Women's Health and the Limits of Law: Domestic and International Perspectives

Description

Despite some significant advances in the creation and protection of rights affecting women’s health, these do not always translate into actual health benefits for women. This collection asks: 'What is an effective law and what influences law’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness? What dynamics, elements, and conditions come together to limit law’s capacity to achieve instrumental goals for women’s health and the advancement of women’s health rights?' The book presents an integrated, co-referential and sustained critical discussion of the normative and constitutive reasons for law’s limited effectiveness in the field of women’s health. It offers comprehensive and cohesive explanatory accounts of law’s limits and for the first time in the field, introduces a distinction between formal and substantive effectiveness of laws. Its approach is trans-systemic, multi-jurisdictional and comparative, with a focus on six countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and international human rights case law based on matters arising from Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The book will be a valuable resource for educators, students, lawyers, rights advocates and policymakers working in women’s health, socio-legal studies, human rights, feminist legal studies, and legal philosophy more broadly. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Table of cases Table of legislation, treaties and instruments List of figures List of table Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: within and beyond the hedge—form, substance and the limits of law on women’s health 2 Law, normative limits and women’s health: towards a jurisprudence of substantive effectiveness 3 Feminism, morality, and human rights: assessing the effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s FGM Act 4 Abortion law in China: disempowering women under the liberal regulatory model 5 Forced sterilizations: addressing limitations of international rights adjudication through an intersectional approach 6 Tilted interpretations: reproductive health law and practice in the Philippines 7 Economics and the limits of law: an international analysis of persistent gaps in women’s reproductive health 8 Indigenous feminist legal theory: a multi-juridical analysis of the limits of law on Indigenous women’s health in relation to HIV in Canada 9 Domestication and reception of international reproductive health law and the limits of law: perspectives from Nigeria and South Africa 10 On the margins of law: examining the limits of legislative initiatives on maternal mortality in South Africa and Nigeria Index