Article Text
Abstract
In regulating the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, English law has accorded particular significance to two biological events. First, ‘viability’, the moment when a fetus is said to acquire the capacity for independent life, plays an important role in grounding restrictions on access to legal abortion later in pregnancy. Second, equally significantly but far less frequently discussed, ‘implantation’ marks the point in pregnancy from which abortion laws apply. This paper focuses on this earlier biological event. It suggests that an unquestioning reliance on implantation as marking an appropriate moment of transition between two radically different legal frameworks is deeply problematic and is rendered still less sustainable in the light of the development of new technologies that potentially operate shortly after the moment of implantation.
- Abortion
- Bills, Laws and Cases
- Law
- Legal Aspects
- Reproductive Medicine
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Other content recommended for you
- The fox and the grapes: an Anglo-Irish perspective on conscientious objection to the supply of emergency hormonal contraception without prescription
- Is contragestion the future?
- The policing of abortion services in England
- Initiating intramuscular depot medroxyprogesterone acetate 24–48 hours after mifepristone administration does not affect success of early medical abortion
- Young women’s fertility knowledge: partial knowledge and implications for contraceptive risk-taking
- Abortion pills: under whose control?
- Embracing post-fertilisation methods of family planning: a call to action
- In this issue
- Oklahoma governor signs strictest ban on abortion in the US
- Towards responsible ejaculations: the moral imperative for male contraceptive responsibility