https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6962-5602
ABSTRACT
By examining the arguments presented in courts and in print media to support and oppose the introduction of conscientious objection for healthcare workers in Sweden, this article illustrates the ways in which interest groups may take advantage of expanding opportunity structures in the wake of internationalization, all the while framing their arguments in ways that create resonance with national and nationalist discourses. Focusing on the case of a midwife who sued a county for refusing to hire her after having learned she would not participate in abortions, the article analyzes how both anti- and pro-abortion groups frame the issue of conscientious objection as aligned with “Swedish exceptionalism” in terms of worker co-determination and adherence to international conventions. The article thus strengthens the feminist contention that the issue of abortion, regardless of how precisely it is framed, tends to mobilize nationalist discourses, but also highlights how anti-abortion movements can “think global, act local.”
In 2014, an alliance of domestic Christian groups opposing abortion, lawyers with ties to international Christian lobbyists, and two midwives – in direct conflict with their union and professional associations – revived the Swedish debate on abortion. Citing not the rights of fetuses but the rights of employees under the European Convention on Human Rights and national anti-discrimination law, the two midwives sued women’s clinics for declining to hire them after learning that they would refuse to perform abortions. The highly publicized court cases centered on the issue of conscientious objection, but also exposed legal and political tensions and nationalist imaginingsFootnote1 in times of internationalization and political integration.
This article aims to examine the arguments presented in courts and in print media to support and to oppose the introduction of conscientious objection for healthcare workers in Sweden.Footnote2 The legal cases and the reaction that they spurred illustrate how interest groups may take advantage of expanding opportunity structures in the wake of internationalization, and indeed that such strategies may still require percipient alignment with national and nationalist discourses. In this regard, the article strengthens the feminist contention that the issue of abortion, regardless of how it is framed, tends to mobilize nationalist discourses (Yuval-Davis Citation1996; Ferree et al. Citation2002). This is true for both pro- and anti-abortion groups. There is a common assumption that socially liberal groups embrace and rely on global, non-nationalist outlooks, while conservative groups tend to be parochial and nationalist (cf. Berlet Citation2011). This article demonstrates that both perspectives can be mobilized to support pro- as well as anti-abortion efforts. The article further demonstrates the ability of major socially conservative and nationalist lobby groups to “act global, think local”; that is, to operate “on the edge of both scale and level” within a framework of a local–global nexus that puts pressure on governments from above and from below (Arts Citation2004, 501f).
The article is organized as follows. First, I provide some background information on the issue of abortion in the context of European political integration. This is followed by a description of one of the Swedish so-called “midwife cases,” along with a presentation of the main actors involved. The data and methods are introduced, followed by a presentation of the concept of opportunity structures. The main body of the text is the analysis of the arguments put forth in print media. The article ends with a discussion of the broader implications of the Swedish debate on conscientious objection in relation to the issue of abortion, political and legal internationalization, and nationalist discourses.
Abortion and European integration
Two decades ago, as the European Union was settling into its current form, scholars queried the role of the nation-state and its social movements: how would social movement organizations develop and take advantage of this new political and legal topography (Marks et al. Citation1996)? Marks and McAdam (Citation1996, 250) raised the issue as one of social movements and changing structures of opportunities and argued that since institutionalized politics is connected to “the ebb and flow of social protest,” one would expect there to be “attendant changes in those forms of interest aggregation/articulation” that hitherto had been linked to the nation-state. Interest groups and social movements would now, the authors predicted, tackle “highly idiosyncratic opportunity structures” characterized by a combination of governmental bodies sharing authority over the issues of interest to the movement (Marks and McAdam Citation1996, 275).
