Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Courtney Cahill on Abortion and Disgust
Courtney M. Cahill
(Florida State University – College of Law) has posted Abortion and
Disgust on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article uses disgust
theory — defined as the insights on disgust by psychologists and social
scientists — to critique disgust’s role in abortion lawmaking. Its point of
departure is a series of developments that independently highlight and call
into question the relationship between abortion and disgust. First, the Supreme
Court introduced disgust as a valid basis for abortion regulation in its 2007
case Gonzales v. Carhart. Second, psychologists have recently discovered a
strong enough association between individual disgust sensitivity and abortion
opposition to suggest that disgust might drive that opposition. They have also
discovered that “abortion disgust” appears to be unrelated to the harm concerns
— e.g., harm to the fetus — on which oppositional abortion rhetoric and
restrictive abortion laws often explicitly rest. Third, legislatures around the
country have passed hundreds of restrictive abortion laws in 2010 and 2011. If
the moral psychologists are right, then disgust underwrites most, if not all,
of those laws.
Taking these developments seriously, this Article synthesizes the key insights
of psychology, social science, and sex equality scholarship to make two
arguments, one descriptive and the other constitutional. First, abortion
disgust is not a reaction to harm/death but rather to perceived gender role
violation by women. Second, this genealogy of abortion disgust constitutes the
best reason why we ought to reject disgust as a basis for abortion regulation,
allied as that emotion is to unconstitutional sex stereotyping — or what the
Court has called unconstitutional “role typing.” This Article concludes by
suggesting that “rejecting disgust” in abortion lawmaking might mean subjecting
all abortion laws to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause,
given disgust’s likely role in animating all abortion regulation.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2012/10/courtney-cahill-on-abortion-and-disgust-theory.html