Explores the complex issues of personhood, prenatal life and reproductive rights, international perspectives on the regulation of abortion, health professionals and the provision of abortion services, and prenatal diagnosis and abortion. Belinda Bennett is from The University of Sydney, Australia.

It is now 10 years since the disease we now know as SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—caused more than 700 deaths around the world and made more than 8,000 people ill. More recently, in 2009 the global community experienced the first influenza pandemic of the 21st century—the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. This paper analyses the major developments in international public health law relating to infectious diseases in the period since SARS and considers their implications for pandemic planning.

It is clear that where a disease affects men and women differently, research on potential therapies or cures should include both men and women and should examine whether the therapy is effective and safe for both sexes. In this paper we consider whether there is an appropriate role for law in regulating to ensure an examination of these sex- and gender-specific aspects in health research. We consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of pursuing a regulatory approach to achieving gender equity (...) in the field of women’s health by exploring first, the meaning of gender equity, and second, the regulatory mechanisms that might be best suited to promoting the goal of gender equity. Within our examination of different regulatory forms and mechanisms, we also interrogate the shift from gender-neutral provisions relating to sex in favor of generalized notions of fairness that remove any specific consideration of sex. (shrink)