Ms Amrita Krishnakumar (LLB (Edinburgh); MA (KCL))

Thesis title: Mind the Legal Gap: Mental Capacity, Women’s Decision-Making, and Access to Abortion in England and Scotland

Biography

Background

Amrita Krishnakumar is a doctoral candidate in law at the University of Edinburgh, where she is supervised by Professor Anne-Maree Farrell and Dr Catriona McMillan. Her thesis addresses a gap that has received no sustained critical attention in legal scholarship: the intersection of abortion and mental capacity law, where legal authority over reproductive decision-making is allocated, displaced, and justified. Focusing on women deemed to lack capacity in England and Scotland, she asks to what extent section 1(1) of the Abortion Act 1967 adequately facilitates access to abortion for these women, and to what extent the courts adequately consider their position in cases involving termination. To examine this, the thesis develops an analytical framework organised around three connected theoretical concepts: autonomy, vulnerability, and protection. Its original contribution lies in the first sustained intra-UK comparison of how the two jurisdictions apply shared statutory frameworks to produce materially different conditions of access.

Her broader research interests include reproductive rights and abortion law, mental capacity and medical law, feminist legal theory, relational autonomy, and the regulation of emerging health technologies. Alongside her doctoral studies, Amrita has held research assistantships with Professor Farrell, reviewing current legislative frameworks and gathering evidence from more than twenty advocacy bodies on mental health and abortion in Scotland, work that informed Professor Farrell's contribution to the Scottish Government's Expert Advisory Group on the Review of Abortion Law, and with Dr Emily Postan, mapping the EU regulation of generative-AI and XR-based mental health technologies. She also works with the product and engineering teams at Kernel, an AI company, where she trains and evaluates the language models behind its automation tools, giving her a practitioner's view of current technologies.

At Edinburgh Law School, she is a content editor for the Edinburgh Student Law Review, assessing submissions through the journal's double-blind peer-review process, holds the position of blog content editor at the Mason Institute, and serves as social officer on the Postgraduate Student Research Board.

Qualifications

LLB with International Relations (Edinburgh); MA in Medical Ethics and Law (King's College London)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Edinburgh University Law School, Mason Institute, Edinburgh Futures Institute

Knowledge exchange

Amrita has most recently presented her work at Lund University as part of the Health Law Centre's Spring Seminar Series. Her seminar can be found here: https://www.law.lu.se/calendar/seminar-mind-legal-gap-mental-capacity-womens-decision-making-and-access-abortion-england-and.

Affiliated research centres

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