Colonialism, Human Rights, and Abortion in Ireland

This essay explores the role of narratives in the field of the Irish abortion debate. In specific, it explores the different types of narratives that both the pro-choice and pro-life groups manipulate in order to draw support from The Irish populace. The author explains that the pro-choice groups employ political-legal narratives To argue for the right to abortion whereas historical narratives and anti-British sentiments are more commonly found within pro-life narratives. However, the true purpose of the pro-life narratives is to prevent the secularization and liberalization of Ireland's laws, thereby maintaining the patriarchy at the top of the social hierarchy. However, with the 2018 referendum on the constitutional ban on abortion resulting in a liberalization of Ireland's abortion laws, the lack of success on The pro-life end is revealed, and a possible wave of liberalization may follow to permanently shift the social hierarchy.

Latin America abortion debate will expand and divide

Headline LATIN AMERICA: Abortion debate will expand and divide

Abortion and multifetal pregnancy reduction: An ethical comparison

In recent years, multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) has increasingly been a subject of debate in Norway. The intensity of this debate reached a tentative maximum when the Legislation Department delivered their interpretative statement, Section 2 - Interpretation of the Abortion Act, in 2016 in response to a request from the Ministry of Health (2014) that the Legislation Department consider whether the Abortion Act allows for MFPR of healthy fetuses in multiple pregnancies. The Legislation Department concluded that the current abortion legislation [as of 2016] allows for MFPR subject to the constraints that the law otherwise stipulates. The debate has not subsided, and during autumn 2018 it was further intensified in connection with the Norwegian Christian Democratic "crossroads" policy and signals from the Conservatives to consider removing section 2.3c and to forbid MFPR. Many of the arguments in the MFPR debate are seemingly similar to arguments put forward in the general abortion debate, and an analysis to ascertain what distinguishes MFPR from other abortions has yet to be conducted. The aim of this article is, therefore, to examine whether there is a moral distinction between abortion and MFPR of healthy fetuses. We will cover the typical arguments emerging in the debate in Norway and exemplify them with scholarly articles from the literature. We have dubbed the most important arguments against MFPR that we have identified the harm argument, the slippery-slope argument, the intention argument, the grief argument, the long-term psychological effects for the woman argument, and the sorting argument. We conclude that these arguments do not measure up in terms of demonstrating a morally relevant difference between MFPR of healthy fetuses and other abortions. Our conclusion is, therefore — despite what several discussants seem to think — that there is no morally relevant difference between the two. Therefore, on the same conditions as we allow for abortions, we should also allow MFPR. Keywords: abortion, ethics, medical ethics, MFPR, selective MFPR

Feminist Mobilization and the Abortion Debate in Latin America: Lessons from Argentina

When Argentine president Mauricio Macri announced in March 2018 that he supported a “responsible and mature” national debate regarding the decriminalization of abortion, it took many by surprise. In a Catholic country with a center-right government, where public opinion regarding abortion had hardly moved in decades—why would the abortion debate surface in Argentina when it did? Our answer is grounded in the social movements literature, as we argue that the organizational framework necessary for growing the decriminalization movement had already been built by an emergent feminist movement of unprecedented scope and influence: Ni Una Menos. By expanding the movement's social justice frame from gender violence to encompass abortion rights, feminist activists were able to change public opinion and expand the scope of debate, making salient an issue that had long been politically untouchable. We marshal evidence from multiple surveys carried out before, during, and after the abortion debate and in-depth interviews to shed light on the sources of abortion rights movements in unlikely contexts.

Surrogacy in the United States: The Horse Is Out of the Barn

The United States are pioneers and leaders of surrogacy international market. Although, there are groups and NGOs in the civil society which are active on the issue of surrogacy (such as the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign in the abolitionist front, and the Center for Genetics and Society in the reformist one), this issue remains marginal in the public debate and has not reached the status of cause for feminists (as for example abortion, violence against women, sexual harassment, breast cancer, etc.). In the United States, the low engagement of feminists can be explained by looking at the evolution of surrogacy debate since the first clinics established in the 1980s to today’s advanced social acceptance of surrogacy and assisted reproduction, as well as to the centrality of the autonomy principle in American feminism, and radicalisation of the abortion debate. Feminists, who in 2020 still need to fight for access to safe and legal abortion, are very careful not to make a misstep in favour of their opponents by admitting that individual autonomy on the body and reproduction can, at times, be limited as a form of women’s protection and emancipation from commodification.

‘You can’t repeal regret’: targeting men for mobilisation in Ireland’s abortion debate

This study explores how social movement organisations involved in the abortion debate in the Republic of Ireland attempted to appeal to men in their campaign messages before the 2018 referendum on the Eighth Amendment concerning abortion. We scrape social movement organisations’ Twitter accounts to conduct quantitative and qualitative content analyses of images and videos the organisations posted, and find evidence that social movement organisations sometimes extended their frames to men as voters. Social movement organisations evoked themes of hegemonic masculinity in their imagery and messaging, though these themes were not a large portion of overall campaign tweets and there were distinct differences in how this was done by the two organisations we study. Previous research suggests anti-abortion organisations extend their frames to incorporate ‘pro-woman’ messaging. Our research contributes by exploring the ways that frames may be extended by both anti- and pro-abortion actors to target men and mobilise masculinity in public debates over women’s rights.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Social movement organisations may extend frames to target men and mobilise them as voters on women’s rights issues.</li><br /><li>Image analysis of social movement organisations’ online campaigns reveals how they used male identities to mobilise men.</li><br /><li>Hegemonic masculinity was evoked, though typically in ways that were consistent with social movement organisations’ general campaign strategies.</li></ul>

Why Ectogestation Is Unlikely to Transform the Abortion Debate: a Discussion of ‘Ectogestation and the Problem of Abortion’

In this commentary, I will consider the implications of the argument made by Christopher Stratman (2020) in ‘Ectogestation and the Problem of Abortion’. Clearly, the possibility of ectogestation will have some effect on the ethical debate on abortion. However, I have become increasingly sceptical that the possibility of ectogestation will transform the problem of abortion. Here, I outline some of my reasons to justify this scepticism. First, I argue that virtually everything we already know about unintended pregnancies, abortion and adoption does not prima facie support the assumption that a large shift to ectogestation would occur. Moreover, if ectogestation does not lead to significant restrictions to abortion, then there will be no radical transformation of the practice of abortion. Second, abortion is already associated with stigma, and so the presence of ectogestation would need to create additional stigma to modify behaviour. Finally, I argue that ectogestation shifts the debate away from the foetus to the human subject of the artificial womb—the gestateling, therefore creating a new category of killing—gestaticide. However, this would only reorient the debate rather than end it.