Full Description
When journalists, academics, and politicians describe the North American anti-abortion movement, they often describe a campaign that is male-dominated, aggressive, and even violent in its tactics, religious in motivation, anti-women in tone, and fetal-centric in arguments and rhetoric. Are they correct?
In The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon suggest that the reality is far more complicated, particularly in Canada. Today, anti-abortion activism increasingly presents itself as "pro-women": using female spokespersons, adopting medical and scientific language to claim that abortion harms women, and employing a wide range of more subtle framing and narrative rhetorical tactics that use traditionally progressive themes to present the anti-abortion position as more feminist than pro-choice feminism.
Following a succinct but comprehensive overview of the two-hundred year history of North American debate and legislation on abortion, Saurette and Gordon present the results of their systematic, five-year quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, supplemented by extensive first-person observations, and outline the implications that flow from these findings. Their discoveries are a challenge to our current assumptions about the abortion debate today, and their conclusions will be compelling for both scholars and activists alike.
Contents
Preface
Ch. 1 - Introduction
Part I: Historicizing the Abortion Debate in North America
Ch. 2 - The History of the Abortion Debate in the United States
Ch. 3 The Abortion Debate in the United States Post Roe v. Wade
Ch. 4 - The History of The Abortion Debate in Canada
Ch. 5 - The Abortion Debate in Canada: Morgentaler and Beyond
Ch. 6 - Intermezzo: The History of the Abortion Debate in North America
Part II: The Changing Voice of Canada's Contemporary Anti-Abortion Movement
Ch. 7 - Shifting Strategies: A Little Old, A Lot of New, A Bit of Both
Ch. 8 - Women Up Front, God Out Back: The Changing Anti-Abortion Arguments
Ch. 9 - We're All Progressives Now: Rebranding the Movement
Ch. 10 - Anti-Abortionism as the New Feminism: Reframing the Position
Ch. 11 - From Jezebel to Snow White: Moralizing Through Narrativizing
Part III: Comparisons, Conclusions, Implications
Ch. 12. Pro-Woman' Discourse in the United States
Ch. 13 - Theoretical Implications
Ch. 14 - Where to Now? Practical Implications For Abortion Rights Advocates
Appendix A: Glossary of Key Legal and Political Events, Organizations and Individuals
Appendix B: Historical Timeline - Abortion Politics in UK, Canada and US
Appendix C: Historical Timeline - Abortion Discourse in Canada and US
