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Bodily Integrity Construct Women's Restrictions?

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In many areas, the law and legal institutions have the potential to contribute to the breaking of restrictions with regard to social norms pertaining to gender and sexuality. While supporters of certain laws may note that the law in many areas increasingly reflects more progressive and contemporary social norms and ideals, critics may charge that in many cases, the law remains an institution which tends to reinforce traditional norms, roles, and divisions of power. In this way, the laws in many areas can act as major impediments to change, challenging progressive ideals by limiting the capacity of certain individuals to be meaningfully recognized and protected under the law. In this essay, I examine how laws pertaining to bodily integrity construct …show more content…

It is argued that:
“What the law misses in constructing the issue in this way is that the abortion decision is only the sole decision if the woman decides to have one. The law, in fixing its gaze on the existence of the abortion choice, constitutes this option as a barrier to more meaningful consideration of the unique nature of pregnancy and of decision-making therein.” Thus, by focusing on the decision of abortion and constructing that as the sole choice a woman has in pregnancy, the law functions to render the woman vulnerable to having the range of her other choices related to issues in pregnancy constrained due to their involving matters other than abortion. The effect of the law here is then to privilege the ideas, goals, and opinions of members of the medical establishment over individual women themselves. In this sense, while the law allows women to have abortions, in doing so, it deeply constricts their ability to maintain their autonomy and make other choices about their pregnancy. Women are thus rendered vulnerable to a whole host of medical interventions during pregnancy that they may not want or …show more content…

Indeed, the literature notes that police warnings to women about rape have often functioned to assign responsibility for the management of risk related to rape to individual women, rather than society itself or legal institutions. In the context of neoliberal governance, it is argued that risk management and sexual safekeeping have emerged as the chief strategies used by some police to respond to incidents of sexual assault. These responses function to place responsibility for sexual assault on individual women, thus limiting the potential for it to be understood as a systemic problem. It is also argued that systemic sexism on the part of police when conducting investigations into allegations of sexual assault is an ongoing problem that functions to limit the potential for police and other agencies to respond appropriately to these crimes; beliefs and suppositions about victims, as well as social norms and gender roles function to inhibit the ability of victims to obtain justice, or even potential understanding and comfort in the aftermath of an

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