Perpetual Conflict or Compromise? The Cost of Domestic Legitimacy in the Realm of Women's Human Rights: A Case Study on the Right to an Abortion

With its turbulent and volatile legal evolution, the right to an abortion in the United States still remains a highly contested issue and has developed into one of the most divisive topics within modern legal discourse. By deconstructing the political underpinnings and legal rationale of the right to an abortion through a systematic case law analysis, I will demonstrate that this right has been incrementally destabilized. This instability embedded in abortion jurisprudence has been primarily produced by a combination of textual ambiguity in the case law and judicial ambivalence regarding this complex area of law. In addition, I argue that the use of the largely discredited substantive due process doctrine to ground this contentious right has also contributed to the lack of legal stability. I assert that when these elements culminate in the realm of reproductive privacy the right to terminate a pregnancy becomes increasingly unstable and contested.

Representing Afghanistan: The United States and Democracy's Imposition

There is an ongoing mission in Afghanistan; a mission driven by external political forces. At its core this mission hopes to establish peace, to protect the populace, and to install democracy. Each of these goals has remained just that, a goal, for the past eight years as the American and international mission in Afghanistan has enjoyed varied levels of commitment. Currently, the stagnant progress in Afghanistan has led the international community to become increasingly concerned about the viability of a future Afghan state. Most of these questions take root in the question over whether or not an Afghan state can function without the auspices of international terrorism. Inevitably, the normative question of what exactly that government should be arises from this base concern. In formulating a response to this question, the consensus of western society has been to install representative democracy. This answer has been a recurring theme in the post Cold War era as states such as Bosnia and Somalia bear witness to the ill effects of external democratic imposition. I hypothesize that the current mold of externally driven state-building is unlikely to result in what western actors seek it to establish: representative democracy. By primarily examining the current situation in Afghanistan, I claim that external installation of representative democracy is modally flawed in that its process mandates choice. Representative democracy by definition constitutes a government reflective of its people, or electorate. Thus, freedom of choice is necessary for a functional representative democracy. From this, one can deduce that because an essential function of democracy is choice, its implementation lies with the presence of choice. State-building is an imposition that eliminates that necessary ingredient. The two stand as polar opposites that cannot effectively collaborate. Security, governing capacity, and development have all been targeted as measurements of success in Afghanistan. The three factors are generally seen as mutually constitutive; so improved security is seen as improving governing capacity. Thus, the recent resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and a deteriorating security environment moving forward has demonstrated the inability of the Afghan government to govern. The primary reason for the Afghan government’s deficiencies is its lack of legitimacy among its constituency. Even the use of the term ‘constituency’ must be qualified because the Afghan government has often oscillated between serving the people within its territorial borders and the international community. The existence of the Afghan state is so dependent on foreign aid and intervention that it has lost policy-making and enforcing power. This is evident by the inability of Afghanistan to engage in basic sovereign state activities as maintaining a national budget, conducting elections, providing for its own national security, and deterring criminality. The Afghan state is nothing more than a shell of a government, and indicative of the failings that external state-building has with establishing democracy.

Church and State

Church and state have historically had an uneasy relationship, sometimes close allies, at others harsh adversaries, and at still others largely independent of one another. This paper develops an economic model of this relationship, where the state's objective is to maximize net tax revenue, while the church provides religious goods. Religious goods benefit the state in two ways: first, they provide utility to citizens, thus allowing the state to extract more taxes before running up against citizens' reservation utility (the point at which they would revolt), and second, they potentially provide legitimacy to the state, thereby lowering the costs of tax collection. If the latter effect is strong enough, the state may find it optimal to take control of the church, either to enhance its legitimizing effect, or to suppress its de-legitimizing effect. To evaluate the model's implications, we use recent cross-country data on the relationship between religion and state, including measures coded from the 2001, 2003, and 2005 International Religious Freedom reports. We also examine in more detail some of the paradigmatic cases indicated by the model, presenting various types of evidence from current and historical examples of each case.