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The response to COVID-19 has been mired in political debates. In a moment of scarcity, especially with regard to medical equipment and capacity, the question of who deserves the few available resources becomes front and center. It is in this context that abortion access has been injected into the political and medical response to COVID-19. There are three main sites of the ongoing abortion debate in the COVID-19 context. First, in the application of the Hyde Amendment to the CARES Act, second, in the attempt by state legislators to classify abortion as an elective procedure that cannot be performed during a time of PPE and personnel shortages, and, finally, a move by state attorney generals (AGs) to seek greater access abortion via telehealth through changing the FDA rules on a necessary abortifacient. This essay describes the current status of the terrain and the potential long-term implications on abortion access and care.

My comments today seek to highlight how social and economic rights
advocates, particularly those concerned with the right to health, engage
with ongoing debates about the role of criminal law in human rights. In
particular, I emphasize how many "right to health" campaigns fight for the
decriminalization of laws that result in the arrest of marginalized
communities or health workers. This trend within right to health advocacy
complicates what has been called the anti-impunity turn in human rights. In
other words, although many scholars have correctly highlighted the rise of a
carceral agenda in human rights, there is also ongoing, and perhaps growing,
emphasis on decriminalization in the context of social and economic rights.
This presentation gives a brief overview of the fight for decriminalization
in the context of the right to health, highlights the challenges faced by
advocates of in those campaigns, and reflects on some cautionary tales
emerging from these fights for decriminalization.

Since early in the HIV epidemic, epidemiologists identified individuals who transact sex as a high-risk group for contracting HIV. Where the issue of transacting sex has been framed as sex work, harm-reduction advocates and scholars call for decriminalization as a primary legal solution to address HIV. Where the issue is defined as trafficking, advocates known as abolitionists argue instead for the criminalization of the purchase of sex. Global health governance institutions are porous to these competing ideas and ideologies. This article first historicizes the contestation between harm-reduction and abolition in global governance on health. The paper then turns to a new arena in which these battles are playing out: measurement and indicators. The contested political environment of the sex work and trafficking debates has resulted in numerous calls to accurately measure "the problem" so that law and policy makers can identify appropriate legal solutions. Rather than being an objective technical tool for effective policymaking, however, I argue that data and indicators serve as a site of politics and governance. Building on literature from law and sociology, I analyze the political battles being waged through the data and indicators on trafficking that reproduce rather than resolve the larger debate on sex work and trafficking. Indicators become instrumental in providing the justification for the competing legal positions. In other words, how people and issues are counted and defined is instrumental for how laws and policy recommendations are made. Finally, in keeping with other critics of the over-emphasis on criminal solutions to trafficking and sex work, I argue that the ongoing legitimation of criminalization projects vis-à-vis indicators comes at a cost to structural solutions to address the underlying factors that lead to violence and exploitation associated with trafficking or sex work.

Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but there is still little agreement on the social and moral legitimacy of commercial sex. There are, of course, those who consider sex sacred and its sale a sin, and there are libertarians who are willing to accept nearly any degree of sexual freedom. But plenty of people have views that lie somewhere in between, and they are fighting over the fairness, regulation, and even the precise definition of what advocates and practitioners increasingly refer to as 'sex work.' As research and experience show, change is essential for the rights of sex workers -- the very thing abolitionists claim they wish to protect. Sex workers deserve not only the right to choose how they make a living, but also the right to be free from the fear, mistreatment, and -- at the root of it all -- misconceptions that have long plagued their industry. Adapted from the source document.