Abortion and legal policy

This paper reviews four legal policies in abortion from a critical theory of law perspective. Since the Comstock era, abortion policy has undergone radical shifts from criminalization in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to decriminalization in the late 1960s, followed by legalization and medical control over the last decade. Yet, until recently, little scholarly attention has been given to the social and political implications of these various policy shifts (almost all studies focus on the current legal phase only) often in isolation from other social and political realities. In this paper we draw on historical, demographic, participant-observation, interview, and documentary and legal materials to analyze the transformations of legal control structures in abortion. This shows both the creation of abortion law, which is imbedded in structures of sexual domination, and the contradictions in abortion law, which express antagonisms in civil society as well as promote alliances within ruling groups. The abortion case further clarifies the failure of legality to transcend existing gender inequalities, thereby contributing to further erosion of welfare rights for poor women and their children.