Abortion Politics

Public Policy in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Marianne Githens, Dorothy McBride Stetson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136660221
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Abortion Politics: Public Policy in Cross CulturalPerspective focuses on current abortion policy and practice in the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan and aims to provide a comprehensive, stimulating and balanced picture of current abortion policy in a cross-cultural perspective. The contributors deal with comparative abortion policy including recent developments in Ireland, Germany and Eastern Europe.

PART I

RHETORIC AND REFORM:

Struggles over the Law

INTRODUCTION

In Western Europe and North America, debates over abortion policy reform began in the 1960s and 1970s, when policymakers liberalized nearly all laws that had criminalized abortion. For most of these countries, the debate over the basic outlines of that abortion policy has receded from the public agenda. The exceptions–the United States, Canada, Ireland, and West Germany–show how this very contentious issue can travel between legislative and legal arenas. And, along the way, perspectives on the issue seem to become increasingly polarized, resisting resolution. At the same time, dramatic political, economic, social, and ideological changes in the transitional regimes of Eastern Europe since 1989 have brought the Soviet-style legal abortion policies up for review, and this potentially divisive issue has become entangled in society-wide struggles over the place of religion and the organization of the state itself.

The chapters in Part I review the types of abortion debates that characterize these policy conflicts and analyze how they are shaped by different national contexts. Laura Woliver’s analysis of amicus curiae briefs presented in the Webster v. Reproductive Services case counterpoises the rhetorical images of fetus and woman so characteristic of the pro-life/pro-choice contest. The pluralistic nature of interest-group relations with the state in the United States provides what may be a unique situation where the debate is carried out by interest groups in a legal arena: the Supreme Court.

For the most part, the constitutionalizing of the abortion issue constrains debate to a legalist framework, stating it as a contest over rights phrased in absolute terms. Scheppele’s description of the efforts of constitutional courts in Canada, Ireland, and Hungary, as well as in the United States, shows how fitting the complex abortion issue into the rules of constitutional discourse distorts the debate, even putting it in a “legal straitjacket.” In none of these cases has the constitutionalizing of the abortion issue resulted in a settlement of the conflict.

Following the abortion debates in Eastern European countries, Githens brings out how this issue, which is usually described in pro-life and pro-choice terms, has become currency for major social conflicts over religion, national identity, and the form of the state itself. Although Eastern European feminist activists often employ ideas of reproductive choice, similar to Western feminist demands, they are participating in contests that are unlike any policy controversies in the West. For one thing, the laws under the communist regimes were patterned after the Soviet laws, which permitted abortion while making access to contraceptives difficult. Eastern European women were thus accustomed to using abortion as the primary means of birth control. Yet, at the same time, official ideologies of communism were not supportive of abortion, seeing the need for the procedure as a remnant of class oppression of the poor.

The opening up of these regimes to more democratic processes unleashed institutions, primarily the Catholic Church, as well as nationalist forces who considered access to abortion as one of the oppressive features of the communist regime they hated. The feminists find themselves allying with organizations tied to the old communist parties challenging rhetoric that foresees the idealization of the maternal heroine and the abolition of abortion as the means to “renew the state.”

The rhetoric in North America and Europe makes the search for “common ground,” as Scheppele points out, difficult and often futile. Readers will note that some of the attempts at compromise yield jerry-rigged policies. The present compromise in the United States continues to guarantee women’s right to privacy in making abortion decisions in the first trimester, yet permits the government to erect various barriers to the exercise of her choice. In Germany, the courts ordered that abortion be criminalized, but not punished. Hungary followed the lead of many European countries in drafting laws that permit abortions only in certain conditions of pregnancy and then interpreting conditions, like the social problems of families, very liberally to permit access to abortion. The Irish court has established a hierarchy of rights that prohibits abortions in Ireland but permits women to travel to England to obtain them. The forging of long-term compromises still eludes policymakers in the countries described in this section.

