Seminar: Mind the Legal Gap: Mental Capacity, Women’s Decision-Making and Access to Abortion in England and Scotland

The Health Law Research Centre welcomes you to sign up for a seminar with Amrita Krishnakumar, PhD Student at the University of Edinburgh, titled "Mind the Legal Gap: Mental Capacity, Women’s Decision-Making and Access to Abortion in England and Scotland".

This presentation examines the legal and practical consequences of the interaction between abortion law and mental capacity law in the United Kingdom (UK). Despite the UK’s statutory framework for lawful abortion, women deemed to lack mental capacity may face additional legal and procedural barriers where access is mediated through capacity-based clinical and legal decision-making. Focusing on England and Scotland, the analysis adopts a doctrinal and socio-legal lens, drawing on statute and case law to show how reproductive decision-making authority may be transferred from the woman to courts and clinicians. It argues that when decision-making ability operates as a threshold requirement, autonomy becomes contingent on a finding of incapacity and vulnerability is framed through the language of deficit and risk, authorising substituted decision-making as the default response. These assumptions are then reproduced in clinical and judicial reasoning, narrowing the circumstances in which abortion is treated as available and shaping the scope of reproductive autonomy for women deemed to lack mental capacity.

You can sign up here!