While drawing lessons from a range of jurisdictions, the project will focus, in particular, on the UK and Ireland, which provide a geographically contained site incorporating legal regimes that range from the most restrictive in Europe to among the most liberal. Most fundamentally, medical abortion poses serious challenges for the enforcement of any prohibition of abortion, including very late in pregnancy. It raises serious issues for detection and proof and also for prosecution policy. ‘How’, asks one commentator, ‘can a state control swallowing’? Finally, the online provision of medical abortion drugs raise further challenges, posing public health concerns around abortion in a more modern frame: in sourcing drugs from an unknown, online supplier, women are clearly risking their health.
Yet what responsibility, if any, does a state have to help them guard against such risks when the drugs are sought with the intention of subverting existing domestic law?