Psychiatrists and termination of pregnancy: clinical, legal and ethical aspects.

Objective: To provide practical guidance for psychiatrists asked to conduct an assessment of a woman requesting a termination of pregnancy.

Method: The law relevant to termination of pregnancy in each of the Australian states and territories and in New Zealand was synthesised and reviewed, as was the available literature around the key roles for the psychiatrist in these settings.

Results: Little is known about the rates of and reasons for terminations in Australasia.

The meaning of "serious disability" in the legal regulation of prenatal and neonatal decision-making.

The concept of "serious disability" appears to play a significant role in circumscribing treatment-limiting decisions in neonatal care, prenatal counselling, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and abortion following prenatal diagnosis. However, there is no legal definition for this concept and its meaning varies among members of the community and the medical profession. Legal and policy responses to "serious disability" consist of an assortment of ethical guidelines, specific legislative frameworks and longstanding provisions of the criminal law, some of which were neither enacted nor developed with modern medical practices and dilemmas in mind.

Life and death before birth: 4D ultrasound and the shifting frontiers of the abortion debate.

The development of 4D ultrasound technology has democratised fetal imagery by offering direct visual access to realistic images of the fetus in utero. These images, which purport to show a responsive being capable of complex behaviour, have renewed debate about the personhood of the fetus and the adequacy of current abortion regulation. This article considers recent abortion law reform initiatives in the United Kingdom and the United States and observes two shifts in the frontiers of these debates.

Sex and the sacred: sterilization and bodily integrity in English and Canadian law.

Through an examination of cases of non-consensual sterilization for learning disabled persons in Canada and England, this article considers the role that law plays in framing the thoughts, beliefs, and norms that fashion the ways we think about bodies, sex, gender, and sexuality. The author asks how it is that Canadian and English law, while both claiming to protect bodily integrity, have reached opposing conclusions about whether non-therapeutic sterilization can be in a person's best interests. She hypothesizes that the answer could lie in the manner in which courts have constructed the bodies of learning disabled men and women in the sphere of sexuality and reproduction.