CHAPTER 1

RHETORIC AND SYMBOLS IN AMERICAN ABORTION POLITICS

LAURA R. WOLIVER

INTRODUCTION

The abortion debate has raged for years in American politics. This controversial issue has drawn in many individuals and interest groups. A distinct pattern of political participation via amicus briefs exists in American abortion politics. Interest groups sometimes submit “friend-of-the-court briefs” in attempts to persuade and educate members of the United States Supreme Court about their position on issues.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989 came after a long campaign by pro-life activists to overturn the ruling in Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion in the United States. The decision expanded the ability of the state and territorial governments to place obstacles in the way of women seeking abortion services. Although the decision was seen as a pro-life victory, legal abortion was retained.

Building on previous research (Woliver, 1991b, 1992a, 1992b), this study looks at the rhetoric and metaphors in the 78 amicus briefs (a record number) filed in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. (Appendix A lists the amicus briefs.) American policies at the time of the preparations for the Webster case were showing steady erosion of many of the principles derived from the landmark Roe decision (see Halva-Neubauer, 1990). Many groups on both sides of the abortion debate saw Webster as the case that might overrule Roe and jeopardize legal abortion. With such high stakes, many groups and professional associations joined in the amicus effort for Webster. For this study, these briefs were read with an eye toward the various definitions of fetuses, pregnant women, abortion providers, along with larger issues of women’s rights and religious freedom.

Ultimately, more than 300 organizations, using more than 120 lawyers, drafted 31 friend-of-the-court briefs for the pro-choice position in the Webster case (Coyle, 1989: 27; see also, Craig and O’Brien, 1993). The pro-choice briefs for Webster were coordinated by attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Reproductive Rights Project, Planned Parenthood, and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). The pro-life interests in Webster submitted 46 amici curiae briefs supporting the position of the state of Missouri. In addition, President Reagan’s Justice Department offered a Solicitor General’s brief. For the first time ever, a United States Solicitor General’s brief called for an overturning of Roe.

Fascinating coalitions of interests worked together on several of the briefs. There was a unique mobilization of the professional and academic communities to rally around Roe and protect legalized abortion. The American Medical Association and other medical groups filed compelling briefs. One-hundred and sixty-seven scientists and physicians signed a brief maintaining that viability for a fetus was still about 24 weeks gestation.

One pro-choice Webster brief signed by 281 historians attempted to refute the position of the United States Justice Department and pro-life amici that abortion had been outlawed throughout United States history, therefore making Roe an aberration. Law professors, 885 strong, signed a Webster brief. Many of the pro-choice briefs displayed a multi-issue reproductive rights perspective, discussing legal abortion within the context of how women must negotiate their lives in America.

Rhetoric, especially the metaphors, used in the briefs is an important representation of a group’s interests. The word choice in the briefs gives clues to the deeper ideological meaning the interest groups and individuals wish to convey. Metaphors are common in rhetorical discourse and are “omnipresent in speech” (Ivie, 198: 167). The metaphors, based on fine distinctions, are not obvious and some terms may not even appear, at first, to be metaphors. For example, pro-life groups frequently label abortion clinics as abortion “industries”. Although the differentiation between the two terms, “clinic” and “industry,” may appear slight and inconsequential, heavy ideological meanings are embedded in phrases chosen by pro-life groups as well as by pro-choice groups (Woliver and McDonald, 1993).

Through words only (not claims), such terms as “property,” “religion,” “right of privacy,” “freedom of speech,” “rule of law,” and “liberty” are more pregnant than propositions ever could be. They are the basic structural elements, the building blocks of ideology. (McGee, 1980, pp. 6–7)

Word choice is even more powerful when it is not explained or defended, but accepted as the truth. The danger lies in accepting these terms and words at face value without questioning or analyzing possible hidden meanings. When statements are represented as objective truth, it is important to explore concealed perspectives or ideologies (Mumby, 1989: 30).

