Judicial Waivers of Parental Consent for Abortion: Tennessee's Troubles Putting Policy into Practice*

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, minors seeking abortions are entitled to petition for relief from state‐mandated parental consent. To facilitate the actualization of this right, Tennessee included procedural mechanisms that go beyond those in effect in most states in its parental consent statute. This paper examines whether these additional mechanisms allow Tennessee to succeed where other states have failed. Our findings indicate that these mechanisms mitigate to some extent the sort of implementation failure observed in other states. However, the magnitude of this mitigation is not sufficient to establish that parental consent statutes can be implemented in accordance with Supreme Court requirements.     

Excluded from Health? Informal Workers’ Access to Health Care in Chile

The Pan American Health Organisation recently highlighted the increased exclusion of low income households in Latin America from health care. The rise in informal employment and sub‐contracting of workers means that many employees lack formal contracts and are excluded from health insurance programmes. Feminist research suggests low income women are often most at risk of exclusion. Simultaneously, deeply entrenched inequalities within health systems across the region have not been addressed by health sector reforms. Drawing on the case of Chile, this paper examines the extent to which informal workers have indeed been excluded and how far these processes are gendered.     

The politics of social service provision through NGOs: A study of Latin America

Abstract — This article looks at the role of NGOs in social service delivery in Latin America and questions some of the assumptions which are often made about their abilities. Following the implementation of the neo-liberal model, increased conditionality has been placed on economic assistance. This has created a new role for NGOs, whereby they are harnessed by states in order to secure effective implementation of reform packages. In the process many NGOs and their own agendas become distorted. The paper discusses the political implications of this new role for NGOs and goes on to conclude that, given the nature of the democratisation process in Latin America, and the accompanying economic model, expectations regarding NGO potential for grassroots empowerment have been over-optimistic.     

THE EFFECT OF ETHNICITY ON CRIME ATTRIBUTION

This study investigates the impact of ethnic origin on the attribution of criminal offenses to faces seen in portrait photographs. The underlying hypothesis is that ethnic stereotypes are a result of the way people perceive themselves and other groups (that is, the relation of in-groups to outgroups) and that ethnic stereotypes directly affect a person's readiness to attribute particular offenses to given portraits. Thus, this study explores cross-ethnic and intra-ethnic offense attribution.