlated with the presence of women in a group—for Mansbridge (1996, 123), for example, the process of persuasion is related to a consultative and participatory style that seems to characterize women more than men. For others, arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament turn on a difference of values. Such views were particularly widespread in the 1980s, when psychological and social theories of gender differences claimed to have found evidence of parallel but different moral reasoning in women and men (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993). Gilligan (1982, 57), among others, advanced in her seminal work, In a Different Voice, that female politicians are more likely to espouse an “ethic of care” concerned with responsibility and interpersonal relationships, while men are, by contrast, prone to embrace an “ethic of justice.”

In the countries of the former Eastern bloc (and the USSR), abortion politics followed a different historical path than in Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, abortion was made legal relatively early on, almost as soon as the social and political turmoil that followed World War II and the communist coup in 1948 had settled. Unlike in Western Europe, however, it was not legalized in response to pressure from civil society or the feminist movement. It was a bureaucratic decision made in relation to specific macrosocial and political circumstances. The Czechoslovak Act on Artificial Termination of Pregnancy in 1957 made abortion legal on certain conditions. Special commissions were established and endowed with the authority to decide whether to grant women permission for abortion on demand. The decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was thus not placed directly in the hands of women.