This chapter examines how religious transformations in Latin America over the past few decades have influenced the rise of the right. Analyzing a five-wave panel study from the “Democracy on the Ballot” project, the authors show that Bolsonaro won much of his support from evangelicals and Pentecostals during the final month of the campaign. While they find little support for the notion that attending church or discussing politics there influenced vote choice, church leaders’ endorsements of Bolsonaro did in fact matter. Other relevant factors included attitudes on the importance of religion in one’s own life, one’s approval of church engagement in elections, anti-LGBT attitudes, and authoritarian parenting values.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.

This chapter finds in the Bible a diversity of views about sexuality, gender, marriage, divorce, celibacy, virginity, and the human body. It next traces in early Christianity an aversion towards same-sex relationships, abortion, and contraception, and a growing gynophobia combined with a growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. It discusses the association between sexuality and original sin, and between misogyny and the invention of the witch, together with the negation of sexual pleasure, the confinement of sexual relations to procreation within marriage, and the struggles of monks with their erotic desires. A painful incompatibility between the sexual practices of colonized peoples and missionary expectations and behaviour is noted. Through to the present time, different models of marriage and attitudes towards same-sex relationships are found within Christianity. The early diversity of views about sexuality is shown to be unresolved, re-appearing in the culture wars of the present century. While attitudes to cohabitation, divorce and masturbation are generally more liberal than in the past, global Christianity still retains a strong antipathy towards loving same-sex relationships, abortion, and even the ordination of women.

The COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized abortion care. What seemed impossible a few years ago – entirely virtual abortion – is now a reality. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has historically required patients to collect abortion medication, a two-drug regimen that terminates a pregnancy in the first ten weeks, in-person at a health care facility. In July 2020, a federal district court suspended that requirement during the pandemic, allowing providers to mail abortion medication directly to patients. In December 2021, President Biden removed the in-person requirement permanently. Over the last two years, virtual clinics have begun offering “no-touch” abortions, eliminating many of the costs associated with travel to an abortion clinic. The FDA’s most recent decision has cleared the way for the supervised mail delivery and pharmacy dispensation of abortion medication. The expansion of virtual clinics, however, faces significant obstacles and limitations – most acutely, the fact that nineteen states prohibit telabortion explicitly or indirectly. This chapter maps the emergence of virtual abortion care and analyzes its significance for early abortion access, particularly in the post-Roe world. It then considers the limits of telabortion, concluding that, over the long term, the portability of abortion medication will test how closely state officials (or anyone else) can police access to early abortion care, even if abortion is banned in a particular state.

While the law has developed greater protection for the growing competence of adolescents, they have not been recognised as autonomous in the same way as adults. This difference in treatment is especially clear in medical decision-making. The law has been willing to accord young people the right to consent to treatment in their best interests, but has been far more reluctant to accept full adolescent autonomy, including the right to refuse such treatment. This chapter considers the assessment of young people’s competence to make decisions concerning their medical treatment. It then considers the authority of parents and courts to overrule adolescents’ decisions to refuse treatment. There are strong reasons to argue that parents should no longer have such authority, which is increasingly out of step with medical practice and developments in children’s rights. The jurisdiction of the courts to do so is well-established but will only provide an adequate safeguard if sufficient weight is placed on young people’s rights to bodily integrity and decision-making. The chapter concludes by considering the application of these principles in the context of adolescent’s use of contraception and abortion.