Related Papers
Center for the Study of Democracy
Countermovement and Media Coverage Outcomes: A Case Study of the Abortion Debate
2001 •
Deana A . Rohlinger
Health and Human Rights
Rights-based Claims Made by UK Anti-abortion Activists
2019 •
Pam Lowe
This article analyzes the ways in which rights-based arguments are utilized by anti-abortion activists in the UK. Drawing on an ethnographic study featuring 30 abortion clinic sites, anti-abortion marches, and other campaigns, we argue that rights-based claims form an important part of their arguments. In contrast to the way in which human rights law has been interpreted to support abortion provision, anti-abortion activists seek to undermine this connection through a number of mechanisms. First, they align their arguments with scientific discourse and attempt to downplay the religious motivation for their action. While this is an attempt to generate greater credibility for their campaign, ultimately, the coopting of scientific arguments actually becomes embedded in their religious practice, rather than being separate from it. Second, they reconfigure who should be awarded human rights, arguing not only that fetuses should be accorded human rights but also that providing abortion to...
Relations of Abortion: Crip Approaches to Reproductive Justice
Michelle Jarman
The article challenges the politically reductive ways that disability is leveraged by both antiabortionists and pro-choice supporters—on one side to claim " protection " of all life, and on the other to use disability as a crucial justification for abortion rights. It centers disability for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the deep connections of disability to the ongoing political erosion of access to reproductive healthcare services, which disproportionately impacts women of color and economically vulnerable women; and second, to build on recent scholarship suggesting a merging of critical disability and reproductive justice approaches to reconfigure the dominant pro-choice public discourse on abortion. To bring these two approaches closer together, this article focuses on two key elements of the abortion debate—access and autonomy—from a critical disability studies lens. By foregrounding disability approaches to access and critiques of autonomy, the complicated relational concerns of reproduction are brought into focus. Ultimately, it argues that an interconnected relational context provides a more nuanced approach that both supports women's access to reproductive options and demands an expansion of the political frame based on choice and rights to include valuing and sustaining lives, challenging precarity, and supporting complex reproductive decisions. Keywords: abortion access / disability rights / disability studies / prenatal testing / pro-life versus pro-choice / reproductive justice / selective abortion Over the last several years, especially since the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, the reproductive rights of women in the United States have come under renewed siege as pro-life politicians have pushed for and enacted severe restrictions on abortion rights, insurance coverage for contraception, access to family planning, nonbiased sex education, and related healthcare. According
Deviant Behavior
Stigma Rituals as Pathways to Activism: Stigma Convergence in a Post Abortion Recovery Group
2016 •
Jonelle Husain
Religion and Gender
Feminist Scholarship and Its Relevance for Political Engagement: The Test Case of Abortion in the U.S
2011 •
Margaret Kamitsuka
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
Considering Social Policy on Abortion: Respecting Women as Moral Agents
2014 •
Rebecca Todd Peters
The Social Construction of Deviance, Activism, and Identity in Women's Accounts of Abortion
2013 •
Mallary Allen
Social Science & Medicine
Visualising abortion: emotion discourse and fetal imagery in a contemporary abortion debate
2005 •
Nick Hopkins
This paper presents an analysis of a recent UK anti-abortion campaign in which the use of fetal imagery--especially images of fetal remains--was a prominent issue. A striking feature of the texts produced by the group behind the campaign was the emphasis given to the emotions of those viewing such imagery. Traditionally, social scientific analyses of mass communication have problematised references to emotion and viewed them as being of significance because of their power to subvert the rational appraisal of message content. However, we argue that emotion discourse may be analysed from a different perspective. As the categorisation of the fetus is a social choice and contested, it follows that all protagonists in the abortion debate (whether pro- or anti-abortion) are faced with the task of constructing the fetus as a particular entity rather than another, and that they must seek to portray their preferred categorisation as objective and driven by an 'out-there' reality. Following this logic, we show how the emotional experience of viewing fetal imagery was represented so as to ground an anti-abortion construction of the fetus as objective. We also show how the arguments of the (pro-abortion) opposition were construed as totally discrepant with such emotions and so were invalidated as deceitful distortions of reality. The wider significance of this analysis for social scientific analyses of the abortion debate is discussed.
The Institutionalization of America's Abortion War
Ronald P Hesselgrave
In this paper I suggest that current extreme polarization over abortion is best understood in the context of Americas' culture war, which sociologist James Davison Hunter describes as a fundamental divide between two value systems—orthodoxy and progressivism. These two value systems have taken on the status of ultimacy such that they reflect two distinct worldviews or belief systems which vie for cultural dominance. Moreover, the conflict over abortion has become entrenched in American life largely because it has been institutionalized through three main polarizing forces: the public media which is characterized by “distortions of public rhetoric”; the battle over the family; and the politicization of American public life.
The Conscience Wars. Rethinking the Balance between Religion, Identity, and Equality
Transatlantic Conversations: The Emergence of Society-Protective Antiabortion Arguments in the United States, Europe, and Russia
2018 •
Kristina Stoeckl
This material has been published in The Conscience Wars. Rethinking the Balance between Religion and Equality edited by Susanna Mancini and Michel Rosenfeld. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works.
