Justifying abortion: The limits of maternal idealist rhetoric

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we explore the logic behind restrictions on abortion and seek possible rhetorical alternatives by turning to an analysis of women’s later abortion narratives published between 2016 and 2020 in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s two most nationally visible remarks about “late-term” abortion. Because arguments for later abortion rights have implications for all women’s reproductive lives, we approach these narratives from a critical perspective rooted in intersectional feminist theory and praxis and reproductive justice. We argue that the narratives develop an idealist rhetoric of self-sacrificing maternity that emerges from an orchestration of racialized discourses of good motherhood and the gendered liberal political tradition. Later abortion narratives limit women’s reproductive freedom by constructing a motivational vocabulary for understanding (and supporting) later abortions based on mercy and good motherhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• idealist rhetoric
• reproductive justice
• motherhood

Notes

1 Kate Carson, “I Had a Later Abortion Because I Couldn’t Give My Baby Girl Both Life and Peace,” USA Today, February 19, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/02/19/late-term-abortion-donald-trump-ben-sasse-state-union-column/2881880002/.

2 Pam Belluck, “What Is Late-Term Abortion? Trump Got It Wrong,” The New York Times, February 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/health/late-term-abortion-trump.html.

3 Pam Belluck, “Trump Said Women Get Abortions Days before Birth. Doctors Say They Don’t,” The New York Times, October 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/health/donald-trump-debate-late-abortion-remarks.html; Anna North, “Why Trump Spent So Much Time Criticizing Abortion during the State of the Union,” Vox, February 6, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/5/18212521/state-of-the-union-trump-abortion-northam.

4 “Facts Are Important: Abortion Care Later in Pregnancy Is Important to Women’s Health,” American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, accessed May 2020, page no longer available; text now available at “ACOG Response to Public Rhetoric,” IJFAB Blog, http://www.ijfab.org/blog/2019/02/acog-response-to-recent-public-rhetoric-on-the-new-york-state-abortion-law-and-other-discussions-of-late-abortion/.

5 Rebecca Todd Peters, Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 41.

6 To capture the later abortion narratives told by women in response to Trump’s public remarks, we searched for “late term abortion” and “later abortion” paired with “narrative,” “story,” and “experience” on Google. We also searched newspapers through LexisNexis using the same terms. We followed up on references and links to other narratives when mentioned in the narratives we found. In total, we have narratives of 47 women.

7 Jane Coasten, “The Intersectionality Wars,” Vox, May 28, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination.

8 Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Practice,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 785–810, https://doi.org/10.1086/669608.

9 Cho et al., “Toward a Field,” 795.

10 Bonnie J. Dow, “Authority, Invention, and Context in Feminist Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 67, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183878. See also Hailey Nicole Otis, “Intersectional Rhetoric: Where Intersectionality as Analytic Sensibility and Embodied Praxis Converge,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 369–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1664755; Sara Hayden and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, “Placing Sex/Gender at the Forefront: Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, eds. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 97–124.

11 Dow, “Authority,” 70.

12 Loretta J. Ross, “Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism,” Souls 19, no. 3 (2017): 287, 291, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2017.1389634.

13 See Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (New York: Free Press, 2004); Tasha N. Dubriwny, The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Stephanie Hartzell, “An (In)visible Universe of Grief: Performative Disidentifications with White Motherhood in the We Are Not Trayvon Martin Blog,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 10, no. 1 (2017): 62–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2016.1177106; Susana Martinez Guillem and Christopher C. Barnes, “‘Am I a Good [White] Mother?’ Mad Men, Bad Mothers, and Post(racial)feminism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 3 (2018): 286–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1416419; Joan B. Wolf, “Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 32, no. 4 (2007): 595–636, https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-2007-018.

14 Hartzell, “An (In)visible Universe,” 65.

15 See Hartzell, “An (In)visible Universe”; Sara Hayden, “Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 196–215, https://doi.org/10.1080/0033563032000125313; Mari Boor Tonn, “Militant Motherhood: Labor’s Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 1 (1996): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384137.

16 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 154.

17 Kristan Poirot, “(Un)Making Sex, Making Race: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, Difference, and the Rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 187, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631003796677; James Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contexualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 212–14.

18 Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A History of Reproductive Politics in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: NYU Press, 2019, Kindle edition), 2776.

19 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 24.

20 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4724.

21 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 11.

22 Cho et al., “Toward a Field,” 790.

23 Cho et al., “Toward a Field,” 791.

24 Named after Harriet Tubman’s Combahee River raid, the Combahee River Collective was a group of Black feminists who began meeting in 1974. They pioneered the intersectional feminist framework, arguing that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” See Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 15–27.

25 Ross, “Reproductive Justice,” 287.

26 Ross, “Reproductive Justice,” 293.

27 Ross, “Reproductive Justice,” 290.

28 Ross, “Reproductive Justice,” 290.

29 Lisa Smyth, “Feminism and Abortion Politics: Choice, Rights, and Reproductive Freedom,” Women’s Studies International Forum 25, no. 3 (2002): 336, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-5395(02)00256-X.

30 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4765.

