Bibliographic record
Abstract
In R. (on the application of Axon) v. Secretary of State for Health & Another, the English High Court affirmed that young women are entitled to seek and receive sexual health care, including abortion care, without parental notification. This chapter examines the Court’s use of comparative constitutional authorities in its reasoning, focusing on the rejection of American authorities. Contrast and rejection, it is argued, can be an exercise in self-reflection, revealing how a court understands its own constitutional approach. Aversive constitutionalism presents opportunities to deconstruct claimed similarities and differences in constitutional approaches, to uncover and contest characteristics and assumptions otherwise unexamined.\nThis chapter uses the contrast and rejection of American authorities in Axon to expose a fundamental characteristic underlying the English constitutional approach to young women’s abortion care. It is a shared rather than contrasted characteristic in American and English law. The characteristic is moral authority, defined as the legal authority to protect a state interest in prenatal life through moral abortion decision-making. Both American and English abortion law seek to protect a state interest in prenatal life by entrusting decision-making about young women’s abortion care to third parties: the family, the court, and the medical profession. Neither constitutional approach vests moral authority in young women themselves.\nPart I deconstructs the aversive constitutional move in Axon to expose the shared characteristic of third-party moral authority and the supporting set of assumptions underlying it. Part II turns to the assumptions themselves. The first assumption is that the involvement of third parties necessarily improves the moral quality of abortion decision-making. The second assumption is that such improvement is required. It is argued that both assumptions are gendered. Young women are denied moral authority on a feminine-gendered assumption of their underdeveloped capacity to engage in moral decision-making. The family, the court, and the medical profession are granted moral authority by virtue of their masculine-gendered identity. Third-party moral authority for this reason requires constitutional reform. Part III seeks to develop a reformed vision of moral authority in abortion law from the perspective of gender equality. It offers a constitutional approach that protects the state interest in prenatal life by entrusting and supporting the decision-making of young women, privileging the unique moral insight of their individual experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".