The Health Law, Ethics & Policy Seminar Series
presents
Joanna Erdman
Yale University
Access to Information on Safe Abortion: A Harm Reduction and Human Rights Approach
THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED
For other upcoming seminars, see the schedule online or contact m.casco@utoronto.ca.
ABSTRACT
With convergence-divergence as an organizing theme, the paper discussed in this seminar explores harm reduction and human rights as conceptual approaches to and discourses about unsafe abortion. The vehicle for this exploration is access to safer-use information on medication abortion, namely women’s self-administration of the drug misoprostol. More specifically, the article focuses on the Sanitary Initiative Against Unsafe Abortion (“the Uruguay Model”) as an actualized model or prototype of access to information through physician-patient consultation in restrictive legal environments. On convergence, the article seeks to test the claim that international human rights law imposes government obligations to provide, and to refrain from interfering with the communication of, information necessary to reduce the harms of unsafe abortion. Access to information is protected in international law through a constellation of human rights. These rights are articulated in broad terms, but given content and meaning through interpretation by courts, committees, Special Rapporteurs, and commissions. By reference to this jurisprudence, normative validation for harm reduction in unsafe abortion, and specifically access to safer-use information, is constructed from the human rights to life, health, and non-discrimination, among others. On divergence, the article seeks to make explicit the different moral warrants underlying harm reduction and human rights. Human rights are set against the normative neutrality of harm reduction, which is characterized by a pragmatic approach to health outcomes. The human rights shortcomings of access to safer-use information through physician-patient consultation, the Uruguay Model, are contrasted against a model driven by a feminist ideology, namely the Safe Abortion Hotline. The limitations of the pragmatic-neutrality of harm reduction in criminal law reform are set against a human rights approach, which envisions legal reform in service of broad social change.
Publication: Erdman, Joanna, Access to Information on Safe Abortion: A Harm Reduction and Human Rights Approach (2011). Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Vol. 34, pp. 413-462, 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1884387
BIOGRAPHY
Joanna Erdman, BA (Toronto) 2001, JD (Toronto) 2004, LLM (Harvard) 2006, is a 2011-2012 fellow with the Information Society Project’s Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School. Joanna recently completed a five-year appointment as Co-Director of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme and founding Director of the Health Equity and Law Clinic at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, Canada. Joanna has and continues to serve on advisory committees at the World Health Organization and Open Society Foundations. Joanna’s primary scholarship concerns sexual and reproductive health law in a transnational context. Her most recent article is Access to Information on Safe Abortion: A Harm Reduction and Human Rights Approach published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender (2011). Joanna’s research agenda for the coming year focuses on law and social health movements.
The Health Law Ethics and Policy Workshop series brings local, national, international scholars and policy makers as guest speakers to the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto to stimulate discussion of issues related to the intersection of law with health care and related ethical and social issues. The series is organized by the Faculty’s Health Law group and is sponsored by the CIHR Training Program in Health Law, Ethics and Policy. The training program addresses the global shortage of experts in the multidisciplinary field of health law, ethics and policy by providing key learning opportunities and competitive scholarships to outstanding Canadian and international graduate students. For more information about the seminar series and/or the training program, please visit our website at: www.healthlawtraining.ca.
