Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
JHPPL Call for Paper Proposals
On January 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), ruling that the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution protects a “right to privacy,” which includes a pregnant person’s right to abortion without excessive government restriction. This landmark case enshrined the right to abortion in US constitutional law while also recognizing that the right was not absolute, and subject to state interference. In the ensuing decades, the right to abortion has been further restricted and, in many places today, is less accessible than it was before Roe. Some predict that Roe will fall in the current Supreme Court term. The politics of reproductive health, in other words, are highly contested as we near the 50th anniversary of the Roe case.
In observance of the 50th anniversary of Roe, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (JHPPL) invites the submission of paper proposals for an interdisciplinary special issue on the politics of abortion today, edited by Katrina Kimport (UCSF) and Rebecca Kreitzer (UNC Chapel Hill). We especially encourage submissions from scholars from historically excluded or marginalized groups, as well as scholarship that centers intersectionality.
We invite papers on a variety of abortion-centered scholarship, including (but not limited to) questions relating to:
- The history and evolution of abortion or abortion policy since Roe, including both constraints on legal abortion and codification and expansions of the right to abortion
- Predictions on the future of abortion in the US
- The relationship of policy and politics to service availability, e.g., prolife sanctuary cities, abortion deserts, what makes abortion care (in)accessible and for whom
- The politics of abortion provision and abortion providers, including conscientious objection, the structure of the workforce, constraints on provision/providers, and policy workarounds
- The relationship of policy and culture regarding abortion, abortion availability, and abortion provision
- Alternatives to legal abortion, including attention to service delivery, criminalization or lack thereof, and existing health care delivery policies
- Specific policies regulating abortion at the state and/or federal level (e.g., Texas’s SB8, the Hyde Amendment, EACH Woman Act), including creation and implications of policies
- Abortion exceptionalism in policy, politics, and health services
- Public opinion on abortion
- Abortion stigmatization
- Social movements for and against abortion rights, their strategies, tactics, successes, and failures
- The politics of reproductive justice (e.g., How has reproductive justice influenced/failed to influence policy? What would a reproductive justice–informed legal framework look like?)
- How the politics of abortion in the US have played out internationally
- What the US can learn from contention over abortion in other countries
We are primarily interested in empirical analyses but may consider a limited number of commentaries. Proposals should be 750 words or fewer and should indicate the proposed manuscript format: full manuscript length (7,000–10,000 words), short manuscript length (4,000–6,000 words), commentary (2,000–3,000 words). The final word count of articles in the special issue will be determined by the editors upon proposal acceptance.
Submit paper proposals via email to Jed Cohen, JHPPL’s managing editor, at jhppl-editor@dukeupress.edu by January 10, 2022. Please put “Roe special issue proposal” in the subject line. Proposals will undergo review to assess the theoretical and empirical contribution of the paper, fit for readers of JHPPL, and coherence with other papers proposed for the special issue.
We anticipate that, for authors selected to submit papers, the deadline for manuscripts will be June 1, 2022. All papers will undergo peer review. Final revised papers must be received by December 1, 2022. The expected publication dates for this issue are January 2023 (online) and August 2023 (print).