Informed Consent to Abortion: Building Bridges of Dialogue in the Medical Encounter

Traditionally the abortion debate has focused on the status of the foetus and the decisions available to pregnant women in isolation. In Informed Consent to Abortion, Caterina Milo argues that this politically polarised debate has neglected the crucial component of the decision-making process: Informed Consent (IC). Whereas in other aspects of healthcare law the IC process has received increasing attention and been the subject of much litigation, the abortion law has fallen behind. IC has been often neglected and the process of decision-making has been undermined.
Caterina Milo provides a legal and ethical framework of abortion law and professional guidelines by critically analysing the implications of the 2015 UK Supreme Court judgment in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board on Informed Consent. She discusses the key potentials and challenges within three major areas of domestic law in England and Wales: the law on abortion, the tort law of negligence, and relevant professional guidelines on consent. Milo argues that these three areas have neglected the decision-making process and a change in approach is needed. Throughout the book, Milo sheds light on problems that emerge from the intersection between reproductive law and human rights law, discussing each in relation to the health-related ethical and policy debates in the domestic, European and US context. In turn, she addresses difficult questions posed by failure to comply with information disclosure and understanding standards in the abortion context. Milo critically assesses the role of clinicians in the abortion context, challenging the current legal and policy approach.

Informed Consent to Abortion contributes not only to philosophical and theoretical issues, but also to practical and applied ethics in medicine and law, both nationally and internationally. Caterina Milo grounds the theoretical debate in the realities of how the law presently responds, and how it should respond, to key ethical values informing contemporary medicine and health.

Caterina Milo is Lecturer at the School of Law, University of Sheffield, where she currently leads the Health Law Research Group. She is Fellow of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge.