Drew Halfmann. 2011. Doctors and Demonstrators: How Political Institutions Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $40.00. pp. 336. Paper. ISBN: 9780226313436.

• Author: Brittany Holom
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.127
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015

Book Review

Drew Halfmann. 2011. Doctors and Demonstrators: How Political Institutions Shape

Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. $40.00. pp. 336. Paper. ISBN: 9780226313436.

Abortion laws, as Dr. Drew Halfmann, Associate Professor of Sociology at the

University of California-Davis, emphasizes, form “a complex and controversial

terrain for most contemporary societies” (p. 1). In the United States, the media

has maintained an intense interest in covering abortion policies since the 1973 Roe

v. Wade decision. The pro-life versus pro-choice debate has resulted in the vast

liberalization of abortion laws since the 1960s and the subsequent gradual

retrenchment of those policies, as well as f‌ierce political debate oddly marked by

a lack of participation by the American Medical Association. But frequent policy

changes and passionate political debates are noticeably absent from the abortion

question in other countries. In Doctors and Demonstrators: How Political Institutions

Shape Abortion Law in the United States, Britain, and Canada, Dr. Halfmann explores

why three countries in the Anglo-American sphere—the United States, Britain,

and Canada—have pursued distinct trajectories concerning abortion policy,

despite their similar cultural and historical characteristics. He demonstrates that

while interest groups do inf‌luence abortion laws, those interest groups’ prefer-

ences and actions are f‌irst of all shaped by a number of political institutions,

including the electoral system, policy venues, and health-care policies.

The book is laid out in an intellectually intuitive, though perhaps untradition-

al, way, which allows Halfmann to emphasize his theory clearly throughout.

Rather than looking at each case separately or investigating a particular issue in

each case with an analysis of the three countries in the same order, he instead

prioritizes chronology across all of the cases, moving from the reforms of the

“Long 1960s” (the late 1950s to the mid-1970s) to the present day. Leveraging

policy differences both across the countries and within each country across time,

he argues that the “scope, pace, and duration of policy making” are ultimately

determined by characteristics of the institutions, particularly in how accessible

they are to special interest groups (p. 23). This is why, he contends, the United

States, where policies are made at the state level through permeable political

World Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2015

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1948-4682 #2015 Policy Studies Organization

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