Reproductive rights or duties? The rhetoric of division in social media debates on abortion law in Poland

ABSTRACT

This study explores the argumentative schemas used in claim-making and the rhetorical resources for stance-taking in the online abortion law debate in Poland in late 2016. It shows how these discursive devices were used to divide and discredit the opponent in the social media by two social movements: the Stop Abortion coalition of conservative and religious organizations that sponsored the legislative proposal to considerably restrict abortion, and the Save Women committee that stood behind the ‘black’ protests opposing the project. The textual material is drawn from social media profiles of the two movements following a week of intense street protests and publicity activities (19–26 October 2016). It is subjected to contrastive argument analysis and critical discourse analysis of rhetorical resources. The analysis involves comparing (1) the discrepant premises underpinning arguments in the process of claim-making; (2) the reverse distribution of legitimization techniques deployed; and (3) the choices of name-calling devices aimed at discrediting antagonists.

KEYWORDS:

• Pro-life
• pro-choice
• argument
• stance
• protest
• discourse analysis
• rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny, http://www.federa.org.pl/aborcja-w-polsce/sprawozdania-rzadowe; Cocotas (2017).

2. Making abortion available only in cases of direct threat to woman’s life/health, not in cases of fetal defects or criminal acts, and introducing harsh penalties for women and doctors for pregnancy termination.

3. The largest strikes and demonstration activities were organized on 3 Oct and 24 Oct and involved up to 98,000 protesters in over 100 cities, https://wiadomosci.wp.pl/czarny-protest-manifestacje-w-wielu-miastach-w-polsce-ile-osob-wzielo-udzial-w-demonstracjach.

4. #czarnyprotest (black protest) was one of the world’s most popular hashtags in early October 2016, http://politykawsieci.pl/analiza-czarnyprotest-vs-bialyprotest/.

5. This committee represents a coalition of pro-life movements (Polska Federacja Ruchów Obrony Życia) and conservative campaigns (some with church affiliations) that drafted a legislative project for a total ban on abortion and penalty for women and doctors who perform it, and gathered about 500,000 citizens’ signatures under such petition, which was subsequently registered in the Parliament on 5 July 2016.

6. This committee stands for a legislative project advocating unrestricted rights to abortion in the first trimester and more public funding for contraceptives and sex education. It gathered 215,000 citizens’ signatures (on the petition submitted on 4 August 2016). It involves a variety of political (liberal, left-wing) leaders, feminist public figures and representatives of non-governmental women’s groups.

7. Claim-making is seen here as a specific form of framing oriented towards expressing the views about what the world is/should look like, while stance-taking is seen as a specific form of framing oriented towards expressing a speaker’s emotional/attitudinal engagements.

8. Since the material is in Polish, which is an inflectional language, words occur with different affixes and have been lemmatized: a type is the base form of the word and a token is every (inflected) instance of that word in the corpus.

9. The number of comments increased later.

10. Italics relate to premises basing on ‘us’/‘them’ polarization and will be discussed below.

11. E.g. encyclical letter by Pope Paul VI Humanae Vitae (1968), Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Evangelium Vitae (1995), instructions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitas Personae (2008) (cf, Molek-Kozakowska, 2017).

12. Italics relates to premises basing on ‘us’/‘them’ polarization and will be discussed below.

13. Only cases of full intercoder agreement are included in this discussion.

14. The strawman fallacy consists in misrepresenting an opponent’s words so as to refute them easily; the ironman fallacy is distorting the argument in such a way that it becomes too radical for an audience to accept (Lewiński & Oswald, 2013).

15. A legislative proposal to ban ‘eugenic abortion’ was reintroduced to the Parliament in November 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska is associate professor at the Institute of English, University of Opole, Poland. With a background in linguistics, she specializes in (critical) discourse analysis, political communication and journalism and media studies. She co-edits the international open access journal Res Rhetorica. She is the Head of Communication Research Lab at the Faculty of Philology.

Michał Wanke

Michał Wanke is assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Opole, Poland. He works in the areas intersecting the digital media and social problems.