Development Studies

Structure, Empowerment and the Liberalization of Cross-National Abortion Rights

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Economic, cultural, and political opportunity structures have been separately shown to
facilitate and constrain abortion rights. We examine two central and related questions:
First, which factors explain liberalization of different types of abortion laws? Second,
which factor or set of factors is the most important in explaining abortion laws? The
cross-national literature suggests a three-pronged explanation for the existence of abortion
rights, including politics, economics, and culture. We parse these out into the structural
and empowerment components of each, and posit a theory of rights in which
empowerment factors are at least as important, if not more important, for explaining
change than structural factors. To test this, we examine the impact of these components
on the liberalization of abortion rights globally utilizing a distributed lag model. We find
that an empowerment approach explains the liberalization of abortion laws better than a
structural approach in terms of politics, but that a structural approach is a better predictor
in terms of culture, and that both empowerment and structural factors are important
predictors when economic factors are taken into account. We conclude with a discussion
of the implications of these findings for understanding policy change and human rights
on a global scale.

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Publication Information

: ., 2008

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Language

English

ISSN

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Subject(s)

empowerment
economic
Politics
Liberalization
Cross-National
Abortion Rights
Abortion Laws
Cultural

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Article

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