The panel explores the challenges faced by public institutions in dealing with abortion regulation. David Kenny will address the ongoing debate on the repeal of the 8th Amendment of the Irish constitution; Antonia Baraggia will compare the current abortion regulation in US and Europe under a constitutional point of view, arguing that federalism may be...
Abortion and Federalism in Mexico: Assessing a Decade of Constitutional Litigation
An element that singularizes the Mexican constitutional debate on abortion in the Latin American scenario is no doubt federalism, since the Supreme Court decided in 2008 that abortion was to be adjudicated under this frame, and not under a fundamental rights frame. While this approach has been criticized for its minimalism, and for generating a...
Abortion regulation in the USA and in Europe: reversed trends?
The paper deals with the issue of abortion law in a comparative perspective. Despite the scientific progress, the regulation of abortion represents an insidious field, which involves extra legal issues, such as the status recognized to the unborn, the freedom of choice of the woman and the right to life of the unborn. Moreover, since...
Repeal or Replace? Debating Ireland‘s Eighth Amendment and the Shadow of Judicial Intervention
Ireland is in the process of proposing removal of the 8th Amendment – the provisions, inserted in the 1980s, recognising the right to life of the unborn as equal to that of the mother. The process – which should result in a referendum in June of 2018 – has involved a Citizen‘s Assembly debating such...
Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roe: Reverend Ammi Rogers and the Pre-history of Roe v. Wade
This paper addresses the 1818 criminal case of a Connecticut minister named Ammi Rogers who was accused of impregnating Asenath Smith, a young woman to whom he was not married, and then giving her an abortion-inducing substance. Procedural and substantive difficulties in prosecuting Rogers were said to be the impetus behind an 1821 Connecticut statute...