 I'm delighted to introduce to you Rebecca Cooley. Rebecca has a distinguished career. Her titles include that she is faculty chair in international human rights. She's co-director of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program at University of Toronto. She's a professor in the Faculty of Law, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Joint Center for Bioethics at U of T. And she has not two, not three, but six degrees to her name. In the areas of arts, public administration and law. So you can send some polymath here. She is co-editor of numerous journals, ethical and legal issues co-editor of the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics. She serves on the editorial advisory boards of Human Rights Quarterly and Reproductive Health Matters. She has a publication list that is very, very extensive and her primary focus is on reproductive health and women's rights. I guess that's two focuses. She is a modest person and her accomplishments though are outrageously high when stacked against her modesty. She has received numerous awards and distinctions. And as you can tell just from the listing of the editorial boards that she sits on, she has a very strong international reputation. So one of the awards she's received is the Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Contribution to Women's Health by the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She has received the Ludwig and Estelle Jues Memorial Human Rights Prize and she is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a great distinction. Rebecca will be speaking with us today on discriminatory effects of stigmatic harms and criminal abortion laws. Please join me in welcoming Rebecca. It's a pleasure to be here and I do apologize for the change in title. Elaine was absolutely right. I started out with discriminatory effects of stigmas, stereotyping and animus. But that really speaks to how comfortable I was in changing my title and the delight that I have in being here. This is definitely a work in progress and I really want to think together with you and have your feedback on this chapter. It's a draft of a chapter for a book on abortion law that Joanna Erdman, Bernard Dickens and I are co-editing. It is very, very much of a draft and I'm not even sure that I'm comfortable with this title. So my last slide in this presentation is to come back to the ideas that I have on various titles and ask you, having heard the paper, what you think might be the most appropriate title. I think they're pros and cons of different aspects of the title that I want to discuss with you. So thank you, Elaine, and to the Health Law Institute for making this possible to try out some of these ideas on this work in progress. So the outline of the talk is really to look at the social meaning that has developed around abortion. One in three women will have or one in three women have abortions during their lifetime. It's a very, very common procedure but very, very stigmatized and rarely discussed. It really sleeps in a valley of shame no matter where you are in the world. So I first want to discuss just a very quick overview of some of the thinking about social meanings and how social meanings are developed through the process of stigma, prejudices and stereotypes. I then want to go on and look at the legal perpetuation of these negative social meanings, particularly in how criminal laws are framed, how they're applied and how they're interpreted by courts. Of course there's many ways to perpetuate different social meanings and laws, only one of them, but given that I'm in a law faculty, that's my primary purpose. Then I want to look at some of the possible legal violations and how they've been articulated by a particular international human rights tribunal and think together about how that tribunal might have done a better job in capturing the negative social meanings in that particular case. So social meanings, what do we mean by social meanings? In an article that is cited in the draft chapter that some of you have, there's an article by Lawrence Lessig, which I found really instrumental in understanding social meanings. And he defines it as this semiotic content attached to various actions or inactions. Now of course I had to go to the dictionary when he mentioned semiotic content, and that semiotics is the branch of knowledge that deals with the production of meaning of signs. So how law signifies certain things and how, for example, how it categorizes. So it's a system of signs and how those signs convey social meaning. I had a lovely walk in your public garden today and certainly that was a social meaning that was conveyed through that park, which gave me great peace. There are other signs in our society that give people a lot of stress, and certainly the way we think about and have conceptualized and attach various meanings to abortion give a lot of people a lot of stress, both those pro and against. Now I want to stress the social part of social meaning. Social is used particularly to emphasize the contingency of the meaning on a particular community in which the meaning occurs. So social meanings don't exist at birth. We're all born without social meanings, but it carries moss. As you go through your life, you have more and you're defined in different ways. So I want to particularly emphasize spoiled meanings and how meanings are spoiled through criminal law. Then I want to look particularly at stigma, prejudice, and stereotype, and how meanings about women get spoiled through these three processes. Now, stigma, prejudice, and stereotypes are complex and they're interrelated, and it's important to understand not only their interrelationship, but the distinctive ways in which they have evolved. They have different roots in social psychology, and it's important to understand those roots. And one of the ways I have done it is to look at the literature on stigma, prejudice, and stereotypes on HIV, AIDS, mental health, disability, and LGBT issues. Then finally I want to look at why do we mark, pre-judge, and stereotype, degrade, and discriminate. So thinking about spoiled meanings. So the production of spoiled meanings through different frameworks, through different signs, and why we develop those