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This article presents information on the medicalization and de-medicalization of abortion in the United States and Great Britain in the last 140 years. It also discusses criminalization of abortion in both countries in the late 19th and early 20th century as well as the establishment of a therapeutic exception to the criminalization of abortion. The authors conducting this study believe that the concept of medicalization has a long history in the sociology of health and illness. A section of researchers suggest that medicalization may also have benefits such as the legitimation of claims to illness and the reduction of stigma for conditions and practices that were once considered crimes or sins.

Drawing on my dissertation research, this presentation argues that our conceptualization of health policy must be broadened to consider the influence of supra- and sub-national scales on health policy-making within nation-states. The history of AIDS policy highlights complex interrelationships between three arms of the health system that operate at different scales. First, basic scientific research about HIV disease and its possible treatments is at the core of the health system response. It is pursued by an international scientific community with a long history of intensive collaboration across national boundaries, which produces one accumulating body of knowledge resulting from the work of researchers from all nations. Second, the public health community merges medical and behavioral research to design educational initiatives to prevent the spread of HIV. These ideas circulate among professionals in different parts of the world, and decisions about what strategies to implement and how to design specific programs are made at international, national, and sub-national levels. Finally, some level of health care is provided to individuals who are HIV-positive or have AIDS. Treatment of individual bodies is affected by structures and protocols to finance and deliver this care. Here cross-national differences in interscalar arrangements have an impact. In the UK, these decisions are largely made at the national level and implemented in a fairly universalistic fashion. In the US, decision-making is divided among national- and state-level actors and implementation differs across various types of private and public medical provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this presentation is to advocate a systematic engagement of health policy studies with sociological approaches to the welfare state, and to argue that both bodies of work stand to benefit from such an approach. I will first discuss some of the main elements of health policy studies and welfare state studies, and point out some of the limitations of each of these bodies of literature. I will then discuss the strengths of a few works that take health policy seriously within the broader context of the welfare state. I will end by indicating some of the ways in which I think our understanding of both health policy specifically and of social provision as a whole in industrialized nations will benefit from a combined research agenda. Along the way, I will make reference to examples from my dissertation research comparing health policy-making around HIV and AIDS in the United States and Britain since the beginning of the epidemic, focusing in particular on the period since 1990. A main project of this work is to merge cultural and institutional understandings of how the two countries have responded to AIDS, and to ascertain the extent to which the different patterns of response can be attributed to one institutional precursor: the existence of a much more centralized health care system in Britain than in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]