Abortion under State Constitutions

Abortion under State Constitutions, which has been favorably reviewed by law professors, research librarians and reference librarians, remains the only comprehensive treatment of arguments for and against the recognition of abortion as a state constitutional right. Since the first edition was published in 2008, abortion advocates have filed state constitutional challenges to abortion regulations in Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma. And in Alaska, a case challenging a citizen-initiated parental notice law tests the limits of the broad abortion right previously recognized in that State. At the same time, the Tennessee General Assembly has proposed an amendment to the state constitution which, if approved by the voters in 2014, would overturn an earlier decision recognizing a state right to abortion. These developments, along with a number of other factors, warrant a second edition.

In this edition, new materials–court decisions and/or legal commentary–have been incorporated into the discussion of state equal rights amendments, unenumerated rights (or retained rights) provisions and state privacy theory, as well as one of the introductory chapters. Individual state chapters have been edited to include, among other changes, a fuller description of a State's pre-Roe abortion statutes, a State's religion clauses, a State's statement of interests in protecting unborn human life and, in one instance, the sources of a right to abortion recognized by a state supreme court. Where appropriate, the analysis of a given state constitutional provision has been rewritten for greater clarity. Citations have been updated throughout the text and notes and, where necessary, corrected, and topical headings have been changed in some instances to describe more accurately the state constitutional provisions discussed. This edition also includes two new features–an appendix containing the text of every state constitutional provision cited or quoted in the book, as well as a topical index to facilitate cross-references to the same (or similar) provisions in different state constitutions. These features make the second edition even more helpful as a reference work for judges, lawyers, legislators and others interested in the issue of abortion as a state constitutional right.