frameworks of understanding. As I've said, they're contingent upon the community in which the meanings occur. Criminal law determines a sexual-moral order by criminalizing abortion in certain circumstances. So it does so in many ways by developing categories to create stigma. Those that have abortion are considered, in some ways, can be punished. Those who undergo abortion in some criminal systems also can be punished. So how criminal law here influences social meaning is really the nub of this chapter. Let me give you another example in the framing of criminal law. Many criminal laws require a reflection delay that women wait three to five days, and that creates a negative social meaning about women. They're incapable of making decisions like we don't have to wait three to five days for other medical procedures. So that's creating a particular social meaning about women. So let's now turn to stigma and then prejudice and stereotypes. So stigma has been defined in this article by Anu Kumar and others to mean abortion stigma, to mean negative attributes ascribed to women who seek to terminate a pregnancy that marks them internally or externally as inferior. It spoils their identity to use the terms of Irving Goffman. And the article by Schellenberg breaks it down even further and looks at perceived stigma, so women who perceive that they'll be stigmatized delay or avoid seeking services. Those who experience stigma might be the experience that women have in, say, how clinics are harassed when they go to certain clinics. Then internalized stigma might be severe mental health problems leading to suicide. So the stigma literature is very useful in breaking down the stigma and how it's perceived, experienced, and internalized, and that has implications for abortion. Now prejudice, my chapter that you read on stigma doesn't include this excellent article by Gregory Herrick on prejudice and LGDP issues. It's very good on prejudice, but it also uses the LGBT context and it's very accessible because he uses examples from that area. So prejudice has been defined as an attitude, a category-based evaluative tendency to respond to individuals on the basis of their group membership. Herrick makes the point that prejudice is also part of a larger cultural complex endorsing an ideological system that disempowers, it's not talking about women particularly, but for our purposes, that disempowers women through stigmatization. So it's part of a larger ideology that disempowers a particular group. In his case, he's talking about LGDP issues. In my case, I'm trying to use his work to think about it and how the ideological views on abortion enable, disempower the stigma against pregnant women thinking about abortion. Now the categorization often derives its content from stereotypes. And this is important for our purposes because it shows how prejudice interrelates with stereotypes. I've already mentioned one, women incapable of making decisions, incapable of moral decision-making. So thinking about how the categorization in the prejudice area can overlap with stereotypes I think is extremely important. Now the other thing about prejudice is you could also think about prejudice as the internalization, acceptance and manifestation of stigma. So it really relates with stigma and it also relates with stereotyping. And I think to understand the negative constructions of women, one has to understand and work with social psychologists to understand how these negative social meanings are made. Now finally, gender stereotypes. And this really builds upon a book that I did with Simone Kuzak on gender stereotypes. And in that book, we really focus on the stereotyping literature and don't look at the prejudice or stigma literature. Stereotypes can be thought of just stereotype. Stereo in Greek means a firm and type is a mold. So just going to the roots of the word, it's a firm mold. So we treat people according to preconceptions of their characteristics or preconceptions of their roles. Now all communities have modesty, chastity and obedience codes. They might be subtle in some countries, they might be very overt in other countries. But they're all there. So we do have stereotypes, they might be very embedded in our unconscious that really think about women in terms of their roles or attributes and what they should be or what really the prescriptive stereotype is probably the most important for us. So an example here is women as mothers irrespective of their desire to be moms, therefore denying them access to information and services on abortion. So these generalized preconceptions are at work in a variety of different abortion laws and we need to make clear what these preconceptions are. But before we do that, let me just go to the issue of why do we have prejudices? Why do we stereotype? Why do we stigmatize? It's a very, very brief highlights of some of the explanation. In Herrick's article he argues that we have prejudices to strengthen our own social acceptance. That's called the social expressive function. We have prejudices to affirm our particular values, they're better than others. That's the value expressive function. We have prejudices to cope with threats, that's called the defensive function. So there are a lot of hypotheses about why these prejudices exist, why they develop in society and I think it's very important as one gets into the literature on abortion prejudice and stereotypes to understand some of the explanations. Now the stereotypes, why do we stereotype? Well we stereotype as I've mentioned to prescribe that women should be modest, they should be chased, they should be obedient. But we also stereotype very innocuously just as a part of human nature to describe women in the aggregate are weaker than men. There are some women that are stronger than men but in the aggregate they are weaker than women, men. So we use it descriptively and what is problematic is when we base our laws on that. For example laws prohibiting women from being firefighters. So in that social psychology literature you find these explanations of describing and prescribing. I haven't spelled prescribed right. The third is otherwise. These are false stereotypes. As Kwamea Pia explains it's outright bigotry, women are dumb. And you see a lot of that when it comes to stereotyping in the abortion context. So that's a very very brief overview and there's so much more work to be done on the explanations of why. But if we're really going to adequately address the legal perpetuation of social meanings, we need to really be conscious of why we develop negative social meanings. So let's look now at the legal perpetuation of social meaning. It happens in how we frame laws, how we apply laws and how we interpret laws. The framing of criminal laws. I've mentioned the reflection delay requirement is embedding in it a stereotype of prejudice about women as incapable of medical decision making. And there's some other spousal authorization, parental consent also embeds stereotypes. Now these are in the administrative requirements of more liberal abortion laws. But probably more importantly is how the criminal prohibition itself marks women as immoral, as a threat to society. So and how the criminal law frames exceptions to the criminal law. Some exceptions are only framed in terms of threats to women's physical health as though we only value women because of their physical capacity. So I think we also need to think about the actual criminal prohibition and what that says and articulate that in ways that judges can work with the harm that's done. Now to do that I want to use this case LMR versus Argentina which was recently decided by the Human Rights Committee. Terrible facts of 18 year old woman who was mentally retarded having the mental age of 8 was allegedly raped by her uncle and was denied services repeatedly. She went to one hospital in Cornavaca in Argentina. That hospital denied her services even though it was legal in Argentina to have abortion when you've been raped and you have mental disabilities. There's no question that it was lawful and you did not need the authorization of a judge. Nonetheless the hospital sent her to another hospital 100 kilometers away and that hospital, the San Martell hospital denied her services. The judge was disciplined for not applying the law and then refusing to authorize the abortion. Not only the treatment of the woman but also it misstated the gestational age, falsely recording the gestational age is later making it even more difficult for her to access services. So what the health system did in this case backed up by the judicial system until this case got to the Supreme Court of Justice of Buenos Aires was treated the woman through a moral lens rather than treating her through her actual health needs. And they found a violation of the right to be free from inhuman integrating treatment, a right to privacy and a right to equal enjoyment of her civil and political rights and a denial of an effective remedy. So in essence how the law was applied into LMR labored her as deviant. It spoiled her identity in the words of Irving Goffman. It separated her from good women who would not seek abortion. And it also has to be said that there was a power differential between the judicial system and the health system. This woman and her family were poor. The woman herself was young and mentally disabled. So you can see in that case how the application of the law degraded her and created all kinds of prejudices. But the decision did not capture any of that particular kind of harm. The complaint referred to some of those harms but the actual holding didn't when it discussed a violation say for example the right to be free from inhuman integrating treatment did not think about the kind of stigmatic harms, the harms to social meaning. Let's look at a decision in terms of judicial reasoning. I want to contrast the Colombian 2006 decision with the 2007 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that's mentioned in the article. There's a handout on stereotyping that I did wrote together with Simon Kuzak and Bernard Dickens. So in the Colombian 2006 decision which liberalized the Colombian abortion law, it named the stereotype. It talked and here I'm quoting, when the legislature enacts criminal laws it cannot ignore that a woman is a human being entitled to dignity and that she must be treated as such. As opposed to being treated as a reproductive instrument for the human race, as a reproductive instrument for the human race. The legislature must not impose the role, the role of procreator on a woman against her will. So this decision of the Supreme Court of Columbia was really brilliant in how it named the stereotype of women and use that as one of the rationales for liberalizing the Colombian law. So that's the kind of judicial reasoning that is very, very helpful in changing negative social meaning. But regrettably judges really don't go there. They haven't had maybe a basic course in social psychology. The Gonzales case is decision is a very interesting one because you have Justice Kennedy perpetuating a stereotype of women and here I'm reading. Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptional to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created in sustain. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. So that stereotype of women as irrational and incompetent decision makers was used as a basis to prohibit a method of late term abortion that might in some cases be safer for women. Now the risk of regret is with every medical procedure and it's not inherent to decisions regarding abortion. But Justice Kennedy and the majority in that decision use that as a rationale to need to pass laws prohibiting the procedure in order to protect women. So the stereotype is of women as vulnerable, incapable of making medical and difficult moral decisions. Therefore we can make decisions that protect them. Justice Ginsburg in dissent went ballistic to put it bluntly. She said and I'm quoting the court, the majority deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice even at the expense of their safety. This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the constitution. Ideas that have long been discredited. Then she footnoted all those decisions going back to Bradwell, the Bradwell decision where women, the Bradwell versus Illinois where women were not allowed to become members of the bar because it wasn't in their nature. So she footnotes all the decisions of the