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Book Review
Abortion
Belinda Bennett (ed)
ISBN: 0-754622-38-X 2004 584 HB pages Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing
Sharyn Roach Anleu
Department of Sociology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA
The first thing that caught my eye regarding this publication is the format: it presents more as a reader with a hard cover than as an edited collection. By this I mean that the editor has selected 25 previously published journal articles and the publisher has simply put them together in one place. The upside of this is that it is easy to identify the page numbers and publication details of the original article (though this might be a downside for the editor and publisher, as reference to the article can circumvent the present volume). The downside is primarily aesthetic: different font styles and sizes, some articles use footnote referencing, others use endnotes, and some articles are formatted into columns - a real mixture. The large majority of articles was published in the 1990s, the most recent in 2002 and the earliest in 1971.
Overall, the volume provides a useful and informative collection of articles in the broad field of law and ethics, which is not surprising as is it part of the International Library of Medicine, Ethics and Law series under the general editorship of Michael D Freeman. It is an important resource for scholars from primarily health sciences, law and philosophy, especially bioethics, and less so, sociology and politics.
The book is organized into four sections, each with a summarizing Introduction by the editor.
Part I - Personhood, Prenatal Life and Reproductive Rights - comprises 11 articles that deal with the ethics of abortion and the moral and legal significance of the life of a foetus. It traverses debates on the moral significance of the embryo and the role of legal protection, especially the notion of fetal rights. At least four of the articles are written by avowedly feminist scholars who attend to the rights women in the ethical debates about embryos that often absent women. Unfortunately, there is no article in this section that examines the significance of abortion, the embryo and women's rights in the context of in vitro fertilization and other associated conceptive technologies.
Part II - Regulating Abortion: International Perspectives - with six reprints, provides insights into the different legal regimes that regulate abortion. Especially informative is Kerry Petersen's comparative (historical and cross-cultural) analysis of the Australian, English and US laws on abortion. This chapter highlights the effect of the different legal systems and legal cultures, especially the salience of rights discourse in the US, on the form and content of abortion laws. The section also examines access to abortion, public health and women's reproductive rights in the member states of the European Union and in developing nations, including China where the issue of coerced abortion raises special concerns.
Part III - Health Professionals and Abortion - is the shortest section with only three articles. It looks at the availability of abortion services and the interaction between the provision of abortion in medical settings and health professionals' personal views about abortion.
Finally, Part IV - Prenatal Diagnosis and Abortion - consists of five chapters that consider 'therapeutic' abortions and some of the ethical and public health issues surrounding selective abortion and the view that disability precludes a rewarding life. In this medical context, the choices to terminate a pregnancy or not are potentially subject to an array of constraints and social decisions about disability and the quality of life.
I have two concluding comments. Firstly, from the point of view of a sociologist, there is insufficient attention to the politics of abortion and cultural differences in which these politics are played out. While the book is about legal and ethical debates, these usually occur in a socio-political context which includes the mobilisation of social movements and political activism (Ferree 2003). More investigation into the discourse of rights, the ways in which social movement activists frame abortion rights in different societies and into gender politics and inequality would have provided a more sociological dimension to the collection.
Secondly, the book's stated aim is to explore the interactions between 'the legal and ethical debates over abortion'. Given that it is an edited collection, I would have found it extremely useful to reprint some of the landmark legal cases. Many of the articles refer to Roe v Wade (1973). With the newly confirmed US Supreme Court Chief Justice (and another imminent appointment), abortion has again come to the surface as a contentious political issue in that country. Roe v Wade is a fascinating case to read: written in a way that is accessible to the lay reader, it shows very clearly the logic of Supreme Court jurisprudence relating to the contours of the privacy doctrine. The opportunity to compare Roe v Wade with R v Bourne (the first UK case on therapeutic abortion in 1939) and key Australian and other decided cases would have strengthened the legal underpinnings of this volume. On the day I was writing this review, Janet Albrechtsen wrote in The Australian: 'Abortion in the US remains such a contentious issue because it was imposed on the American people by a group of unelected judges' (2005: 14). Whether one agrees or disagrees with this assertion, it points to the importance of appreciating law and politics when considering abortion and staking out ethical positions.
References
Albrechtsen J (2005) Let's not turn our judges into politicians: In contrast to the US fracas, our own boring judiciary is a sign of a healthy democracy. The Australian, 28 September p.14.
Ferree M M (2003) Resonance and radicalism: feminist framing in the abortion debates of the United States and Germany. American Journal of Sociology 109(2): 304-44.
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