Abstract
The present chapter is an analysis of how 10 women described their positions on abortion prior to and after deciding to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. The discursive features of their pre- and post-decision accounts are contrasted, noting the ways their pre-abortion accounts resembled the generalized, impartial, simplistic accounts that characterize political abortion rhetoric, and how they reframed and reconstructed more experiential, complex, integrated, and objective accounts, which then informed their changed position on the issue of abortion.
“Feminist thinkers must self-consciously and critically confront various traditions of political discourse, feminist and nonfeminist. There are among us, for example, those who seek solutions to our public and private dilemmas by depriving us of a grammar of moral discourse and forcing all of life under a set of terms denuded of a critical edge. In so doing, they would deprive the human object, female and male, of the capacity to think, to judge, to question, and to act, for all these activities are importantly constituted by an everyday, ordinary language infused with moral terms. We must be alert to such destructive options as we break the silence of traditional political thought on questions of women's historic oppression and the absence of women from the realm of public speech” (Elshtain, 1982, p. 605).
TopIntroduction
The present chapter focuses on a contrast between 10 people’s pre-pregnancy anti-abortion accounts, and their changed, more objective positions post-pregnancy that accompanied a decision to have an abortion. These accounts, collected 21 years after the passage of Roe v. Wade in the United States, are analyzed against the backdrop of a discussion of three factors related to abortion in the United States since 1973: 1) Historically ambivalent public opinion on the moral and legal status of abortion; 2) The stubborn taboo against personally situated abortion accounts; And 3) A longstanding, unwarranted privileging of the indicatively “male” (Gilligan, 1982) discourse that characterizes public, political rhetoric over a situated discourse that draws from personal experience. The current chapter describes how 10 individuals communicated with the author, a sympathetic listener under conditions of confidentiality, about their pro-life beliefs prior to deciding to have an abortion, their decisions to terminate their unplanned pregnancies, and their subsequent changed perspectives on abortion. Their pre-abortion accounts are shown to resemble the universal, impartial, and simplistic structure of publicly facing political scientific discourse while their post-pregnancy accounts constitute more complex and personally situated formulations of the decision-making process, constructing what the author claims is a discourse of “strong objectivity” (Harding, 1991, 1993) resembling the more ambivalent discourse of American public opinion that has persisted for nearly 50 years.
Grounded in their communication with a sympathetic Other, encouraged to detail their experiences with neither an imposition of taboo nor an expectation of stigma, the interviewees talked about the particularities of their private lives, the complexity of their developing understanding of what it means to be a pregnant person, a parent, a partner, an employee, a student, a daughter, among other intersectional identities that situate their experiences and considerations about an unwanted pregnancy. While the individuals whose stories are told in this chapter are not politicians or scientists, their explorations into their personal circumstances are powerful models of how to reimagine a more objective knowledge about the realities and complexities of an abortion decision in ways that publicly facing political rhetoric about abortion leaves out in its attempt to generalize, distill, distance, convince1.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Political Rhetoric: Communicative strategies used to construct persuasive arguments in political debate.
Masculinized Communication: Ways of communicating that conform to and reflect societal expectations about masculinity.
Feminist Standpoint Theory: A form of epistemology that claims that knowledge is grounded in one’s social position.
Indexicality: The condition in which a sign (word, symbol) points to (or indexes) some object in the context in which it occurs.
Strong Objectivity: Coined by feminist philosopher Sandra Harding who suggests that starting research from the lives of women “strengthens standards of objectivity.”
Epistemology: Theory of knowledge.
Discourse: A system of thought, knowledge, or communication that frames one’s experience and interpretation of the world.
Abortion: Termination of a pregnancy through the deliberate removal or involuntary expulsion (as in “miscarriage”) of an embryo or fetus.