Supreme Court, the most recent ones rejecting stereotypes of women as rationales for prohibiting them in certain professions and also the more recent ones in terms of rejecting stereotypes in the employment sector. So these contrasting these two decisions I think is a useful way of understanding how the court unconsciously and consciously uses stereotypes. So I've talked about the first two violations in the LMR case, but I want to end with the right to be free from all forms of discrimination against women. And this is a right in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in Article 5A, where it explains there is an obligation of all state parties to take all appropriate measures to modify social and cultural patterns of conduct, to eliminate prejudices and practices based upon the inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotype roles for men and women. So there's an obligation under international treaty law, and this obligation in Article 5A has been replicated in other conventions, particularly the African Protocol on Women's Rights. And well, we'll leave it for there. So there is an obligation to deal with negative social meanings to use that term, an all-encompassing term. So let me end where I began and just talk a little bit about what the title of this still evolving chapter might be. And the title I chose for this actual paper is The Stigmatic Arms of Criminal Abortion Law. Well, I'm not just talking about stigma. I'm talking about all social meaning, negative social meanings. So that's why I thought, well, maybe I'll try negative social meanings of criminal abortion law. And then I thought, well, but we really need to name women here. So that's the next option, marking women through criminal abortion law. I'm really not sure, though, about the term mark because that stigma is to mark. Stigmata is a mark. And so I'm not sure I like the term mark. So maybe, and I don't want to use the term degrading because I also want to show how it brings in the right to equality. So I'm not sure about marking. I like marking women. I like renaming women here. And then the final thought was, well, let's emphasize the obligations, the obligations to eliminate prejudices, stereotypes, and stigma. But then this leaves out women and it leaves out criminal law. So love your thoughts and I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. And the paper, I should explain, the book is aimed at a transnational audience so it's not just focused on Canada. But certainly in terms of, yes, we don't, abortion has been decriminalized here. It's treated like any other medical procedure. And we need to think about how we could further destigmatize, maybe through codes of medical ethics around the delivery of abortion services. WHO recently issued an updated version of their guidelines. Joanna was very much involved in this. Maybe she could speak to it. So guidelines for abortion services might be a way to begin to destigmatize, at least to name some of the stereotypes. And where there are difficulties in how women are treated in seeking services, at one point there was allegations of women being denied anesthesia. There's a lot of debates around what kind of painkiller to give. So that might be a particular area where I'm not sufficiently on top of developments in Canada about the delivery of abortion services, but it would make a fantastic paper. And so a lot more work needs to be done on it. Because until we completely destigmatize this procedure, there will be threats of recriminalization. But in other countries, most other countries do have a criminal prohibition. Even though they liberalize the law, they retain the criminal prohibition. They just carve out exceptions. There are very few other countries like Canada. I think Cuba is maybe the only other one that I know. I have a question about the slide that you put up there with the step to the ways in which women are stereotyped as poor decision makers. So the forced delay or the parental consent. And I'm curious about whether or not these big ones could add to that slide. What do you think it belongs to somewhere else? The notion of good enough reasons. The last set of good enough reasons for us to actually escalate is you're asking for it. Or is that something that you think is legitimate for the law? Should be doing it in a range of places and therefore should also be doing that legitimately here. Because I think in part that's what happens when people go over to guidelines for offering procedures. They try to build in what will count as a good enough reason. Not just a rational reason, but good enough that's past some kind of threshold that other people have set. Very helpful suggestion. These are only suggestive and a lot more research needs to be done on how stereotypes are embedded. But I think the good enough reason, stereotype or sufficient reason is a very, very important one in how the exceptions to criminal prohibitions are framed. And you see this, so in the abortion book it's coming up in several different ways. So there are counseling provisions in many countries. Some are like in Germany are dissuasive counseling. You try to dissuade the woman. Other countries you just counsel and that comes out of a mindset. You have to counsel as a way of trying to protect prenatal life. If you counsel women maybe they'll think twice. Maybe they'll decide not to have the abortion. So maybe you're counseling to make sure the reason is good enough that's certainly embedded in the notion that you have to have a second medical opinion in those countries that have it. But certainly you point to something that's very, very important that needs a lot more work. Part of the reason I'm interested in this is that there are some reasons. I mean we're fortunate in any context that you don't have to offer opportunities. In other places you do have to offer opportunities and there are extremes that allow you to continue. And I guess I'm interested in sort of one extreme along that continuum. So my reason is social sex selection. So if I can build that into this as a sort of a complicated factor. So I'm just curious as to where in your analysis that kind of a concern would fit with the concerns of that stereotype in women as poor decision-makers