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Promoting Fetal Personhood: The Rhetorical and Legislative Strategies of the Pro-Life Movement after Planned Parenthood v. Casey
Abstract
:The article examines the pro-life movement's efforts to advance the legal, moral, and political arguments for fetal personhood in the period following the Supreme Court's case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It begins with an overview of the efforts to define the fetus as a legal person prior to Casey, and proceeds to describe the opportunity created for pro-life forces by the court's ambiguous holding on the issue of personhood.Examining rhetorical and legislative strategies, the article argues that pro-life forces have transformed their framing of the abortion issue, from one that pits fetal rights against maternal rights, to one that emphasizes the unique and intimate bond between the woman and the "child." This rhetorical shift coincides with legislative agendas that indirectly attack the central claim of mainstream pro-choice activists: That the fetus is not a person. The article examines the imagery used by pro-life activists and the substantive statutory reforms they advocate. By casting the relationship between woman and fetus as nonadversarial and pursuing legislation expanding the rights of the fetus, such activists have been effective in establishing indices of fetal personhood. The article contends that these strategies are effective and serve to undermine the rhetorical and legal foundations of the abortion right.
... Another theme in the current analysis that was not found in antiabortion arguments for Georgia's 6-week ban (9) was negative portrayals of people involved in abortions, including providers and patients. Foundational to these negative portrayals was the claim that abortions are dangerous, which has been a common claim among U.S. anti-abortion advocates at least since the U.S. Supreme Court's Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision in 1992 (32,36). Anti-abortion proponents have used this false claim to frame abortion restrictions as benefitting rather than harming women (32,(36)(37)(38). ...
... Foundational to these negative portrayals was the claim that abortions are dangerous, which has been a common claim among U.S. anti-abortion advocates at least since the U.S. Supreme Court's Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision in 1992 (32,36). Anti-abortion proponents have used this false claim to frame abortion restrictions as benefitting rather than harming women (32,(36)(37)(38). Claiming that abortions were harmful allowed proponents of the 6-week ban in South Carolina to both argue that abortion providers were deceiving patients about the risks of abortion and that abortion patients were being victimized. ...
... Since the U.S. Supreme Court's Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision in 1992, abortion opponents have strategically vilified abortion providers, claiming that they mislead people about the risks of abortion (36). This theme remains prominent in anti-abortion discourse today (33,37). ...
Background:
On June 24, 2022, The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving abortion legislation entirely up to states. However, anti-abortion activists and legislators have organized for decades to prevent abortion access through restrictive state-level legislation. In 2019, South Carolina legislators proposed a bill criminalizing abortion after 6 weeks gestation, before most people know they are pregnant. The current study examines the anti-abortion rhetoric used in legislative hearings for this extreme abortion restriction in South Carolina. By examining the arguments used by anti-abortion proponents, we aim to expose their misalignment with public opinion on abortion and demonstrate that their main arguments are not supported by and often are counter to medical and scientific evidence.
Methods:
We qualitatively analyzed anti-abortion discourse used during legislative hearings of SC House Bill 3020, The South Carolina Fetal Heartbeat Protection from Abortion Act. Data came from publicly available videos of legislative hearings between March and November 2019, during which members of the public and legislators testified for and against the abortion ban. After the videos were transcribed, we thematically analyzed the testimonies using a priori and emergent coding.
Results:
Testifiers (Anti-abortion proponents) defended the ban using scientific disinformation and by citing advances in science to redefine "life." A central argument was that a fetal "heartbeat" (i.e., cardiac activity) detected at 6 weeks gestation indicates life. Anti-abortion proponents used this to support their argument that the 6-week ban would "save lives." Other core strategies compared anti-abortion advocacy to civil rights legislation, vilified supporters and providers of abortion, and framed people who get abortions as victims. Personhood language was used across strategies and was particularly prominent in pseudo-scientific arguments.
Discussion:
Abortion restrictions are detrimental to the health and wellbeing of people with the potential to become pregnant and to those who are pregnant. Efforts to defeat abortion bans must be grounded in a critical and deep understanding of anti-abortion strategies and tactics. Our results reveal that anti-abortion discourse is extremely inaccurate and harmful. These findings can be useful in developing effective approaches to countering anti-abortion rhetoric.
... Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health services in the US and abroad. 2 Whether or not the US government should continue to fund Planned Parenthood has been the subject of ongoing debate, mainly due to the controversial practice of abortion (Halva-Neubauer and Zeigler, 2010;Devi, 2015;Silver and Kapadia, 2017); researchers have argued over the legality and subsequent funding for abortion (Primrose, 2012;Wharton et al., 2006). Supporters of Planned Parenthood have presented several arguments, including that it provides other medical services (Silver and Kapadia, 2017;Stevenson et al., 2016;House and Goldsmith, 1972). ...
... Supporters of Planned Parenthood have presented several arguments, including that it provides other medical services (Silver and Kapadia, 2017;Stevenson et al., 2016;House and Goldsmith, 1972). Those against Planned Parenthood also have expressed their position, mostly arguing against the practice of abortion (Halva-Neubauer and Zeigler, 2010;Ziegler, 2012;Devi, 2015). ...
... Given the overarching framing of abortion discourse in the United States, this is not necessarily surprising. Messaging about fetal life (e.g., 'Abortion stops a beating heart') is integral to the pro-life movement's assertion that abortion constitutes ending a life (Halva-Neubauer & Zeigler, 2010). Conversely, personal choice and bodily autonomy (e.g., 'My body, my choice') -another idea that participants brought up in their responses -has been a central component of the pro-choice movement's argument in favor of legal abortion (Fried, 2013). ...
Previous research indicates that abortion attitudes may vary across different contexts, such as the reason for abortion and gestational age of the pregnancy. To expand on these findings, we examined abortion attitudes as they pertain to fetal development-based bans. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, we assessed correlates of support and opposition to these types of bans and contextualized our quantitative findings by analyzing open-ended responses where participants provided the rationale for their close-ended responses. Approximately half of our sample was supportive of fetal development-based bans at implantation/fertilization or detection of a fetal heartbeat. Participants associated developmental markers with the beginning of ‘real’ life, personal responsibility, and the role of the government in legislating abortion, thereby indicating that these markers function as culturally established symbols. These interpretations are consistent with broader messaging and framing of the pro-life and pro-choice movements in the USA.
... In our analysis, references to the fetus as a person outweigh women's own personal stories of unintended pregnancy and abortion. This balance may support the anti-abortion movement's strategy of promoting the fetus as the "vulnerable victim" of abortion (Halva-Neubauer & Zeigler, 2010). ...
Background and objectives:
News coverage can shape public understanding of policy issues in important ways. In the last decade, many new state-level abortion restrictions have been passed, often based on claims about the safety of abortion care, yet little is known about recent news coverage of abortion. This study analyzes a sample of news on abortion in the United States and explores the implications for reproductive health policymakers, practitioners, and advocates.
Methods:
We analyzed a sample of news and opinion articles containing the term "abortion" published in three major U.S. newspaper sources in 2013 and 2016. The total sample was 783 unique pieces. We coded for story topics, references to fetal personhood, women's stories, and basic abortion facts. Three trained coders conducted the coding, with intercoder reliability rates ranging from 0.777 to 1.0.
Findings:
Most of the time abortion appears in the news, it is merely mentioned, rather than discussed substantively. Abortion is covered as a political issue more than a health issue. The personal experiences of people who get abortions are present in only 4% of the sample, and language personifying the fetus appears more often than women's abortion stories. State abortion restrictions are newsworthy, yet basic facts on the commonality and safety of abortion are virtually absent.
Conclusions:
This study suggests that the news does not support public understanding of abortion as a common, safe part of reproductive health care. Such framing may undermine public support for policies that protect access to this common health care service.
... For instance, pro-life activists adopt the rhetoric of fetal personhood, and advocate that abortion ends a human life. This ideology has consistently advanced the principle that the practice should be stopped, just like any other form of unjustified killing [24]. Challenging the mainstream pro-life rhetoric, feminist theorist Adrienne Rich states, "Arguments against abortion have in common a valuing of the unborn fetus over the living woman" [41]. ...
Social media provides a unique platform enabling public discourse around cross-cutting ideologies. In this paper, we provide a methodological lens for studying the discourses around the controversial topic of abortion on social media. Drawing from the theoretical framework of “Critical Discourse Analysis”, we study discourse around abortion on Twitter through analysis of language and the manifested socio-cultural practices. First,
employing a large dataset of over 700 thousand posts, we find that abortion discourse can be classified into three ideologies: For, Against, and Neutral to Abortion. We observe these ideological categories to be characterized by distinctive textual and psycholinguistic cues. Finally, we analyze the nature of discourse across ideologies against the backdrop of socio-cultural practices associated with abortion. Our findings reveal how the hegemonic nature of the rhetoric that has historically shaped the abortion debate in society is reconceptualized on Twitter. We discuss the role of social media as a public sphere that shapes critical discourse around controversial topics.
