Day 1, 6 March 2024
University of Oslo, Domus Juridica, Auditorium 2
Time 10:00–12:30:
Welcome
Keynote: Tony Ward
Narrative Relevance, Rape and Medical Evidence
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
This presentation argues for the importance of ‘narrative relevance’ in communicating medical evidence to legal audiences. To be able to assess medical evidence in a legal context, a factfinder needs to understand how it fits into one or more of the narratives of events that will be presented at a trial. For example, they need to understand that a finding that a rape complainant had no injuries would be consistent with the defendant’s claim that sex was consensual, but would also be a typical finding in a woman who had been raped.
There is often a tension between narrative relevance and other values related to scientific communication, such as precision, objectivity, and a narrow conception of the proper role of the expert. For example, Gethin Rees’s (2010) study of medical reports in Scottish rape cases found that Forensic Medical Examiners tended to avoid any comment on how their findings related to an allegation of rape. This diminished the evidential usefulness of their reports and made it harder to challenge the stereotype of ‘real rape’ as involving bodily injury.
The idea of narrative relevance reflects one way of understanding the legal concept of relevance. In the context of a system of party-controlled evidence, where the parties adduce evidence to support competing narratives, evidence may be said to be relevant if it is explained by one or more of the alternative narratives, or makes one of them more plausible. This approach can be contrasted with one that defines relevance in terms of class comparisons. For example, evidence of anogenital injury is seen as relevant because women with such injuries are significantly more likely to be victims of rape than women without them. In their recent study of ‘sexual history’ evidence in rape trials (i.e. evidence of the complainant’s previous sexual behaviour) Conaghan and Russell (2023) approach relevance solely in terms of class comparisons, rather than plausibility. I argue that a narrative or ‘relative plausibility’ approach to relevance makes better sense of the problems concerning both medical evidence and sexual history evidence. In relation to medical evidence, this means that evidence that the complainant was uninjured coupled with an explanation of how common this is in rape cases could be relevant evidence in support of the prosecution, if it helps to show that rape provides the best explanation of the evidence as a whole.
Panel: Medical knowledge in legal contexts
Peter Gill: Avoiding miscarriages of justice, illustrated by the Birgitte Tengs case
Oslo University Hospital and University of Oslo Norway
Birgitte Tengs was found murdered in 1995 in Karmøy, Rogaland, Norway. In 1997 a cousin of the victim was charged with the crime and sentenced to prison for 14 years. On appeal, he was acquitted in 1998, but was held liable to pay compensation to the victim’s family. It wasn’t until 2022 that the conviction was fully overturned. Subsequently, following new DNA profiling evidence, Johny Vassbakk was charged with the murder, and found guilty in February 2023. On appeal he was acquitted in December 2023. The court judgement contained strong criticism of the police and prosecution, where it was believed that they had fallen into the trap on "confirmation bias".
In this talk I will discuss aspects of the case: a) The mere presence of DNA cannot be used to imply the method of transfer b) A framework for reporting evidence will be discussed that minimises risks of confirmation bias and false associations c) The expert must always explain the limitations of evidence to the court, by explaining various pitfalls and traps (such as confirmation bias and the prosecutor’s fallacy).
Finally, there are parallels to be drawn between cases involving DNA evidence that are miscarriages of justice. In particular, the Amanda Knox case will be highlighted as another key example. Since there is a common thread that runs through such cases, it is extremely important to fully analyse reasons for the errors to identify procedures that may lead to recurrence.
Anette Bringedal Houge: (Un)Predictable outcomes: the role of forensic expertise in rape cases
University of Oslo, Norway
In the Evidently rape-funded project From medical facts to legal evidence, I examine how medical facts and forensic evidence are written and spoken for in pre-trial and trial stages of the criminal justice process in rape and sexual assault cases in Norway. The project is designed to study empirically the translation work that medical and forensic experts invest in to communicate the scientific meaning and quality of facts to a legal context and audience, and draws on the police reports of all rape cases that were decided in a Norwegian court room (trial, appellate and/or supreme court level) in 2019, as well as complementary interviews with forensic experts. In this paper I will present a selection of cases where toxicology, forensic genetics, and medical expertise from the rape reception centers are made relevant. The cases illustrate the use and role of forensic expertise in rape investigations and trials, the unpredictability of outcome, and used as well as missed opportunities in the handling of rape case
Lunch 12:30–13:30
Time 13:30–17:00:
Panel: Translating experience into evidence
Sharon Cowan: "A bit of evidence in the process": the use of complainers’ sexual history and private data in Scottish Sexual Offences Trials
Northumbria Law School, Northumbria University, Newcastle
This paper presents findings from a project, funded by the Scottish Government undertaken with the assistance of Rape Crisis Scotland, on the use of sexual history and sensitive private data of complainers in rape and attempted rape trials in Scotland. The use of such information is governed by the common law of ‘relevance', and by section 274 and 275 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, commonly referred to as ‘rape shield’ legislation. Researchers analysed data, collected between September 2021 and November 2022 on 5 historical trials, 20 preliminary hearings and 10 substantive trials that had one or more s. 275 applications to raise sexual history evidence. We also interviewed 38 stakeholders (complainers, advocacy workers, police officers, judges, defence counsel and personnel from the Crown and Procurator Fiscals Service). Although we found evidence of a positive shift in approach, relative to that reflected in the historical analysis, towards a more restrictive interpretation of the legislative framework. we found that there is still some inconsistency regarding practitioners’ and judges’ approaches to s. 275, with applications sometimes continuing to be made when they appeared unlikely to be granted, with attendant upset then caused to complainers in being required to give their views on those applications. On some occasions, we also saw material being introduced at trial that had not been subject to appropriate scrutiny and which, if it had been, would have been unlikely – in our view – to have been considered admissible. This paper discusses areas where good practice could be strengthened and where further reform and review are likely to be required.
Solveig Laugerud: Accounts of non-resistance in rape verdicts: the psychological freeze response model and the state of liminality
University of Oslo, Norway
The criminal justice system has been criticized for not taking seriously rapes in which the victims do not physically resist the assault. It has been argued that trauma may explain why many rape victims freeze or do not attempt to resist or fight off the attacker when assaulted. To freeze or experience tonic immobility suggests that a person is unable to act or speak due to experiencing intense fear. This phenomenon has been characterized as trauma-induced immobility or involuntary incapacitation, something that de Heer and Jones (2023) believe the criminal justice system should consider as evidence of non-consent during rape trials. In this presentation, I will analyze Norwegian case law to investigate the use of the freeze response model in rape verdicts delivered by appellate courts. My purpose is to examine how a scientific biomedical model of fear performs in criminal trials and to compare it with competing models that explain victims’ apparent passive response to rape. These competing models include sleep, intoxication, and in-between positions conceptualized as liminal hotspots. Ultimately, my aim is to further conceptualize victims’ responses to rape.
The freeze response model, as with biomedical models in general, is based on measurable features. As such, the model fits into the legal system well because of how the system relies upon documentation – that is, the process of making something visible in terms of evidence or eyewitness accounts. This means that the freeze response model may become relevant and serve as scientific evidence in cases that are possible to document. In most rape cases, however, it does not really fit for two reasons. First, it is not possible to document the freeze reaction, Second, the prosecuted rapecases are more characterized by an internal sense of chaos rather than of fear.
Panel: When public concerns are translated into law
Carolina Borges Rau Steuernagel, Gabriela Saldanha Viva and Ingvild Knutsen Braut: The logic of choice and care in the abortion debate: the case of Argentina
University of Oslo, Norway
In December 2020, Argentina decriminalized voluntary terminations until the 14th week of pregnancy, marking a historic achievement, largely attributed to the extensive mobilization of civil society organizations working together across health, legal and religious sectors. Having voted for one of the most progressive legislations on voluntary pregnancy termination in the world despite an uneven democratic record, the case of Argentina is a particularly useful one to learn from in the current climate, where reproductive rights have become centre stage in electoral campaigns in countries across the world, including the US, France, Poland and, once again, Argentina.
In this presentation, we offer an analysis of the discourse of civil society organisations in Argentina drawing on Annemarie Mol’s distinction between the logic of care and the logic of choice in planning and delivering health services. As employed by Mol, the term ‘logic’ describes a coherent set of principles embedded in daily and institutional language as well as other practices, habits, including, but not limited to, buildings, technologies and facilities engaged in the delivery of health services. Mol’s argument is that practices designed to foster ‘patient choice’ erode existing practices that were established to ensure ‘good care’. However, the two logics are not mutually exclusive and often interact in complex ways.
The aim of our analysis is to understand how the Argentinean civil movements negotiated the two logics and how this negotiation was ultimately reflected in the legislation that civil society helped to draft and ultimate enshrine in law.
We demonstrate that the logic of care has been deployed to win the argument on health grounds while the logic of choice played a pivotal role in advocating for abortion as a fundamental civil right to autonomous decision-making. We argue that understanding how the logic of care and the logic of choice are articulated by successful civil society movements lobbying for health reform can contribute to understand how medical practices and knowledge are translated into legal arguments and, ultimately, into law.
Eli Baltzersen, Francesca R. Jensenius and Øyvind Søraas Skorge: State action and moral attitudes toward sexual consent
University of Oslo and Oslo New University College, Norway
Sexual violence threatens the security of citizens worldwide – particularly women. Even in advanced democracies, where there is overall less violence in society and gender roles are generally considered more equal, sexual assault remains a pressing problem. However, as the #MeToo movement brought to the fore, there are large gray zones and considerable disagreement about what actually constitutes sexual assault. In recent years, several countries have in recent years moved from a coercion-based to a consent-based legal definition of rape. To what extent are citizens’ moral attitudes toward sexual consent affected by these legal changes? Building on expressive-law theory, we expect a move to consent-based rape legislation to shift moral attitudes. This effect, we argue, is likely to be moderated both by citizens’ proximity to the issue at hand and by their relationship to the state.
Our study contributes original experimental data from Norway – an ideal context in which to test our hypotheses related to moral attitudes toward consent and the expressive power of the law. In December 2022, the Norwegian Criminal Law Council – a permanent expert committee tasked by the government to review sexual offense legislation – recommended that consent should be included in the current coercion-based legal framework. This pending introduction of consent-based rape legislation in Norway allows us to compare the response to information on current and pending legislation, thereby testing the expressive power of the law while holding constant the level of information that respondents have about the law.
Through the Coordinated Online Panels for Research on Democracy and Governance in Norway (KODEM), we test the treatment in the overall representative sample of the general public, and also look for heterogeneous effects by gender and age (issue proximity) and across the samples of the general public, of civil servants, and of elected representatives (relationship to the state). Our outcome variables are two measures of moral attitudes toward sexual consent: one question about the importance of explicit consent meant to tap prescriptive attitudes (how I ought to behave), as well as a question about a scenario of a sexual encounter to capture evaluative moral attitudes (how I judge others’ behavior). Thus, we explore to what extent information about changing legal understandings of rape are reflected in the general public’s attitudes toward sexual consent.
Carolina Steuernagel, Tony Sandset and My Rafstedt: The mobilization of fetal pain in abortion legislation
University of Oslo, Norway
Scientific controversies around fetal pain have been mobilized in legislative proposals in the United States during the past decade, with the aim of restricting abortion access. In these bills, fetal pain enacts a defining feature of personhood, granting the fetus rights of protection. Together with other medical interventions such as the early detection of fetal heartbeats, these bills pave the way for public deliberation on the nature of the fetus in democratic societies. The House of Representatives has passed the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act three times during the decade since its first introduction in 2013, but the Act has so far failed to pass the Senate. The bill stipulates that it is illegal to perform abortions after the gestational mark of 20 weeks has been passed, and that fetuses can experience pain after 20 weeks. By undertaking an in-depth reading of the legislative proposals that have been introduced at the federal level in the US Congress, this paper investigates how fetal pain is articulated in these legislative proposals since 2013 and asks how these bills reflect broader moral and regulatory concerns around the indeterminacy of the fetus. The analysis highlights how actors mobilize and coalesce partially irreconcilable scientific information into the arguments portrayed in the bills, speaking from and to wider audiences. Political outsiders take part in the bill as both 1) the source of practical and moral concerns that anchors the issue of the nature of the fetus and 2) the public in which the final message of the bill finds its cultural resonance. As such, techno-scientific developments on fetal capabilities afford a transformation of fetuses into citizens with equal rights to the women that bear them. The paper contributes to the growing scholarship on public involvement in legislative practices around matters of scientific concern employed in attempts to limit women’s reproductive rights.