versus putting in sort of a social moral criteria to say not a reason that socially we're going to support. And I don't get that. So far I haven't gotten into that in the chapter. I'm not sure I will because it's such a complex issue in and of itself. You can argue it both ways. Some might think it isn't a good enough reason. Some might think it is a good enough reason depending upon that context with that particular woman. If you're living in India and you have six girls maybe it is a good reason. And then that gets back to why are we prejudging that? Why are we bringing our prejudices to that? So it's not how I come out on that. I think it's the process of thinking about it to make sure that we name and are aware of what's happening in our unconscious about those. And often we're not. So I was really interested by the reasons why we choose to stereotype. And they also are very self-serving like affirming yourself, building your beliefs in comparison. And so I wondered if you have given any thought or written anything about, you know, because it seems like we choose to attack very aggressively women who choose to get abortions or women who choose to get abortions. And why those particular things in ourselves are the things that we feel like we need to protect the most strongly. Does that make sense? So I don't know the prejudice literature as well as I know the stereotyping literature. But in the stereotyping literature we use negative stereotypes, malevolent stereotypes when we're under threat. There's just no doubt about it. And we use them to control the other. So when you have situations where societies are changing, you start say in conflict zones where there's a clash of different ethnic groups. You start and you see this by sort of stoking the stereotypes, the negative stereotypes, stoking the prejudice. And you see this stoking the stigma. And that's done as almost instinctively as a way of preserving your own. And then that escalates into violence. And there is a whole social psychology literature on this that I don't, I'm not on top of, but I was on a panel a few weeks ago with a Spanish social psychologist. And he was very, very explicit on talking about how stereotypes is the first step towards ethnic violence. He was very much on top of it. He's a spender social psychologist. He's written the basic social psychology textbook for Spain. And so his take home message to this audience was that if we don't get on top of this as a community, as a society, as a country, we aren't doing our job. So these explanations are important to understand. And they are in the prejudice area, yes, they are all very, very defensive. They're preserving their own. And I have to be honest, when I stereotype, it is for some of these very same reasons. No, so if you're really honest with yourself, you do it for these reasons. So understanding these reasons helps you make conscious what's in your unconscious. So there are many other reasons as well. This is really just a sketch. And there's a whole literature on this, which would be absolutely fascinating. But I just wanted to sketch this for you to say that we stereotype, we have prejudices. And before we can get in touch with our own prejudices and our own stereotypes, we have to understand our own reasons for doing it. And so these are some of the reasons. But again, it's only a sketch and there are many others and there's a deep literature on it. And it varies from, say, LGDP, to mental health, to women. So it's the whole range. And looking at it and how it evolves in different areas is fascinating. And while that slide is up, I'm glad when you said that this is only a smattering of women there. Others, because when I was reflecting on it, I thought, surely to have the main reason in a positive way that we prejudge and stereotype is for simplicity's sake. That's the description, the descriptive. To describe it all, to get through the day, I don't think we could function without prejudging certain kinds of things. So what you've done in your analysis is to give us a deep and complex insight into what has been treated often in a prejudicial and stereotypical way. And you're revealing the problematic aspect of it. But when I thought about simplicity, I also thought about religion because you didn't once mention a Catholic church. You're talking about international abortion laws. And I was struck by the parallel between simplicity and religious belief, frankly. That there is a comfort in religious belief that gives someone a set, prejudice and stereotype body of approach to life that you can follow. And I just wondered if you have reflected on that. And one of the reasons why I got into this stereotyping work was because it was a way of bringing article 5A alive without being anti-Catholic. Because I didn't want to reveal my anti-Catholic prejudices. And I thought I had to understand them. And you just go to the LMR case and it's all the Catholic. It was the Bishop, it was the Catholic Association of Lawyers in Argentina. They were all the ones that went against LMR and prevented her from getting a timely abortion. And so to understand how we stereotype, how others stereotype, how we develop prejudices, I think is first and foremost the first line of attack. But then in the stereotyping book, Simon Kuzak and I, I think it was in the stereotyping book. I think we did look at the debates in which the stereotyping book wasn't specific to abortion. It was just gender stereotyping. We looked at the debates in England about women becoming bishops. And it was absolutely, just the stereotypes just popped out at us all over the place. And we talked about it in the book. So yes, once you understand the process, then you look at other discourses. It doesn't have to just be the legal discourse. It doesn't have to be the legal reasoning in court decisions. But it really enables you to understand this was Catholic, not Catholic bishops, but women bishops in the Church of England. And the discourses were, you know, they were same like in the 1800s, going back to those cases, not allowing women to be doctors, going back to those cases, not allowing women to be lawyers. The same arguments. It's not in women's nature to be moral leaders. And they actually use those