31 See, for example, Celeste Michelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Kathleen M. de Onís, “Lost in Translation: Challenging (White, Monolingual Feminism’s) <Choice> with Justicia Reproductiva,” Women’s Studies in Communication 38 (2015): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2014.989462; Sara Hayden, “Revitalizing the Debate between <Life> and <Choice>: The 2004 March for Women’s Lives,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 111–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420902833189.

32 Hayden, “Revitalizing,” 123.

33 de Onís, “Lost in Translation,” 10.

34 Joan C. Callahan and Dorothy E. Roberts, “A Feminist Social Justice Approach to Reproduction-Assisting Technologies: A Case Study on the Limits of Liberal Theory,” Kentucky Law Journal 84, no. 4 (1995): 1201.

35 Callahan and Roberts, “A Feminist Social Justice Approach,” 1201.

36 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 164.

37 Brown, States of Injury, 164. Poirot, “(Un)making Sex, Making Race,” 191.

38 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

39 P. Lealle Ruhl, “Disarticulating Liberal Subjectivities: Abortion and Fetal Protection,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 1 (2002): 37–60, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178494.

40 Ruhl, “Disarticulating,” 43.

41 Ruhl, “Disarticulating,” 44.

42 Mary Poovey, “The Abortion Question and the Death of Man,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 243.

43 Ruhl, “Disarticulating,” 45.

44 Ruhl, “Disarticulating,” 47.

45 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 25.

46 Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 81. See also Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

47 Duden, “Disembodying Women,” 52.

48 Kathy Rudy, “Liberal Theory and Feminist Politics,” Women and Politics 20, no. 2 (1999): 35, https://doi.org/10.1300/J014v20n02_03.

49 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity.

50 Smyth, “Feminism,” 342.

51 Later Abortion Initiative, “Who Needs Abortion Later in Pregnancy in the United States, and Why?” December 2018, https://laterabortion.org/sites/default/files/lai_who_needs.pdf.

52 Later Abortion Initiative, “Who Needs Abortion Later.”

53 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4846.

54 Lyndsay Werking-Yip, “I Had a Late Term Abortion. I Am Not a Monster,” New York Times, October 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/opinion/sunday/late-term-abortion.html.

55 Werking-Yip, “I Had a Late Term Abortion.”

56 Maya Manian, “The Irrational Woman: Informed Consent and Abortion Decision-Making,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 16 (2009): 258.

57 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 11.

58 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity. See also Wolf, “Is Breast Really Best?”

59 Karen Agatone, “Why I Had a Second Trimester Abortion,” Bustle, September 19, 2016, https://www.bustle.com/articles/180946-i-had-a-second-trimester-abortion-i-am-sick-of-hearing-politicians-opinions-about-it.

60 Agatone, “Why.”

61 Agatone, “Why.”

62 Jennifer Katz and Vanessa Tirone, “From the Agency Line to the Picket Line: Neoliberal Ideals, Sexual Realities, and Arguments about Abortion in the U.S.,” Sex Roles 73 (2015): 311–18, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-015-0475-z.

63 Katz and Tirone, “From the Agency Line,” 314.

64 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 12.

65 Agatone, “Why.”

66 Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 59.

67 Alexis K. Miller, “My Late Term Abortion,” The Washingtonian, June 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/06/14/late-term-abortion/.

68 Natalia Megas, “The Agony of Ending a Wanted Late Term Pregnancy,” The Guardian, April 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/18/late-term-abortion-experience-donald-trump.

69 Alicia Hupprich, “I’m a Mom Who Had a Late-Term Abortion & It’s Nothing Like Donald Trump Says,” Romper, October 25, 2016, https://www.romper.com/p/im-a-mom-who-had-a-late-term-abortion-its-nothing-like-donald-trump-says-21212.

70 Mary Bouquet, “The Family Photographic Condition,” Visual Anthropology Review 16, no. 1 (1999): 9, https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.16.1.2.

71 Jeannie Ludlow, “Sometimes It’s a Child and a Choice: Toward an Embodied Abortion Praxis,” NWSA Journal 20, no. 1 (2008): 36, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/236179.

72 Darla Jackson, “I Chose to Have a Late-Term Abortion Because I Love Both My Daughters,” The Daily Dot, March 8, 2017, https://www.dailydot.com/irl/late-term-abortion-twins-story/.

73 Meredith Isaksen, “Late-Term Abortion Was the Right Choice for Me,” New York Times, October 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/opinion/late-term-abortion-was-the-right-choice-for-me.html.

74 Isaksen, “Late-Term Abortion”; Jackson, “I Chose”; Sara Ahmed, “This Story of One Woman’s Late-Term Abortion Is a Powerful Reminder of Why Reproductive Rights Matter,” Babble, January 6, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170112050317if_/https://www.babble.com/parenting/late-term-abortion-story-reproductive-rights-matter/; Sylvia A. Harvey, “The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind,” Elle, November 2, 2016, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a40363/20-week-abortion-ban/; Cassie Murdoch, “A Devastating Late-Term Abortion Story That’s Nothing Like Trump Says,” Vocativ, October 20, 2016, https://www.vocativ.com/369706/a-devastating-late-term-abortion-story-thats-nothing-like-trump-says/index.html.

