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74 Duke L.J. 1 (2024-2025)

handle is hein.journals/duklr74 and id is 1 raw text is: Duke Law Journal VOLUME 74 OCTOBER 2024 NUMBER 1 ABORTION DISORIENTATION GREER DONLEYt & CAROLINE KELLYtt ABSTRACT The word abortion pervades public discourse in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. But do people know what it means? Not only do law and medicine define it differently, but state legislatures have codified wildly different definitions of abortion across jurisdictions. This Article exposes inherent ambiguities at the boundaries of the term, particularly as it intersects with other categories of reproductive health care often viewed as separate, like pregnancy loss and ectopic pregnancy. By juxtaposing statutory text with real people's experiences of being denied care in states with abortion bans, this Article reveals how those ambiguities cause tragic results. This Article's analysis also tracks how antiabortion legislatures have responded to the tragedies of their own making by changing the definition of abortion. Thirteen abortion-hostile states have changed the definition of abortion since Dobbs, eleven of which have added at least one definitional exclusion, most commonly for ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, or molar pregnancy. States that have expanded abortion rights, on the other hand, have moved in the opposite direction, broadening their abortion definitions as they expand reproductive rights. Copyright © 2024 Greer Donley & Caroline Kelly. t Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, John E. Murray Faculty Scholar, and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. ft Recent graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. We would like to thank David S. Cohen, Mary Ziegler, Maya Manian, Jill Wieber Lens, Rachel Rebouch6, Yvonne (Yvette) Lindgren, and Reva Siegel for their feedback on the piece. Donley also workshopped this paper at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, where she received invaluable feedback from the whole faculty, particularly Susan Appleton, Adrienne Davis, and Gregory Magarian.

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