Elected prosecutors have pledged not to enforce abortion laws, in response to state-level abortion bans. For their pledges to be meaningful, prosecutors must exercise their discretion in cases of individuals who face legal risk, including people who help others self-manage their abortions. With a harm-reduction approach to improving abortion access, prosecutors should aim to reduce abortion helpers’ involvement with the criminal justice system.

This paper argues that abortion access is an important subject for bioethics scholarship and reflects on the relationship between legal frameworks and access to care. The author uses the example of the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks in terms of access. These are legal frameworks that enable the provision of abortion but subject to restrictions. An abortion-permissive regime—first in Great Britain and then in Northern Ireland—has gone some way to improving access to care over time. However, aspects of the regime (that lead to its description as permissive rather than supportive of abortion) have the potential to endanger abortion access in the future and so legal reform is necessary.

This article examines the relationship between reproductive rights, democracy, and the rule of law in transitional societies. As a case study, it examines the development of abortion law in Poland. The article makes three primary claims. First, it argues that the relationship between reproductive rights and the rule of law in Poland came clearly into view through the abortion judgment K 1/20, handed down by the Constitutional Tribunal in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The judgment and the context in which it was issued and published are interpreted as reflections of deep-lying processes and problems in Polish society. Consequently, second, the article argues that analysis of the history of reproductive rights in recent decades in Poland reveals weak institutionalization of the rule of law. This is manifest in the ways in which different professional groups, especially doctors and lawyers, have addressed questions regarding abortion law. Therefore, third, the article argues that any assessment of the rule of law should take into account how powerful professional actors and organizations interact with the law. The Polish case study shows that reproductive rights should be seen as important parts of a “litmus test,” which we can use to examine the efficacy of democratic transitions and the quality of the democracies in which such transitions result.

In this paper, we set out what it means to offer a ‘biography’ of a law, illustrating the discussion through the example of the Abortion Act (1967), an important statute that has regulated a highly controversial field of practice for five decades. Biography is taken as a useful shorthand for an approach which requires simultaneous attention to continuity and change in the historical study of a law's life. It takes seriously the insight that written norms are rooted in the past, enshrining a certain set of historically contingent values and practices, yet that – as linguistic structures that can impact on the world only through acts of interpretation – they are simultaneously constantly evolving. It acknowledges the complex, ongoing co-constitution of law and the contexts within which it operates, recognising that understanding how law works requires historical, empirical study. Finally, it suggests that consideration of a law can offer a unique window through which to explore these broader contexts.

Voters in many American states have considered important social policies that redefine civil liberties within their state through the initiative and referendum. An important question remaining is, are voters knowledgeable enough to make decisions on these social policies that have far-reaching effects? The common wisdom is that voters rely on information shortcuts in lieu of extensive knowledge about the issues. Unlike candidate elections, however, ballot measures lack some prominent and useful information shortcuts (i.e. party identification). We test the hypothesis that voters use shortcuts to inform their decisions on two ballot measures central to today's policy debates: California's Proposition 4 on parental notification for abortion and Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage. We show that voters do not use cues universally, and, furthermore, factual information has a limited effect on voters’ decisions. In particular, we find that the persuasiveness of an endorsement is conditional on whether an individual trusts the source.