The modern papacy emerged from the clash with the values of Enlightenment and the pope’s loss of temporal power. In a way, popes established themselves as a renovated source of moral authority on bioethics. This chapter aims to trace the history of papal pronouncements on contraception and abortion. It examines the historical roots of Christian sexual ethics from antiquity. It focuses on the early modern origin of the questions concerning the beginning of life and on the modern idea of immediate ensoulment. It shows how modern medical knowledge and eugenics contributed to a new view of reproduction as separate from sexuality, which called into question the traditional sense of marriage and gender roles. In this context, in which anti-modernism certainly played a role, popes condemned birth control, abortion, and women’s emancipation, revealing a huge hiatus between the experience of laity and the inflexible authority of the Catholic Church.

The papacy played a central role in the development of Roman Catholic teaching about bioethics. Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930) condemned contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Papal teaching was broadly accepted by Catholics before the 1960s. Widespread dissent in the Church greatly increased after the publication of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968). The first successful IVF procedure in 1978 raised new bioethical issues relating to the status of human embryos outside the womb.

The Catholic hierarchy was more successful in lobbying politicians to enact restrictive laws, or obstruct liberal reforms, than in persuading the laity to accept its teaching on birth control and assisted human reproduction. A rift emerged between mainstream Catholic culture and the institutional Church. The Church is now circumscribed in meeting the challenges presented by complex ethical issues, such as surrogacy and assisted dying, because of the papacy’s inflexible stance on these matters.

Chapter 6 employs Welby’s Meaning Triad to investigate whether the boundary for the beginning of girlhood should be clearly identified in the international legal framework. It studies the definitions of child under international law and in the English language to assess whether they establish a beginning point for girlhood. It conducts two case studies concerning, respectively, the practice of prenatal sex selection and the right of young and adolescent girls to a safe abortion, to illustrate the significance for girl children of the current boundary for the beginning of girlhood under international law. It studies the sense, meaning and significance of provisions in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and refers to their respective travaux préparatoires.

This chapter examines how religious transformations in Latin America over the past few decades have influenced the rise of the right. Analyzing a five-wave panel study from the “Democracy on the Ballot” project, the authors show that Bolsonaro won much of his support from evangelicals and Pentecostals during the final month of the campaign. While they find little support for the notion that attending church or discussing politics there influenced vote choice, church leaders’ endorsements of Bolsonaro did in fact matter. Other relevant factors included attitudes on the importance of religion in one’s own life, one’s approval of church engagement in elections, anti-LGBT attitudes, and authoritarian parenting values.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.