terms. So in understanding stereotypes in all their gradations and why we use them, and yes, doing the stereotyping book, we had a huge debate about whether stereotypes could only be negative. No, there are some positive stereotypes, but you have to be very careful that those positives don't turn into negatives. And you have to be very clear why you're using these stereotypes. The Madonna stereotype that's used a lot in Poland, for example, putting women on the Madonna pedal stool. That's really, it might be a positive stereotype, but it's used to keep her in the home. In the stereotyping article that I gave you, this small piece in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, we talk about the Irish Constitution, and talking about the woman as the homemaker and how important that is. So you see those all over the place. But until you are sensitized and made aware of how you do it, how it happens in different discourses, and I don't think you're ready to quite take on the Catholic Church, or at least I wasn't, but I have started by taking on the Church of England. Yeah? I was wondering what your thoughts were on really the role of politics in enforcing the stereotypes. And I guess the reason I have this question, and just the recent events in the House of Commons trying to reopen the data as to when life begins. So I was just wondering the thoughts on that. Did you read the Globe and Mail the other day about the Prime Minister of Australia? No. So, again, this was where the Prime Minister of Australia, well, who actually read it? Does anybody remember? Just explain for the group. There was a call for the head of the Speaker of the House for being sexist. The leader of the opposition was calling for the head of the Speaker of the House. And then she took him on in Parliament right across the table, pointed out through his record as a politician. Exactly what he had said. And basically called for himself. Yes. So, yes, I think that's another very, very important area where politics is another very important area that stereotypes are used over and over again. And we, you know, those who care deeply about these issues have to be able to call them on it, just like the Australian Prime Minister called them on it. But again, unless we can see how these stereotypes are embedded, so this using the pretext of life begins at the moment of conception, that needs to be dissected. You know, what's happening there? In some ways you can say that life begins from the moment of conception is saying that women aren't capable of life. You know, who are they? They're just erasing women. So by developing a stigma of women, by erasing them in that discussion, they're really stigmatizing women and we have to be able to call people on that. But again, that's another whole area that needs more research. I keep trying to motivate everybody because this is such a fascinating area and there's so much more work to be done on it in conjunction with social scientists, particularly social psychologists. I wonder about, like I've spent some time thinking about the way in which finders of fact in the sexual assault context resort to schematic thinking or stereotypical thinking. There's an interesting literature that suggests that this unconscious method of reasoning happens most of all in conditions of uncertainty, which is a somewhat optimistic narrative about sexual violence. I wonder what the analogy, I think there's something to it, right? In a sexual violence context, so much of it really does come down to it. He said she said, or he said he said context, right? So you can imagine why the culmination of that with the fact that credibility becomes usually the most salient factor in the outcome. Triers of fact resort to very socially entrenched stereotypes about particularly about women, right? And so I wonder about what the analogy would be in terms of conditions of uncertainty. Okay, in the stereotyping book, we cite to some really fascinating article by Michelle O'Sullivan, a South African legal scholar who looked at divorce settlements. When women got good divorce settlements, they met the stereotypical good woman, good mother, good wife role. And where they didn't meet that stereotype, they were given lesser divorce settlements. So that's one area that I know of. I don't know, I haven't done any particular work in the area of sexual assault. There's another New Zealand case, again a very positive case where the judge takes on this, well it's not directly the credibility of the witness. I'm not going to remember the case exactly, but he takes on the lower chord in how they found facts. It was kind of like the Yonchuk case, but the Australian version. But I happen, then there's a final scholar that did some of this work in the OJ Simpson trial, the University of Miami, that cited in the, actually in the bibliography of the abortion book, his name is now escaping me, but that article just, I was having coffee at a McDonald's on a Sunday morning if you can believe it. And I ran back, I was teaching, and I ran back, I was so excited about this article that I finally got certain aspects of the criminal justice system. And I ran back to my co-author and I said, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it. So I can look at the book and give you the article. So there is some literature on that that we came across in the book and used it. A lot more work to be done on how we stereotype credible witnesses in the Islamic system. There you need two women. I think it's least two women versus one man and how we embed stereotypes in that. But there's an awful lot more work that should be done in the criminal justice system per se. There is, oh, there's the Cottonfields case from the Inter-American Court on Human Rights of their, women were disappeared and they didn't investigate because they used stereotypes that they were just young girls out with their boyfriends. And the parents came and encouraged the police to investigate their disappearances and they weren't investigated. And there's evidence to suggest that if they were investigated their death might have been prevented. So stereotypes in the criminal justice system are used, you know, a great, great deal and people aren't conscious of it. And I wonder