Private employers and their health insurers have come to occupy a central role in access to reproductive care for the majority of Americans through a complex legal infrastructure that effectuates employers’ choices in their employee benefit plans. While some aspects of state insurance law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and anti-discrimination laws encourage employers to cover reproductive care, this web of laws is very porous and predominantly supports employers’ choices. Sometimes, this validation of employer choices expands access to reproductive care services, as in the case of Walmart extending its benefits to cover abortion-related travel expenses in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. But employers who wish to restrict access to reproductive care also find their preferences validated by law, as illustrated in Hobby Lobby’s successful bid to refuse coverage for certain contraceptive drugs, despite the ACA’s mandate to cover them. The additional deregulation that employers’ “self-insured” plans enjoy under ERISA preemption, combined with the prevalence of these plans, amplifies these effects. In essence, the availability of funding for reproductive care for the majority of Americans of reproductive age is left to the promises enshrined in employers’ health benefit plans and the incentives that these entities pursue in designing their plans. This chapter untangles the legal web that gives private sector employers this gatekeeper role, and explores the implications of our reliance on employers for individuals’ reproductive freedom.

The modern papacy emerged from the clash with the values of Enlightenment and the pope’s loss of temporal power. In a way, popes established themselves as a renovated source of moral authority on bioethics. This chapter aims to trace the history of papal pronouncements on contraception and abortion. It examines the historical roots of Christian sexual ethics from antiquity. It focuses on the early modern origin of the questions concerning the beginning of life and on the modern idea of immediate ensoulment. It shows how modern medical knowledge and eugenics contributed to a new view of reproduction as separate from sexuality, which called into question the traditional sense of marriage and gender roles. In this context, in which anti-modernism certainly played a role, popes condemned birth control, abortion, and women’s emancipation, revealing a huge hiatus between the experience of laity and the inflexible authority of the Catholic Church.

The papacy played a central role in the development of Roman Catholic teaching about bioethics. Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930) condemned contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Papal teaching was broadly accepted by Catholics before the 1960s. Widespread dissent in the Church greatly increased after the publication of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968). The first successful IVF procedure in 1978 raised new bioethical issues relating to the status of human embryos outside the womb.

The Catholic hierarchy was more successful in lobbying politicians to enact restrictive laws, or obstruct liberal reforms, than in persuading the laity to accept its teaching on birth control and assisted human reproduction. A rift emerged between mainstream Catholic culture and the institutional Church. The Church is now circumscribed in meeting the challenges presented by complex ethical issues, such as surrogacy and assisted dying, because of the papacy’s inflexible stance on these matters.

Chapter 6 employs Welby’s Meaning Triad to investigate whether the boundary for the beginning of girlhood should be clearly identified in the international legal framework. It studies the definitions of child under international law and in the English language to assess whether they establish a beginning point for girlhood. It conducts two case studies concerning, respectively, the practice of prenatal sex selection and the right of young and adolescent girls to a safe abortion, to illustrate the significance for girl children of the current boundary for the beginning of girlhood under international law. It studies the sense, meaning and significance of provisions in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and refers to their respective travaux préparatoires.

This chapter examines how religious transformations in Latin America over the past few decades have influenced the rise of the right. Analyzing a five-wave panel study from the “Democracy on the Ballot” project, the authors show that Bolsonaro won much of his support from evangelicals and Pentecostals during the final month of the campaign. While they find little support for the notion that attending church or discussing politics there influenced vote choice, church leaders’ endorsements of Bolsonaro did in fact matter. Other relevant factors included attitudes on the importance of religion in one’s own life, one’s approval of church engagement in elections, anti-LGBT attitudes, and authoritarian parenting values.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.