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Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity. In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety. Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into \"nation-building\" projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.

Mobile health apps often require the collection of identifiable information. Subsequently, this places users at significant risk of privacy breaches when the data are misused or not adequately stored and secured. These issues are especially concerning for users of reproductive health apps in the United States as protection of sensitive user information is affected by shifting governmental regulations such as the overruling of Roe v Wade and varying state-level abortion laws. Limited studies have analyzed the data privacy policies of these apps and considered the safety issues associated with a lack of user transparency and protection. This study aimed to evaluate popular reproductive health apps, assess their individual privacy policies, analyze federal and state data privacy laws governing these apps in the United States and the European Union (EU), and recommend best practices for users and app developers to ensure user data safety. In total, 4 popular reproductive health apps-Clue, Flo, Period Tracker by GP Apps, and Stardust-as identified from multiple web sources were selected through convenience sampling. This selection ensured equal representation of apps based in the United States and the EU, facilitating a comparative analysis of data safety practices under differing privacy laws. A qualitative content analysis of the apps and a review of the literature on data use policies, governmental data privacy regulations, and best practices for mobile app data privacy were conducted between January 2023 and July 2023. The apps were downloaded and systematically evaluated using the Transparency, Health Content, Excellent Technical Content, Security/Privacy, Usability, Subjective (THESIS) evaluation tool to assess their privacy and security practices. The overall privacy and security scores for the EU-based apps, Clue and Flo, were both 3.5 of 5. In contrast, the US-based apps, Period Tracker by GP Apps and Stardust, received scores of 2 and 4.5, respectively. Major concerns regarding privacy and data security primarily involved the apps' use of IP address tracking and the involvement of third parties for advertising and marketing purposes, as well as the potential misuse of data. Currently, user expectations for data privacy in reproductive health apps are not being met. Despite stricter privacy policies, particularly with state-specific adaptations, apps must be transparent about data storage and third-party sharing even if just for marketing or analytical purposes. Given the sensitivity of reproductive health data and recent state restrictions on abortion, apps should minimize data collection, exceed encryption and anonymization standards, and reduce IP address tracking to better protect users.

This study examines the extent to which banning women from having abortions affected the fertility of their children, who did not face a similar legal constraint. Using multiple censuses from Romania, I follow men and women born around the time Romania banned abortion in the mid-1960s to investigate the demand for children over their life cycle. The empirical approach combines elements of regression discontinuity design and the Heckman selection model. The results indicate that individuals whose mothers were affected by the ban had significantly lower demand for children than those who were not. One-third of the decline is explained by inherited socio-economic status.

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and maternal labor supply, I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a sizable child benefit in Spain in 2007. Following a regression discontinuity-type design, I find that the benefit significantly increased fertility, in part through a reduction in abortions. Families who received the benefit did not increase consumption. Instead, eligible mothers stayed out of the labor force longer after childbirth, which led to their children spending less time informal child care.

This study examines educational and labor outcomes of children affected by a ban on abortions. I use evidence from Romania, where in 1966 dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu declared abortion and family planning illegal. Birth rates doubled in 1967 because formerly abortion had been the primary method of birth control. Children born after the abortion ban attained more years of schooling and greater labor market success. The reason is that urban, educated women were more likely to have abortions prior to the policy change, and the relative number of children born to this type of woman increased after the ban. However, when I control for composition using observable background variables, children born after the ban on abortions had worse educational and labor market achievements as adults.

The regulation of surrogacy across Western Europe displays the overwhelming prevalence of a restrictive status quo, with only a few states having moved towards greater permissiveness. However, we know little about the determinants of such regulation from a comparative perspective. This article fills this gap, by mapping the variation in the regulation of surrogacy across Western Europe and determining whether the explanations offered by the morality politics literature to the attendant variation in the regulation of abortion, prostitution and assisted reproductive technologies also explain it, or, rather, surrogacy policy has its own determinants. It concludes that, while the factors that explain the variation in the permissiveness of the regulation of abortion, prostitution and assisted reproduction technologies across Western Europe also apply to surrogacy, their specific combination in the latter is unlike in any of the former. Hence, surrogacy policy has its own determinants, which require further research. In doing so, the article adds to the emerging comparative analysis of surrogacy policies across Western Europe from a morality politics perspective, which is unprecedented, and, in turn, to the literature on morality politics, by confronting it to an issue that questions several of its established conclusions.

This study provides both a behavioral model and empirical evidence on the risky search for a health service across jurisdictions that differ in their regulatory policies. The health service in question is a particularly sensitive one, an abortion, and the jurisdictions are the 26 cantons of Switzerland. Using Swiss health insurance data, theoretical predictions are confirmed to a considerable degree: (1) Women who derive a particularly high benefit from an abortion (and concealing it) are less discouraged by strict local enforcement than others; (2) A substantial share of abortions may be concealed by contrived medical coding, and (3) Conservative cantons with a preference for stringent implementation of federal abortion regulation export the problem to more liberal ones, resulting in preference-based migration. The analysis implies a difficult trade-off for policy: To curtail abortion tourism, the cantons would have to be mandated to implement the pertinent federal regulation in a uniform way; this would, however, neglect important regional differences in preferences.

Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the 'reversal of misfortunes'. We investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes, incarceration, abortion, unemployment and immigration on crìme. For this we use time series data (1970-2008) from seven European countries and the United States. We find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime. Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe. Our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether such a policy would also be efficient from a cost-benefit point of view. We leave this to future research.

Although the rate of contraceptive use in France is high, more than one-third of pregnancies are unintended. We built a dynamic microsimulation model that applies data from the French COCON study on method switching, discontinuation, and failure rates to a hypothetical population of 20,000 women, followed for five years. We use the model to estimate the adjustment factor needed to make the survey data fit the demographic profile of France by adjusting for underreporting of contraceptive nonuse and abortion. We then test three behavior-change scenarios that could reduce unintended pregnancies: decreasing method failure, increasing time using effective methods, and increasing switching from less effective to more effective methods. Our model suggests that decreasing method failure is the most effective means of reducing unintended pregnancies, but we found that all of the scenarios reduced unintended pregnancies by at least 25 percent. Dynamic microsimulations may have great potential in reproductive health research and prove useful for policymakers.