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The Politics of Legal Abortion: From Direct Action to Dialogue

Review products

Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century By KarissaHaugeberg, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2017 ISBN 978-0-252-08246-7
Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion By KatieWatson, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019 ISBN 978-0-190-62487-3

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2021

Jeffrey A. Gauthier
Jeffrey A. Gauthier*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Portland, Portland, OR, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: gauthier@up.edu
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Extract

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education (Luker 1984, 163). But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent (Shields 2012). This tepid support has coincided with a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts (Rose 2006, 89). Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion” (Haugeberg, 8). Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion” (Watson, 37). Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it.

Type
Invited Review Essay
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2021 , pp. 800 - 804
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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References

Luker, Kristen. 1984. Abortion and the politics of motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Melody. 2006. Safe, legal, and unavailable: Abortion politics in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press.Google Scholar
Shields, Jon A. 2012. The politics of motherhood revisited. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 41 (1): 43–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shrage, Laurie. 2003. Abortion and social responsibility: Depolarizing the debate. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/019515309X.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar