ABSTRACT
Social regulatory policy refers to issues having to do with moral codes and other relationships among individuals and social groups that the state regulates to a greater or lesser extent. Criminal justice covers a wide area and includes capital punishment, the oldest policy in which the unusual characteristics of social regulatory policy have been observed. As with capital punishment, the judiciary did not play a major role in the abortion debate, unlike in the United States; this was a political decision, made by political bodies, most centrally the House of Commons. Educated and working women are more likely to support women's empowerment, which suggests that more women will be elected to the House of Commons and sit in the cabinet. It may be that the trend toward social permissiveness holds greater sway on those issues in which the minority is identified by practice and values rather than by ascriptive group identification.
