Abortion, decriminalisation and the medico-legal paradigm

Bibliographic Data

ID4596645
AuthorsErica Millar (0000-0002-1219-2922, La Trobe University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume355
Pages117098
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science & Medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0277-9536 • E-ISSN: 1873-5347
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117098
PMID39018995
OpenAlexW4400388123
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited18

The medico-legal paradigm enmeshes legal with medical power, making abortion lawfully available only under the supervision of medical professionals. This article examines the recent parliamentary debates over abortion decriminalisation in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, to argue that the decriminalisation of abortion in Australia represents a continuance with, rather than a break from, the medico-legal paradigm. The medical power embedded in laws that criminalised abortion in the nineteenth century, and liberalised abortion in the twentieth century, was not the same as that imagined by parliamentarians debating decriminalising abortion in the twenty-first century. Norms constituting abortion seekers and their doctors have shifted significantly. Nevertheless, the medico-legal paradigm continues to govern how lawful abortion is imagined. The medico-legal paradigm converts abortion seekers' desires for abortion into a need for healthcare and imagines the autonomy and agency of abortion seekers as enabled only through their subjection to medical power. This conversion, I suggest, dampens the potential abortion holds to open up and challenge norms of gender, sexuality and reproduction

Abortion · Agency (philosophy · Autonomy · Political science · Pregnancy · Social science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Reproductive Health and Contraception

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