Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
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Books: Textbooks
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This chapter explores the law on abortion and contraception in the UK through a feminist lens, considering ethical perspectives on reproductive autonomy and critiques of the current law from this viewpoint. This chapter introduces two key abortion law reform debates: decriminalisation, in light of increasing investigations and prosecutions of suspected illegal abortions; and abortion on the grounds on fetal disability, following recent legal challenges to this ground. Perspectives from disability rights advocates are introduced here to highlight the discriminatory nature of the law. Finally, this chapter introduces the reproductive justice framework – a concept developed by Black women in the US context – and applies it as a critique of court-ordered abortion and contraceptive decisions for people with intellectual disabilities.
This chapter explores current debates on planning and growth. It begins by assessing the proponents of good growth, including sustainable development, doughnut economics and inclusive growth. It then moves on to green growth, which is grounded in the ecological modernisation framework. It pays particular attention to the circular economy model and to debates about delinking economic activity and resource use. Finally, it addresses the degrowth arguments and considers its suitability as a basis for a new planning approach. The chapter concludes by arguing for a pragmatic post-growth perspective.
This chapter explores the relevance of ethnicity, sexuality, and age in the law of assisted reproduction and infertility. We consider the extent to which the law engages with the interests of individuals of different ethnicities, LGBTQI+ individuals and families, and different age groups. The impact of this, including the symbolic messages that the law communicates through to the effect that clinical practice has on families undergoing treatment, can be felt at several levels. With this in mind, this chapter explores the ways in which the voices of non-dominant groups become marginalised in discourses surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and how we can foreground a more diverse range of voices in relation to this.
This chapter is concerned with medical decision-making for, with, and by mature children. Through a combination of academic discourse absent from the dominant literature and a case study from fiction (The Children Act by Ian McEwan), this chapter conducts a fresh exploration of ethical dilemmas that arise in child medical law. This chapter discusses the incremental changes in interpretation and application of the Gillick test, sections 2(1) and 3(1) of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and section 8 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969 to understand minors’ power to consent and the much more limited power to refuse.
Clinical research is the controlled experimentation of drugs, devices, and procedures tested on human participants. Ethics of clinical research is the systematic investigation of the ethical issues that arise from this practice. The ethical knot at the centre of clinical research hinges on the question of how to balance the benefits for future patients with the burdens and risk for current participants. The chapter first discusses the roots and foundations of clinical research ethics through a historically informed outlook. We then present two key and interrelated concepts in research ethics: clinical equipoise and therapeutic misconception. Second, the chapter discusses the emergence of adaptive and platform trials in the COVID-19 pandemic and unpacks the ethical and epistemological implications of adaptive trials for the concepts of clinical equipoise, and therapeutic misconception, the long-standing idea in clinical research that we should strive to keep the aims of research and the aims of care as clearly separate.
Many communities have banded together to take over built environment assets and use these to deliver a variety of services and activities. They typically do this using a social enterprise organisational form. This chapter explores such social enterprises, looking at the research literature on how they operate and the challenges they face. The way that local planning can support them includes a discussion of the concept of ‘community’ and the unintended consequences of relying on communities in this way. There is an extended discussion of social enterprises managing community assets in the Western Isles of Scotland and in two locations on the western coast of Ireland.
Infrastructure is the means by which energy is supplied, water supplied and disposed of, waste managed and transport provided. This chapter looks at the debates about recent ‘splintering’ of infrastructure and considers how community-based infrastructure fits in to these debates. It looks at the literature on a wide variety of community-based infrastructures but provides a more extended discussion of community-based energy, largely renewable energy, in France. This provides an insight into how planning can support such community-based offerings. The issue of planning for infrastructure in a way that can incorporate community-based projects is returned to in Chapter 10.
The conclusion highlights that mental health is a growing and critical public health challenge. Mental health remains poorly understood and services have been underfunded and underdeveloped. Mental health problems are not distributed equally across the population; rather, they are disproportionately associated with poverty and disadvantage. While there has been considerable progress in this policy area, much work is required to address long-standing systemic issues.