In the context of hashtag activism and hashtag feminism, this article examines the use of “camping” as a code for abortion on Twitter following the 2022 Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis approach, the analysis assesses the discursive practices of using “camping” as a symbol while considering the affordances and limitations of social media spaces in conveying messages that influence social and political life, such as abortion access advocacy online. The findings revealed the discursive practices created by the “camping” code and the impact of other users’ concerns around this iteration of hashtag activism that resulted in the following four themes: adoption, disidentification, rejection or caution, and redirection toward advocacy. This study presents the affordances of constitutive effects online and the limitations of using symbols within social media spaces to claim oneself as a “safe” person to trust in lieu of existing activist networks.
Abortion is one of the most contested social issues in the United States with three periods of high social movement activity: the physician anti‐abortion movement of the mid‐1800s, the abortion rights reform/repeal movement of the 1960s, and the post‐ Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision (410 US 113 in 1973). The Roe decision served as the catalyst for the two modern social movements most identified with the issue of abortion: the “Pro‐life Movement” and the “Pro‐choice Movement.” The following review summarizes the study of movements supporting and opposing abortion rights as considered by sociologists and other social scientists, predominately in the United States with some attention to the changing international dimensions of this debate.
In the summer of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the historic Roe v. Wade ruling, prompting various states to put forth ballot measures regarding state-level abortion rights. While earlier studies have established associations between demographics, such as religious beliefs and political ideologies, and attitudes towards abortion, the current research delves into the influence of psychological traits such as empathy, locus of control, and need for cognition on attitudes towards diverse abortion scenarios. A sample of 294 U.S. adults was obtained via Amazon Mechanical Turk, and participants were asked to provide their attitudes on seven abortion scenarios. They also responded to scales measuring empathy towards the pregnant woman and the unborn, locus of control, and need for cognition. Principal Component Analysis divided abortion attitudes into two categories: traumatic abortions (e.g., pregnancies due to rape) and elective abortions (e.g., the woman does not want the child anymore). After controlling for religious belief and political ideology, the study found psychological factors accounted for substantial variation in abortion attitudes. Notably, empathy towards the pregnant woman correlated positively with abortion support across both categories, while empathy towards the unborn revealed an inverse relationship. An internal locus of control was positively linked to support for both types of abortions. Conversely, external locus of control and need for cognition only positively correlated with attitudes towards elective abortion, showing no association with traumatic abortion attitudes. Collectively, these findings underscore the significant role psychological factors play in shaping public attitudes towards abortion.
In this article, in response to several calls for new theoretical and analytical tools to help us understand the nature of contemporary anti-feminist and anti-queer politics, I introduce the concept of ‘discourse capture’. I argue that discourse capture is a key backlash mechanism, characterised by its intention, scale, and undercover nature. Discourse capture occurs where progressive discourse is co-opted and manipulated to serve right-wing agendas. I outline four forms of discourse capture in practice – resignifying, shifting, mimicking, and twisting. Finally, in the context of existing feminist counter backlash strategies, I explore what a counter discourse capture strategy might comprise.
Conservative women in US state legislatures outpace their male colleagues in introducing anti-abortion policies. In doing so, they often frame anti-abortion policy standpoints in feminist terms. They assert abortion physically and emotionally damages women, and abortion providers fail to inform women. By centering women’s welfare, conservative women seek to enhance their representation, and wrest the mantle of being “pro-woman” from feminists. In this article, I analyse the use of feminist framing of anti-abortion bills by conservative women representatives. Their words signify a rise in the cooption of feminist language by conservative women and challenge the notion of representation.
In US political discourse, anti-abortion framing traditionally focuses on the right to life of the fetus. However, a “pro-life, pro-woman” frame increasingly gained ground among anti-abortion advocates inside and outside of elected office throughout the turn of the 21st century. The pro-woman frame in contemporary anti-abortion discourse situates abortion as inherently harmful for women – both psychologically and physically – and insists that women deserve better than abortion. By introducing regulatory abortion bills that “educate” women about abortion or protect them from potential harm of abortion, anti-abortion lawmakers may claim they are advocates for women. Though social movement scholars document the shift in focus from the fetus to the woman in anti-abortion movement rhetoric, it is equally important to trace this frame transformation among anti-abortion legislators. To uncover the presence of the pro-woman frame, this article analyzes anti-abortion bills introduced in all 50 US states from 2008 to 2017. The findings indicate that the pro-woman frame is found throughout a majority of the bills, which marks a significant use and acceptance of the frame by US state legislators. This frame transformation represents a strategic tactic of anti-abortion legislators to soften political behavior and beliefs that are seen as hostile toward women, especially during a time where there is an unprecedented amount of anti-abortion bills introduced in the states.
Purpose
We use data from California, where 13% of US births occur, to address two questions arising from efforts in the first decade of this century to avoid stillbirth before 25 6/7 weeks of gestation (i.e., in the periviable period). First, did stillbirths decline in the first decade of this century? Second, if stillbirths did decline, did periviable live births increase simultaneously? Answering these questions would seem important given that periviable infants represent <1% of live births but account for roughly 40% of infant mortality and 20% of hospital-based obstetric costs in the US.
