Achieving transparency in implementing abortion laws.

National and international courts and tribunals are increasingly ruling that although states may aim to deter unlawful abortion by criminal penalties, they bear a parallel duty to inform physicians and patients of when abortion is lawful. The fear is that women are unjustly denied safe medical procedures to which they are legally entitled, because without such information physicians are deterred from involvement. With particular attention to the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, and the US Supreme Court, decisions are explained that show the responsibility of states to make rights to legal abortion transparent. Litigants are persuading judges to apply rights to reproductive health and human rights to require states' explanations of when abortion is lawful, and governments are increasingly inspired to publicize regulations or guidelines on when abortion will attract neither police nor prosecutors' scrutiny.

Respecting adolescents' confidentiality and reproductive and sexual choices.

Adolescents, defined as between 10 and 19 years old, present a growing challenge to reproductive health. Adolescent sexual intercourse contributes to worldwide burdens of unplanned pregnancy, abortion, spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and maternal mortality and morbidity. A barrier to contraceptive care and termination of adolescent pregnancy is the belief that in law minors intellectually mature enough to give consent also require consent of, or at least prior information to, their parental guardians. Adolescents may avoid parental disclosure by forgoing desirable reproductive health care. Recent judicial decisions, however, give effect to internationally established human rights to confidentiality, for instance under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which apply without a minimum age. These judgments contribute to modern legal recognition that sufficiently mature adolescents can decide not only to request care for contraception, abortion and STIs, but also whether and when their parents should be informed.

Emergency contraception, abortion and evidence-based law.

Courts and legal tribunals increasingly decline to serve as religious or moral guardians, and require social evidence to support litigants' claims. Recent cases on emergency contraception and abortion are examined to show how judicial interpretations can take account of evidence of the impact that different understandings of the law will have for how ordinary people can plan their lives and reproductive choices. In an emergency contraception case, an interpretation was rejected that would have criminalized choices that millions of decent, law-abiding physicians, pharmacists and women routinely make. In an abortion case, three judges unanimously rejected a government ministry's defence of compliance with the law because the ministry had failed to investigate the needs within its jurisdiction for legal clarity, lawful services, and its responsibility to women returning from having lawful procedures elsewhere. In both cases, litigants prevailed who showed factual evidence that their claims better promoted reproductive health and choice.