whether, but I'm particularly curious about this idea that they are most prevalent in circumstances of uncertainty where a moment of decision-making occurs and what that could mean for your analysis. Well, I haven't done a lot of work about circumstance of uncertainty but say in the Ciudad Juarez, the Cottonfields case, of course it's a highly violent situation, migrating, it's on the border between El Paso, Ciudad Juarez is on the border between Mexico and the U.S. So it's a very volatile situation and the police are under tremendous stress. So, you know, they've got a Z in things to investigate so they're going to use that stereotype probably to avoid just that one other investigation that they don't probably have time to do. I'm very charitable to them. So if you can analogize situations of uncertainty with high-stress situations, situations of uncertainty, do they happen in high-stress situations or do they happen just on their own? But certainly all that work that's been done on stereotypes that lead to ethnic violence might be something you might want to look at. I guess I need to better understand what you mean by situations of uncertainty and I'd want to sort of analyze that further with you to really understand what that means in particular context. One question here. I just want to mention this issue of the context in which this happens. So in the stereotyping literature you look at the individual context, how the individual stereotypes, then you look secondly to the context and there's very good, where the context is neat and tidy like an employment context, it's easy to understand the context. But in Ciudad Juarez where it's violent, where there's a lot of migration, it's a messy, messy context. So it's harder to understand the context and how stereotypes play out. And then there's the underlying conditions and that gets to religious use. So there's that three levels. Just a comment on that discussion. That happens to be the area of research when I throw up, isn't it? Which areas of uncertainty are there? The sexual assault context when stereotypes by the tribe are fact-touched. And what I found is that often these cases, because they're going to be a tremor about drinking, so a woman goes with drinking and then wakes up the next morning and there's evidence of sexual assault or cease treatment for sexual assault that night. And then I found a lot of stereotypes by the crown of defense and the judge centering around she's engaged when drinking. Therefore she's essentially asking for it. She's putting herself in a situation of risk. And if she hadn't developed her, if she went home with someone that she would know or if she didn't go up to the first place, we would all be sinned. But she wouldn't have done herself in that situation. And so I was specifically looking for these stereotypes in three groups. And sadly they're a massive problem. And just let me say, I haven't asked everybody to do it. And what are you doing in your project is you name them. Sort of pop. I'll just answer something with respect to those conditions of uncertainty. So Herrick, when he was looking at stigma and prejudice with respect to sexual orientation, found one of the greatest quote here was putting people in the room together. He said, you know, you know, putting people in the room together. So this kind of personal familiarity, which is kind of a hokey claim. But actually, empirically, it shows some truth to matter. That so long as you actually have some evidence in front, some personal experience with something that you can no longer rely on stereotype because you know a case to be true of the opposite, that this did fundamentally affect the capacity of people to short circuit and go to stereotypes immediately. So there's been a lot of, so I go to that literature around what that kind of direct contact to contact. And this, you know, an abortion context the claim was part of the reason why it remains so stigmatized is because people don't talk about it. And because you don't talk about it, you don't exactly, if you don't talk about it, you don't get to know this one in three women who are having terminations and you absolutely is that person. And so it's again that kind of the degree to which there's a secrecy or idea of not talking about it and not sharing, but, you know, the idea is that in abortion you need a social process akin to coming out of the closet, right? That happened, right, in the coming out of the closet in the LGBT movement, it was something akin to that in the abortion movement. And so too sexual violence. So that if in some context this stereotypical or kind of schematic thinking resorting to these preconceived concepts is a way of knowing then some response, whether it be abortion, sexual violence, sexual minority discrimination, some response must be aimed at different mechanisms that reorient the way of knowing. Right, and that's why I asked the student in the back this importance of naming. It's just so critical. Popping it up, naming it, discussing it. And a lot of judges, like the Colombian decision is quite good at that, but they could be so much better at it, you know, and that it's so important. The kind of things by the Inter-American Court, there's the Karen Natala case where they did discuss stereotypes, but the hope, the judicial reasoning around these prejudice, stereotypes and statement is so critical. And when you analyze these decisions it's just, it's the exceptional decision that does it. Joanna's referring to the contact thesis, which is, so the more contact you have, and I think there's probably a whole literature on whether in which situations the contact thesis hypothesis works. And then the abortion context is just interesting, the sexual assault context is the claim that this is a transient condition, right? You're not, you know, you're not a person who walks around always as a survivor or victim, right? You're not a person who walks around always as someone who's had an abortion, you know, in the same way that, right, racial identity or sexual, right, minority identity or so forth. So the idea is to what extent as this trait is transient, social movements for coming out of the closet and identifying, and you can't come in, quote, contact with these people who