Any political speech, then, evokes its most compelling cognitions in a large part of its audience (and in the speaker himself) through the metaphoric views it takes for granted rather than through those it explicitly asserts and calls to people’s attention. (Edelman, 1971: 69)

In the amicus briefs filed in Webster, the writers did not shy away from metaphors, and in fact they effectively used these tools of discourse. Their arguments and rhetoric were even more forceful because they often chose to avoid an explanation for word choices, making their phrasing appear to be the correct, proper, or commonly used terminology. In abortion politics, a subject so evocative of emotions and symbols, the language used to frame the debate has heavy implications for policymaking. Whether abortion is defined as murder or a health care option shapes the rest of the policy debate, and very likely the outcome as well.

Throughout this chapter the opposing sides in the abortion debate are referred to as pro-choice and pro-life. These are the terms that the activists use to describe themselves. Although the accuracy of these terms can be debated, it is preferable to use the self-definition of the activists when describing their political behavior. This follows the decision rule Kristin Luker utilized in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984).

COMPARISON OF RHETORICAL MODES: IMAGES OF FETUSES AND WOMEN

One of the most common metaphors employed by the pro-life interest groups involved substituting the term “fetus” with variations of the term the “unborn.” Such consistent use of terms identifying and personalizing the fetus as an individual rests on the premise that a person exists and is alive from the moment of conception. They tend to ignore women altogether or refer to them only in their relation to the fetus.

Striking throughout the over one-thousand pages of these pro-life amicus briefs (single-spaced!) is the careful attention to terms. Fetuses are never called fetuses, they are always “unborn children,” “unborn life,” “prenatal life,” “children in the womb,” or “human life before birth.” Over forty versions of the term “unborn” were used by pro-life advocates, including “unborn grandchildren,” “viable unborn,” “minor child,” and “unborn human life.” Right to Life advocates refer to fetuses as “those who will be citizens if their lives are not ended in the womb” (Brief #10). A couple of pro-life briefs hardly ever use the word “woman” but instead call her the “mother.” Discussions abound about “pregnancies,” not “pregnant women,” glossing over the fact that pregnancies occur within women. The United States Catholic Conference declares that the fetus and the woman are “separate patients” (Brief #20).

The motive for painting this picture is to evoke sympathy for what pro-life groups perceive to be independent human beings. These terms are value laden; they define as true the concept that the fetus is a living being from the moment of conception, a question about which scientists have yet to reach a consensus. Despite this fact, the New England Christian Action Council claims that the “consensus on conception is overwhelming” and there is an “unchallenged positive consensus that human life is fully and legally present ‘at every period of gestation’” (Brief #11). Right to Life advocates argue that life beginning at the moment of conception is a “natural and self-evident truism” (Brief #10). Because the pro-life groups assume they are correct and their interpretation of when life begins is the only interpretation, the arguments made are absolute, not allowing the subject to be open for compromise.

Although pro-life briefs make scant mention of what an undesired pregnancy means to women, the briefs do refer to women, mostly in a chastising way. As Baer has noted, “Women are the targets of most moral lectures. On this particular issue [abortion], women get lectured by the religious right, by the male left, by ‘feminists for life,’ and by politicians who wish the pro-choice movement would disappear” (1990: 578). The dominant voice in the pro-life briefs comes from lawyers, scholars, interest groups, and religious leaders who can never become pregnant and who do not know the thoughts of a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy. “Constitutional law is male, while the decision to have an abortion is female” (Baer, 1990: 560). Missing in the pro-life briefs, for instance, is a central first step recognition of what one scholar has called “the very geography of pregnancy” (Gallagher, 1989: 187).

In several places in the pro-life briefs it is striking how the women actually involved in the debates are invisible. One example, which also shows how pro-life groups use medical advances and fetal medicine in their logic, comes from Brief #15 by The Association for Public Justice et al.:

Today an embryologist or fetologist can diagnose and treat an unborn child independently of treating the mother, including removing the child from its mother’s womb for surgery, and then returning it to the womb to complete gestation. Facing such ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I RHETORIC AND REFORM: Struggles over the Law
• PART II THE REALITY FACTOR: Availability and Access to Abortion Services
• PART III RHETORIC, REALITY, AND RIGHTS: The Implications of the Policy Environment
• PART IV BEYOND ABORTION: New Reproductive Technologies
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX