Like the federal government, states can apply their laws to people beyond their borders. Statutes can reach out-of-state conduct, such as fraud, that has effects within the state, and in some ...circumstances, states can prosecute their own citizens for out-of-state conduct. Many applications of extraterritorial jurisdiction are well established and uncontroversial; state common law and the Model Penal Code provide for such authority. The practice draws little attention when states' criminal laws are broadly similar and treat the same activities as crimes. In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, however, state laws now sharply conflict over conduct related to abortion services. In addition to prohibiting in-state activities that facilitate access to abortions, some state legislatures and local prosecutors seek to extend criminal liability to persons acting in states in which their conduct is legal. Louisiana, for example, made it a crime for anyone outside of Louisiana to ship "abortion inducing drugs" to a Louisiana resident. This article analyzes the principles of state extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction and the longstanding state laws that authorize criminal jurisdiction over actors in other states. It then turns to the existing and proposed state criminal laws that target abortion services beyond a state's own borders. In some cases, such laws are well grounded; for others, the validity of extraterritorial application is unclear. But even for statutes with valid extraterritorial reach, barriers to enforcement remain. In many circumstances, cross-border enforcement depends on state cooperation, especially in extraditing defendants and obtaining out-of-state evidence and witness testimony. Federal law requires states to fulfill other states' extradition requests only for "fugitives," which creates a gap between the law of extradition and of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Those who violate one state's criminal law while in another state are not fugitives, which means pro-choice states can refuse to extradite their residents for other states' abortion-related prosecutions. A few states have already changed their laws to permit this kind of resistance-another sign of diminished comity between states. Finally, the article briefly surveys constitutional doctrines that might constrain extraterritorial prosecutions. Few of those doctrines provide clear limits, suggesting that, if the post-Dobbs world leads to extraterritorial prosecutions, the constitutional parameters for that practice will be one of the new battlegrounds.
The New York State legislature has passed the Reproductive Health Act to protect a woman’s right to abortion if the increasingly conservative Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, which legalized ...abortion in 1973. ...with two conservative justices appointed to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, the chance of Roe v Wade being overturned has increased. Some states have laws to ban abortion or to limit it more strictly, which would go into force if Roe v Wade were struck down.1 The new act New York State’s new Reproductive Health Act moves laws relating to abortion from the criminal law code to the public health code; it permits some licensed or certified health providers other than physicians to perform abortions, such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and midwives; and it permits abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy if the woman’s health is at risk or if the fetus is not viable.
Ectogenesis (artificial wombs) might soon become a reality. This paper will analyse how the development of such technologies will affect Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defence of abortion, and what the ...potential consequences of this will be for society. Thomson attempts to justify abortion by appealing to the mother’s right to bodily autonomy. We will argue that once these technologies have been developed, the right to abortion can no longer be justified by such appeals. As a result, when justifying abortion, Thomson-style arguments will no longer work, and a very different strategy will have to be adopted by those wishing to justify its permissibility. Anticipating a consequent weaker position of the pro-choice view, we briefly consider some of the practical implications of ectogenesis for society: effects on parental dynamics, governmental expenditure, research, and gender equality.
This article examines the overturning of the landmark US Supreme Court decision of 'Roe v Wade', the precedent which conferred federal constitutional protection on the right to abortion. It looks at ...the US anti-abortion movement which worked for decades to overturn 'Roe v Wade' and the degree to which Australian law is vulnerable to its influence.
The American pro-life movement’s “mother-child strategy,” which emphasizes the alignment of fetal and maternal interests, complicates conceptions of backlash. Pro-life activists claim that it is now ...feminists who are engaging in backlash against the movement for “fetal human rights.” Although this claim does reflect the troublingly defensive position in which advocates of reproductive freedom currently find themselves, I contend that neither pro-life nor pro-choice activism can be adequately captured by the notion of backlash. I also argue that pro-life discourse has evolved from a backlash into a neopatriarchal campaign for a future that superficially reconfigures but ultimately deepens reproductive oppression. Because the pro-life movement has a complicated relationship with neoliberal feminism, I conclude that feminists should respond by developing new discourses about pregnant bodies and visions of a feminist future that offer an alternative to neoliberalism.