represent this group because they're never the same, you know, and they can kind of, quote, disappear into, right, general populations, and can often be the people who will then enact the prejudice against their same group that they were once a member of. So I think that that is, I mean it's a good question because these seem to change a lot in contrast to some of the work that's done on stigma and prejudice with respect to what we might call as, you know, kind of staying traits, right? And I should say that the social psychologists work on abortions, I think there's three articles, Max, was the Kumar article that I cited, the Schellenberg article, and I think there's one other, and that's it. If you can believe it, I mean it's really quite shocking. Yeah, I was just wondering, so you were talking about the importance of naming and I know that you said you hadn't looked into it much, but kind of going back to the good enough reason, social selection. So are you saying that it's more important that we recognize that we have the stereotypes and things that we're using to build bond, whatever. It's, you're saying that it's more important that we kind of acknowledge that we're doing it than it is to kind of stop doing it? I don't think it's a question of more or less. It's a question, if we're going to be serious about dismantling stereotype prejudices and stigma, we have to understand how we ourselves stereotype develop prejudice and stigmatize other people. Because if we can't understand how we do it, then it's very difficult to understand how it's done more generally. So that's why I think the section on why we do this is very important just as a way of sensitizing people. Now there's also a lot of literature on dismantling these stereotypes. And I haven't really gotten into that because it's really looking at how you change views and that's not really helpful. I didn't find it helpful in terms of how we change laws because laws you have to find a violation. So, but in the LMR case, for example, when they found a violation of the right to be free from inhuman integrating treatment, they really didn't discuss any of this. Very, very disappointing. So just there is a PhD thesis coming out from, actually from an Australian PhD law student on the use of inhuman integrating treatment in the abortion context, which I think will be very, very useful. I don't recall how much it gets at the discussions by courts of stereotypes prejudice and stigma. I was just wondering if you could comment about the limitations that come when you frame movements to liberalize abortion laws are not choice and how that plays out in terms of seeing that all the states, the United States, all their laws keep coming back and forth. There's a lot of assumptions I think that are embodied around notions of choice and who can choose and what does that mean. When that becomes the main platform for reforming laws then whose interests are protected under those and how is maybe also the idea of choice stereotyped as well in that context. It was the main platform for quite a long time for liberalizing abortion laws. So I think the major limitation of framing the reproductive rights movement around choice is that it doesn't get at the health disparities. We know that we have restrictive abortion laws. It's poor women generally who have very difficult times getting it. So disproportionately impacts on poor women and that usually correlates with race ethnicity and certainly by age in the abortion context and adolescents are by and large poor. So by framing it around choice you fail the grasp of the reproductive justice, the reproductive justice elements about that. Now in terms of thinking about the negative social meanings of not grasping the social justice dimensions of issues I think the way the negative social meanings and ensuring that you frame this as an equality issue we generally tend to stereotype others in negative terms others that are different from us. It could be adolescents, it could be poor people, it could be people who are racially marginalized. So I think the two intersect in very, very important ways and I didn't get involved at all but in the book we have a whole section called compounded stereotypes. So you're not only stereotyping on grounds of gender and other grounds as well and they intersect and compound in ways and certainly in the abortion context I think one of the more critical areas to look at is how we think of stereotypes of adolescents because it's adolescents who disproportionately bear the burden of restrictive laws. They come late they join us right that an abortion stigma is transient but with adolescents there's a much higher threat of internalized stigma that stays with that adolescent and probably affects their mental health in ways that we don't even begin to understand. So even though that adolescent might be successful in getting an abortion usually under very difficult circumstances that how that procedure marked that adolescent I'm sure has mental health consequences way beyond the act of the so the self stigma there's several cases on the international one of the things I want to do with this article oh by the way I haven't gotten any responses to the last my title question one of the things I want to do in the chapter is to look at there's probably about eight abortion cases at the international level and there's one very tragic case where an adolescent tried to commit suicide so there's I think that felt stigma that internalized stigma issue is a very important one even though they're not physically blemished they're internally blemished and that stays with them. So before I invite you to join me in thanking Rebecca I wanted to mention the next seminar which is Friday October of 26 so it's in just two weeks it's by Evelyn Fox Keller of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she'll be speaking on legislating for catastrophic risk unless she changes her title now one of the things I did not mention yet from Rebecca's bio is that she spent from 2004 to 2007 at the University of the Free State in South Africa she was on the faculty of law there and she had the title there of Professor Extraordinarius and we can see how she earned the title so please join me in thanking her.