Methods
We constructed 240 monthly conception cohorts, starting with that conceived in January 1991, from 9,880,536 singleton pregnancies that reached the 20 0/7 week of gestation. We used time-series design and Box-Jenkins methods that address confounding by autocorrelation, including secular trends and seasonality to answer our questions.
Results
We detected a downward shift in stillbirths in April 2007 that coincided with an upward shift in periviable live births.
Conclusions
Our findings imply that, since 2007, fewer Californians than expected from history and from the size of conception cohorts reaching 20 0/7 weeks of gestation, have had to contend with the sequelae of stillbirth, but more than expected likely have had to contend with those of periviable birth.
Research suggests that women may use social media to overcome disadvantages when running for and serving in public office. However, limited research has explored how party and gender influence politicians’ social media engagement and whether the promotion of women’s issues remains gendered and marginalized online. I use negative binomial regression to analyze how gender and party influence US House members’ discussion and framing of one women’s issue, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015, on Twitter. I find that Republican women are the most engaged, on average, and frame the defunding of Planned Parenthood as a women’s issue and fetal rights issue, balancing gender and party expectations to strategically engage in this debate.
This article examines Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart to argue that her feminist jurisprudence challenges the rhetorical genre of judicial opinion. Ginsburg's dissent undermines the rhetorical commitments to neutrality, abstraction, and universality that overwhelmingly shape the voice of the law. Instead, Ginsburg's rhetoric advances a more promising field of argument for advocates of reproductive choice and shifts the language of the law to legitimate voices, experiences, and rights of groups traditionally excluded by the rhetoric of the law.
We analyze the rhetoric that high-level administrators used to justify control over a campus women's center's mission statement and programming related to reproductive rights. Appealing to valued cultural abstractions (“both sides,” “tolerance”) and the conventional reification of “The Law,” administrators' rhetorical moves obscured their power, legitimated their decisions, and positioned themselves as magnanimous. We also highlight the ideological codes—what “everyone knows”—that administrators relied on to shape the terms of debate and to bend to right-wing pressures without appearing to do so. We conclude with recommendations for challenging the seemingly benign cast of “both sides.”
[ab]This article examines how amplified fetal heartbeats may be used to make claims about fetuses’ social presence. These claims are supported by the Mexican Public Health system's selection of the maternal–child relationship as a key site of clinical intervention, intertwining medical and moral discourse. Drawing on the robust literature on cross-cultural propositions of “fetal personhood,” this analysis uses ethnographic material from public health institutions in Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore how doctors use diagnostic technology to materialize fetuses for their patients. I argue that Spanish's epistemological distinction between saber (to have knowledge about) and conocer (to be acquainted with) is key to how diagnostic technologies may be deployed to make social claims. I use one doctor's attempts to use technology to shift her patient from saber to conocer as illustrative of underlying cultural logics about fetal embodiment and its proof. Focused on the under-theorized socio–medical deployment of audio fetal heartbeat technology, this article suggests that sound—in addition to sight—is a potent tool for constructing fetal personhood.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Whether a human fetus experiences pain during an abortion has been the subject of heated debate within medical, legal, and political circles for over two decades. In the 1980's President Reagan's statement that "when the lives of the unborn are snuffed out [by abortion], they often feel pain, pain that is long and agonizing," and the release of a controversial film entitled "The Silent Scream" were merely two of the events that kept this issue in public view. Federal and state legislative efforts to enact "partial birth abortion bans" have reignited public debate over fetal pain." Three years ago, the argument intensified when the world caught a glimpse of life within the womb through the picture of Samuel Armas' tiny hand apparently grasping the finger of the perinatal surgeon who was repairing the spine of the twenty-one week old fetus. As the twenty-first century begins, there are some indications that advances in medical knowledge are resolving the debate in medical circles surrounding fetal pain, and the resolution favors its acknowledgment at some point prior to birth. The purpose of this article is to explore the nature and extent of the medical community's emerging consensus on the issue of fetal pain, and consider whether this consensus should be reflected in American law. Part I discusses the current state of medical knowledge regarding fetal experiences of pain. Part II describes recent changes in medical standards to acknowledge the possibility of fetal pain. The legal status of laws directed at minimizing or protecting the human fetus from pain under the United States Constitution is discussed in Part III. Common objections to fetal pain legislation are identified and answered in Part IV. This article concludes with a call for legal requirements that women seeking abortions be informed of the possibility that the fetus may experience pain after twelve weeks gestation, and offered fetal anesthetic or modified abortion procedures to minimize any possibility of fetal pain.