The regulatory cliff edge between contraception and abortion: the legal and moral significance of implantation

In regulating the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, English law has accorded particular significance to two biological events. First, ‘viability’, the moment when a fetus is said to acquire the capacity for independent life, plays an important role in grounding restrictions on access to legal abortion later in pregnancy. Second, equally significantly but far less frequently discussed, ‘implantation’ marks the point in pregnancy from which abortion laws apply. This paper focuses on this earlier biological event. It suggests that an unquestioning reliance on implantation as marking an appropriate moment of transition between two radically different legal frameworks is deeply problematic and is rendered still less sustainable in the light of the development of new technologies that potentially operate shortly after the moment of implantation.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Journal of Medical Ethics

• Publication date

  2015-06-17

• Fields of study

  Law, Philosophy, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1136/medethics-2015-102712PMID 26085334PMCID 4552905
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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