Ireland's near-total abortion ban was, in effect, a policy of offshoring abortions. Before the May 2018 vote to repeal it, the 8th Amendment allowed for conservative and nationalist groups to ...celebrate the idea of Ireland as an 'abortion-free' territory, while forcing women to travel to England for abortion or self-manage abortions with illegal pills at home. Artists in the Irish pro-choice movement have contested the public silence around abortion and abortion-travel; in doing so they have disrupted the political narrative of 'abortion-free Ireland' by symbolically re-placing Irish abortion seekers in public spaces. These place-based artistic interventions have larger significance for the changing relationship between women, reproduction, and the state. Drawing on ongoing debates in critical and feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the relationship between geopolitics, art, and political agency to theorize the role of pro-choice Irish artworks in challenging the enforced silence that surrounded abortion travel. It builds on geographical engagement with Jacques Rancière to address the feminist geopolitics critique of geopolitical scales and sites of 'serious' geopolitics. The article examines three artworks that depict Irish women's experiences of abortion-related travel to England as part of the larger political campaign for liberalization of Ireland's abortion laws.
Despite societal changes in Western countries, abortion continues to be morally stigmatized. While research on abortion stigma targeted both at people who seek or voluntarily terminate their ...pregnancy and abortion providers has been conducted, stigma directed at those who advocate abortion rights has remained under-researched. The purpose of this study was to deepen understandings of abortion stigma in relation to Italian cisgender female pro-choice activists. Accordingly, a qualitative study was conducted to examine how participants experienced, perceived, and internalized stigma, as well as the strategies they employed to manage it. The sample included 34 Italian cisgender female pro-choice activists who were actively engaged in movements at the time of the study, including organizations or unions that publicly defend the right to abort. The findings revealed that participants perceive they are targets of negative stereotyping and behaviors. Nevertheless, they do not internalize the stigma and use different strategies to manage it, such as speaking openly about their activism.
In National Institute of 'Family Life Advocates v. Becerra', the Supreme Court said that a preliminary injunction should have been issued against a California law that required that reproductive ...healthcare facilities post notices containing truthful factual information. All that was required by the law was posting a notice that the state of California makes available free and low-cost contraception and abortion for women who economically qualify. Also, unlicensed facilities were required to post a notice that they are not licensed by the state to provide healthcare.
In concluding that the California law is unconstitutional, the Court's decision has enormously important implications. It puts all laws requiring disclosures in jeopardy because all, like the California law, prescribe the required content of speech. All disclosure laws now will need to meet strict scrutiny and thus are constitutionally vulnerable. Moreover, the ruling is inconsistent with prior Supreme Court decisions that allowed the government to require speech of physicians intended to discourage abortions. The Court ignored legal precedent, failed to weigh the interests at stake in its decision, and applied a more demanding standard based on content of speech.
But 'NIFLA v. Becerra' is only secondarily about speech. It is impossible to understand the Court's decision in 'NIFLA v. Becerra' except as a reflection of the conservative Justices' hostility to abortion rights and their indifference to the rights and interests of women, especially poor women. In this way, it is likely a harbinger of what is to come from a Court with a majority that is very hostile to abortion.
Using a multidisciplinary framework, this article examines the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) policy decision to prohibit teens in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. As we ...argue, this appropriation of decisional authority over their reproductive bodies discursively cast them as doubly subversive for first breaching the southern border of the United States and then insisting upon the right to ‘abortion on demand’. Mapping these twinned agendas onto their bodies, these teens were configured as a threat to the racialised national order during the Trump era. Centring our analysis on the much publicised constitutional challenge to ORR’s abortion ban in
Garza v. Hargan
, we interrogate this policy as a powerful expression of legal duplicity, the spatial and bodily containment of those deemed other, and the privileging of the citizen-foetus over their undocumented mothers.
PDF
