Beyond Control: Medical Power and Abortion Law: Medical Power, Women and Abortion Law (Law and Social Theory) [Hardcover]

This book is well written and states a strong argument, but one which is misguided and draws selectively on so-called "pro-choice" sources while failing to address the powerful aspects of the legal and ethical arguments for the protection of the unborn child, the difference between abortion being justified or excused exceptionally where it is necessary from its being available routinely as a matter of choice, and the difference between contraception (or choosing not to bear a child pre-conception) and the voluntarily chosen killing of already conceived and borne, pre-natal, human life. Its arguments on Liberty and Equality, so far as discernible, fail to address with sufficient detail or robustness the obligation of a legitimate rule of law in an authentic legal system to universally protect human life, and therefore collapse to the illiberal. The law on abortion that is purportedly critiqued is not properly understood by the author, especially the criminal laws affording protection to the unborn child in principle, although the book has certain good points in its historical referencing. The author struggles, however, to adhere to any legitimate over-riding legal principle(s) or coherent ethical position in her "legal" or "ethical" arguments, that tend to suggest that even the extraordinarily lax, second part of the UK's abortion laws (that allow abortion purportedly for exceptional "medical" reasons, but in fact do so without any real substantive limit or genuine medical indications for most of pregnancy) - which is open to very substantial criticism in the opposite direction - is too strict! It could hardly be less strict, and the notion of removing either the criminal laws protecting existing pre-natal human life, which give the rule of law its claim to legitimacy, or even the illegitimately lax regulatory requirements of the permissively neo-liberal Abortion Act 1967 as amended, would require an equivalence between contraception and abortion in law and ethics which the author does nothing to establish, and appears to be suggestive of the author's tendancy to an unreflective acceptance of so-called "pro-choice" mantra without appreciation of key legal duties in the protection of existing human life or the violence that is involved in the permissive, deliberate killing of already existing human life. In correctly identifying that the destruction of the unborn child is overwhelmingly not a medical matter, the author incongruously opts for the alternative of removing existing legal regulation, as well as any effective legal protection for early pre-natal human life that has already been removed in reality, rather than ensuring that the violence involved is addressed and the unborn child afforded the protection that it is authentically due by law and ethically. That would be contrary to the requirements of the rule of law, illegitimate and inhuman.

This book gives a wonderful overview of the development of the law on abortion in Britain. The inclusion of feminist perspectives is of great interest yet does not take over from the main body of the book, which is concerned with the move away from the political issue that abortion posed to the medicalization of the issue. The discussion of the 1967 act and the reform in 1990 is thorough and the ideas for further reform are provoking.