Anna Ratecka: Prevention without emancipation. Translating harm reduction for sex work communities by the service providing organizations in postsocialist Poland
Södertörn University, Sweden
In my presentation, I will discuss the ways in which various types of knowledge are translated in the process of providing services to sex workers in post-socialist Poland. The vocabulary of rights, community empowerment, decriminalization, and peer education has been an element of HIV programmes for sex workers globally. However, the process of translating these ideas into the work of service-providing NGOs in Poland in the early 2000s posed several challenges. In particular, the practices and ideas rooted in sex workers' rights mobilisations were difficult to translate in a context where the framing of 'sex work as work' was absent not only in harm reduction practice but also in the feminist or academic vocabulary. In addition, conservative values and the influence of the Catholic Church on social and health policies, such as restricting the use of condoms in prevention programmes, added another layer to this nexus. Drawing on my fieldwork with civil society actors involved in service provision and advocacy for sex workers, I will explore the outcomes of these processes and reconstruct how harm reduction and prevention programmes were translated into the Polish context.
End-comments
Dinner 19:00 Edderkoppen
Day 2, 7 March 2024
University of Oslo, Domus Juridica, Auditorium 2
Time 9:30–12:00:
Keynote: Julie Boéri
To ‘care’ or to ‘kill’: interpreting as a ‘technology’ in the asylum procedure
Translation and Interpreting Studies Department (TISD), College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Hamad bin Khalifa University
The art of governing rests on the central paradox of caring and killing. Because the modern state considers it its duty to care about individuals, but only insofar as they can reinforce or weaken its strength, it is also entitled to isolate, expel and kill individuals, if it deems it necessary to do so. Nowhere is this Foucauldian postulate as evident as in the treatment of asylum seekers. Regulated by international law for signatories to protect the persecuted, asylum functions as a technocratic procedure that sorts asylum applicants into the few to be protected and the large majority to be expelled. Asylum seekers are thus prompted to speak within a fictional juridical procedure that conceals the very mechanisms through which their narratives of threats and fears are mediated, translated, objectified and resolved. Given the oral and translational nature of the asylum procedure, I argue that interpreting in this context functions as a ‘technology’, in the Foucauldian sense of a technical rather than a juridical relation of power that controls individuals while creating the conditions for their subjectivation, that is, for the making of who we are and what we ought to do in context. Focusing on the French asylum procedure, I will examine the legal, institutional, spatial and temporal arrangements of interpreting, as well as interpreters’ practices in the asylum hearing. I will show that while interpreting coerces the asylum seeker (and the interpreter) into fragmenting and condensing their narrative of exile in an expedited and highly monitored procedure, it also enacts resistant interventions that, however limited, cast light onto an obliterated mediational and translational space where the ethics and politics of interpreting for asylum seekers dwell. It is hoped that this study on the transgression of rights and morality can elicit a reflection on the paradox of caring and killing in modern state institutions, both medical or legal, and wherever the wounded and the traumatized are prompted to speak across language barriers.
Julie Boéri is Associate Professor in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Her research focuses on the translational nature of socio-political and technological change, with a particular interest in the ethics and politics of mediation and communication in professional, artistic and scholarly practices. She is Vice-President of IATIS, the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies.
Panel: Translating medical and legal principles and texts
Mahmoud Alhirthani: Translating human rights in Palestine
Translation and intercultural studies, Alaqsa University, Gaza, Palestine
This presentation relates to two of the conference strands (translation and law) and focuses on the politics of translation in the legal domain. It examines how the specifics of the law of human rights are mediated in English-speaking media, and with what implications, with reference to the 2023 Israeli war on Gaza, Palestine. Human rights are one of three pillars that constitute the current world order, together with the economy and security. The extent to which human rights law can be effective or ineffective does not merely depend on established legal arguments and precedents but also on the ways in which the death and suffering of specific victims are translated into items of news circulated by mainstream media at any point in time. Human shields, human shielding and the question of who is or is not a civilian as established in international humanitarian law are a case in point. Human rights can be undermined by partisan media coverage, yet they may also be undermined by non-partisan coverage on the pretext of offering an ‘objective’ account of events and ‘balanced’ coverage of different points of view. Such objectivity and balance support a politics of inversion, where, for example, settler colonialism in Palestine promotes itself – and is promoted in some media outlets – as a movement of indigenous people reclaiming their land, mirroring the narratives of the oppressed and blurring the line between the colonizer and the colonized. Needless to say, the media’s framing of acts of settler colonialism along these lines has an impact on what constitutes justice in a given situation, this (i.e., justice) being a basic human right. I examine the extent to which English-speaking media coverage of the ongoing 2023 Israel war on Gaza endorses or exacerbates the flouting of international human rights law as it applies to Palestine, paying particular attention to the use of what appears on the surface as innocuous terminology but is increasingly constituting a site of contestation in this context. For instance, a term such as ‘conflict’ (rather than ‘attack’ or ‘genocide’) assumes parity. The way the recourse to ‘objectivity’ is used to support such translations of reality into sanitized language recalls Fanon’s argument that journalistic objectivity in such cases ends up perpetuating the oppression of the native. Objective media coverage further supports the adoption of subtle ways of undermining international human rights law through various processes of gatekeeping and transediting.
