Report: When Abortion Becomes a Crime

Starting from the issue on abortion, we tried to restrict the debate by focusing on the controversy relating to fetal pain, which is the gestation age limit in which the fetus begins to feel pain.
At the beginning of this project, when we drawed the protocol of research, we
hypothesized that may be exist an influence between science and law.
In fact, a summary research allowed us to know two important aspect of the issue:
– first, there are many different laws on abortion, in particular connected to gestational age limit, and this fact brings us to think that aren’t an univocal point of views;
– secondly, there is an intense debate on the argument, so this implies possible consequences in politics and laws.
Starting with these premises, we conducted our research always in two parallel ways, science and laws, and we could constantly compare their development.
At the end of our analysis, we can observe that there is a really mutual influence between the scientific debate, with its achievements, and the frequent changes in abortion law, how it’s proved by the temporal coincidence among the new scientific discovers related of the week when fetus begins to feel pain, and , by other hand, the gestational age limit imposed by laws.
The initial question remains a question, because there is an univocal point of view about the week, so we now ask for: when will the controversy find a real end?

Website: Life Motion. When a Foetus Starts to Be

The website aims to simplify a little bit the controversy through an output that allows the average user knowledge of a topic of interest, but whose knowledge is limited to the scientific world.
The narrative line chosen presents the dispute through the story of the anatomical development of the foetus week by week by academics’ citations.
The foetus is represented by an abstraction of the main physical skills of the development, symbolized by circles of different shapes and sizes, related to the importance of the specific feature in the debate.
In parallel, from every week user can access the world map where there are geolocated both the scientists network and the different abortion laws.
After knowing the development week by week, user may also choose to compare data by weeks or by means of the skills of the foetus, to put greater emphasis on the density of the debate.

Website
note: we do not guarantee that the website is cross browser. we apologise if you experience some problems while browsing the website

Authors

Alice Colombo
Chiara Galiano
Claudia Crespi
Jessica Camisasca
Francesco Ceciliani