75 Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 56.

76 Denise M. Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter’s Rhetoric on the Crisis in Iran,” Communication Studies 43, no. 1 (1992): 16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979209368356.

77 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 187.

78 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 171.

79 Sara Ruddick’s work is central to understanding maternal thinking. Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Thinking,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (1980): 342–67, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177749. See also Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgement in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 3 (1993): 286–302, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639309384036; Hayden, “Family Metaphors.”

80 Megas, “The Agony.”

81 Megas, “The Agony.”

82 Lori Gawron and Katie Watson, “Documenting Moral Agency: A Qualitative Analysis of Abortion Decision Making for Fetal Indications,” Contraception 95, no. 2 (2017): 177, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2016.08.020.

83 Hupprich, “I’m a Mom”; Amy Butler, “Trump’s Words Drove Me to Tears,” USA Today, October 26, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/10/26/abortion-late-term-donald-trump-column/92691850/.

84 Isaksen, “Late-Term Abortion.”

85 Butler, “Trump’s Words”; Tobin Moon Carson, “This Mother Had a Late-Term Abortion,” Bangor Daily News, October 26, 2016, https://bangordailynews.com/2016/10/26/the-point/this-mother-had-a-late-term-abortion-heres-what-her-choice-and-her-grief-were-really-like/; Alison Draper, “I Had a Late Term Abortion,” Facebook (public post no longer available), October 20, 2016, https://www.self.com/story/late-term-abortion-story; Harvey, “The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind.”

86 Rachel Bertsche, “What Kind of Mother is 8 Months Pregnant and Wants an Abortion?” Yahoo Lifestyle, October 20, 2016, https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/what-kind-of-mother-is-8-months-pregnant-and-117104430132.html.

87 Harvey, “The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind.”

88 Hupprich, “I’m a Mom.”

89 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 3649.

90 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 3662.

91 Hanna Neuschwander, “A Birth Plan for Dying,” Longreads, September 28, 2018, https://longreads.com/2018/09/28/a-birth-plan-for-dying/.

92 Neuschwander, “A Birth Plan.”

93 Bertsche, “What Kind of Mother.”

94 Bertsche, “What Kind of Mother.”

95 Hupprich, “I’m a Mom.”

96 Hupprich, “I’m a Mom.”

97 Hupprich, “I’m a Mom.”

98 Butler, “Trump’s Words.”

99 Margot Finn, “I Had a Late Term Abortion,” Slate, February 7, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/late-term-abortion-support-group-lessons-trust-myself-women.html.

100 “We Are Later Abortion Patients,” Abortion Patients, last modified January 23, 2020, https://www.abortionpatients.com/.

101 Karen Silverman and Robbie Silverman, “Why We Had to Get a Late-Term Abortion,” Boston Globe, July 9, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/07/09/our-abortion-story/W4xHhzEVdGqraq0gmGLhlK/story.html.

102 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4307.

103 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4402.

104 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, 4414.

105 Werking-Yip, “I Had a Late Term Abortion.”

106 Missy Kurzweil, “Later Abortion: A Love Story,” Jezebel, February 21, 2019, https://jezebel.com/later-abortion-a-love-story-1832631748.

107 Callie Beusman, “What It’s Like to Get an Abortion When You’re Six Months Pregnant,” Vice, October 2, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article/8×8kzk/what-its-like-to-get-an-abortion-when-youre-six-months-pregnant.

108 Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 69.

109 Karen Weingarten, “Impossible Decisions: Abortion, Reproductive Technologies, and the Rhetoric of Choice,” Women’s Studies 41, no. 3 (2012): 276, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2012.655167.

110 Peters, Trust Women, 52.

111 Mallary Allen, “Narrative Diversity and Sympathetic Abortion: What Online Storytelling Reveals about the Prescribed Norms of the Mainstream Movements,” Symbolic Interaction 38, no. 1 (2014): 61, https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.135.

112 Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York: Verso Books, 1984).

113 Caroline Praderio, “We Are Not Monsters,” Insider, February 9, 2019, https://www.insider.com/late-term-abortion-patients-sign-open-letter-2019-2.

114 Anna Staver, “Why a NY Woman Came to Colorado for 32-Week Abortion,” Denver Post, October 13, 2019, https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/13/late-abortion-women-2020/.

115 Finn, “I Had a Late Term Abortion.”

116 Staver, “Why a NY Woman.”

117 Maggie Kirkwood, Heather Rowe, Annarella Hardiman, Shelley Mallett, and Doreen Rosenthal, “Reasons Women Give for Abortion: A Review of the Literature,” Archives of Women’s Mental Health 12 (2009): 365–78, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-009-0084-3; Lawrence B. Finer, Lori F. Frohwirth, Lindsay A. Dauphinee, and Susheela Singh, “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 37, no. 3 (2005): 110–18, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-2393.2005.tb00045.x.

118 Ruhl, “Disarticulating,” 47.

119 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 146.

120 Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice, 11.

121 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity, 153.

122 Petchesky, Abortion and Women’s Choice, 387.