Doaa Embabi: A Mapping of the Stakeholders in the Globalized Medical Interpretation Market: The Case of Interpretation between English and Arabic
Department of English Language and Literature, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt
Medical translation is perhaps one of the oldest areas of translation practice. With the evolution of health services and the growing number of individuals coming in contact with health systems foreign to them, also medical interpretation has become an established profession. The market need for English-Arabic medical interpreters is also growing for various reasons including migration by Arabs and pursuit of more developed health services in English-speaking countries. In addition to this ‘commercial’ need for medical interpreters, there are specific contexts where interpretation of medical content is required, such as some of the World Health Organization meetings/ events. Thus, medical interpretation is a professional practice that is both public-oriented and scientifically-based. The aim of this presentation is to explore the network of stakeholders involved in the provision of this very specific type of interpretation service and the envisaged outcome that this branch of the interpretation industry aims to achieve vis-à-vis clients (healthcare providers, organizations, and patients).
Medical interpretation involves different key stakeholders who play a role in shaping the provision of this type of service professionally and business-wise. This research mainly explores the supply side of the industry namely: service providers, accreditation and training bodies, and interpreters themselves. The research attempts to map the various service providers, examining whether they are fully dedicated to providing medical interpretation (and possibly translation) services or if this service part of a suite of others. Another area of investigation is the business model of such providers, i.e. in terms of their relationship to interpreters and to healthcare facilities. As for accreditation and training, the research studies the minimum requirements for hiring interpreters in medical settings (different certification/accreditation boards), scrutinizing the position of Arabic in the language combinations and the acknowledgement of the certification issued by such bodies for the language pair Arabic and English. This part also explores one example of a regional training institute and the program offered. The examination of the training part adopts the view presented by Gile and Barranco-Droege (2021) that theory is mainly drawn upon in interpreter training for scaffolding purposes and for accounting for certain phenomena in practice; and that this type of training is particularly practice oriented. This leads to a discussion of (would-be) interpreters as stakeholders themselves and the extent of their awareness of this specific line of interpretation, the special skill-set required, and ethical considerations needed to be part of this ecosystem.
This descriptive study, therefore, suggests that interpreter training programs and interpreters in the field of medicine require a solid base of subject knowledge, language competence, and interpretation skills for the interpretation product to be able to achieve the pragmatic effect it is aimed fulfill (among any receivers of this medical / health-related interpretation service).
Lunch 12:00–13:00
Time 13:00–16:00:
Keynote: Corinna Kruse
Transferring evidence, moving knowledge – the work of attaining movement and stability
Linköping University
This keynote addresses the movement of knowledge – for example in the form of forensic evidence through the criminal justice system – from a theoretical point of view. It proposes widening the analytical focus on the movement of knowledge from the pieces of knowledge themselves to contemplating the structures and work that make it possible to move knowledge from one context or epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina 1999) to another without (too much) loss or change of meaning.
To discuss the movement of knowledge, I will draw mainly on empirical material about forensic evidence in the Swedish criminal justice system, but I will also touch upon medical knowledge from midwifery and occupational health services. Together, this material makes it possible to trace and think about the work, relationships, and inequalities that enable and shape the movement of knowledge. Drawing parallels to the infrastructures that facilitate the movement of goods and people, I will argue that the movement of knowledge, and especially the stable movement of knowledge, requires undergirdings and that these undergirdings are crucial in understanding knowledge and how it moves – and understanding the movement of knowledge makes it possible to develop structures and routines that facilitate this movement, both in the criminal justice system and in medicine.
Panel: Plural sources of medical knowledge
Kari Solbrække, May-Len Skilbrei and Mari Holen: Experience as evidence: Patient organisations as knowledge agents
University of Oslo, Norway and Roskilde University, Denmark
In recent years, a norm to include members of the group in question in the planning, execution and dissemination of research has been established. Within medical and healthcare research, this change represents a break with the traditional biomedical knowledge hierarchy where the patient and user perspective has long been ranked lowest, if not neglected. Today, we are dealing with a more clearly democratic ideal, namely that the patients' voices and perspectives should also be included in the medical and healthcare knowledge production, thereby creating a more inclusive and perspective-rich basis for diagnosis and treatment.
In this presentation, we examine how the Cancer Association, the ADHD Association and the Endometriosis Association in Norway engage with research and present their members’ experience as relevant expertise for these illnesses. This is part of an exploration of how patient activism may take shape and impact what counts as evident knowledge about health and disease in today's Norway.
Ingrid H. Johansen, Turid Kråkås, Miriam Andrea Aaberg, Siri-Linn Schmidt Fotland, Kjersti Alsaker: The multiple and conflicting purposes of documentation in medical health records
NORCE, Norway
The main purpose of medical health records is to be a working document for health personnel, which they can use to track the medical history of the patient and to document medicaldecisions and treatment. In Norway, the patients have the legal right to access their own medical health record and they can share it with whoever they want. Medical health records are also used as legal documentation, for example in court cases regarding sexual abuse or violence.
The Norwegian healthcare system is two-tiered, with primary care acting as gatekeepers to secondary care. A large proportion of all urgent contacts regarding injuries and sociopsychological crises are made to emergency primary care which is accessible 24/7/365. In an experiment, 25 nurses atfive different local emergency medical communication centres received calls from simulated patients presenting a total of 15 different medical cases. One of the cases was regarding an injury that had resulted from domestic violence. Seven of the nurses later participated in semi-structured interviews where they listened through the recording of their own call, and then reflected on discovery, medical handling, and documentation of domestic violence. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically.
Preliminary results suggest that during documentation of their contact with the patient, the health personnel try to balance between the need to communicate clearly with other health personnel, their desire to avoid a faulty label of the situation or stigmatisation of the patient, and their fear of putting themselves at risk of retaliation. They described how they worked in teams, and that sensitive information often was relayed orally instead of becoming part of the written documentation. They also described how they sometimes included subtle cues in their written documentation whichwould be obvious to people with the same professional background and experience as themselves, but which would mean nothing to other people.
The multiple purposes of documentation might decrease the value of medical records as legal evidence. We need to explorehow we can help health personnel document medical incidentsin a way that is also beneficial for future law cases, while still being attainable in a busy clinical setting and allowing for maintenance of the integrity of the patient and the health personnel.
Eli Baltzersen: Conceptualizing abortion and ART as reproductive issues: explaining attitudes in Europe
University of Oslo, Norway
Despite an increasing number of individuals and couples employing
assisted reproductive technology (ART) to achieve their family formation goals,
what factors explain variation in ART attitudes are largely unaccounted for. ART
is a reproductive health issue alongside abortion. However, there is no convergence on how to legislate reproductive rights in Europe. While abortion legislation has been highly politicized for decades, the regulation of ART has been largely left to the medical community in many countries.
With a more limited medical and legal understanding of ART in the public, many individuals may have less crystallized attitudes toward ART compared to abortion. This underlines the importance of discerning what drives the mobilization of both pro-
and anti-reproductive rights movements toward these two issues, as well as the relationship between public opinion and state action on reproductive issues. Hence, this paper argues that it is necessary to disaggregate reproductive rights to accurately pinpoint the drivers of public opinion toward ART and abortion. To do so, mapping attitudes towards reproductive issues, and what explains variation in such attitudes, is a necessary first step.
Drawing on the rich literature on abortion attitudes as a starting point, religious and party explanations are explored, in addition to other relevant control variables. Cross-national survey data from the European Values Study (EVS) in multilevel models is utilized to examine attitudes towards two different reproductive issues: ART and abortion. Considering how reproductive issues differ conceptually and practically is particularly important, as the political consequences and normative implications vary between ART and abortion.