At the same time, scholars reflected on the durable role of the nation-state and popular resistance to European integration, which often played off notions of national characteristics viewed as being at risk in the consolidation process (Aarter Citation2008). Noting, for example, that Nordic resistance to the EU seemed inextricably linked to the fear of losing hold of so-called “Scandinavian exceptionalism,” Lawler (Citation1997) illustrated that the domestic campaigns for EU membership focused on the possibility of creating a “Social Europe,” promising skeptics that integration would strengthen and in fact extend the social democratic welfare regime and its “women-friendliness.”
One of the issues that quickly came to the foreground of European integration versus such political and cultural sovereignty was abortion (cf. Hoskyns Citation1996). On the one hand, the EU includes countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where integration was framed as an opportunity to export Scandinavian gender equality, and where abortion has been readily available as part of the universal healthcare regime since the 1970s. On the other hand, there are countries such as Poland, where EU membership was framed as a way to “balance the EU’s liberalism with Poland’s conservative values” (Czerwinski Citation2003, 659).
The Irish case was perhaps most interesting in relation to EU integration. In 1991, Ireland negotiated an exemption in the Maastricht Treaty so that “no act or amendment at European level could supersede the 1983 Amendment to the Irish Constitution,” effectively denying Irish women “recourse to European Community law to overrule the Irish Constitution on abortion” (Murphy-Lawless Citation1993, 57). With this exemption, which connected to the principle that member states enjoy full freedom in matters of a moral and philosophical nature, the EU accepted abortion as a moral issue, belonging to the cultural fabric of each member state (Eduards Citation2009, 112). However, pro- and anti-abortion activists, lobbyists, and politicians have used European integration in various ways to create pathways to further their agenda. As Marks and McAdam (Citation1996) anticipated, interest groups and social movement organizations have time and again brought the issue of abortion to different European political and judicial bodies, hoping to restrict or increase women’s access to abortion in the region. Abortion and reproductive rights can thus be viewed as one aspect of what Tilly (Citation2004) called “contentious Europe.”
The midwife case, as this article will illustrate, explicitly sought domestic political change by bringing a lawsuit to a European judicial body with the support of international lobby groups. Scholars across disciplines agree that processes of transnationalization change the form and function of movement politics (Eder Citation2005, 99). Eder argues that
Europe offers a particular opportunity structure of protest. Its particularity lies in the multilevel system of European governance. The term “governance” describes the horizontal dimensions of decision-making, the importance of networks and systems of negotiations; the term “multilevel” points to the increase of strategic options for actors entering the system at different levels. Accordingly, this system offers an increasing number of alternatives for collective action. They become clear upon looking into the specific issues around contentious politics by understanding the way in which issues are taken up and contested. (Eder Citation2005, 103)
Regardless of whether one views it as a question of gender relations or morality, according to Linders (Citation2004, 375), abortion “is placed on the political agenda by political outsiders (e.g., women’s groups or religious organizations) whose interests cut across established political constituencies and therefore cannot readily be accommodated by the normal political process.” Out of this realization, Linders argues, follows an analytical approach that interprets outcome success as reaching beyond deliberate movement action, views movement activities “and the sociopolitical context in which they emerge as intricately linked rather than separate and distinct,” and explores movement outcomes as “intermittent products of the interactions among actors and institutions” (ibid.). Thus, in exploring the ways in which abortion politics is being made and represented, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the ways in which opportunity structures are acted upon in the context of tensions between notions such as exceptionalism and processes of internationalization, as well as penetration into new fields of judicial ways of acting (Magnussen and Banasiak Citation2013, 32). The article further shows that lobby groups based in countries such as the US, where law traditionally has been placed above polity, are spurring local European movements to pursue atypical judicial routes by drawing on (and provoking resistance through) specific national(istic) tropes. This is in line with socio-legal research that has identified how legal mobilization politics has become a “familiar activity of social movements around the world” (McCann Citation2017, xxi). In Ireland, attempts to amend the Constitution to allow abortions in certain cases have been unsuccessfully brought to the European Court of Human Rights (D v Ireland, Citation2002); finally, it was a combination of the 2016 Citizens’ Assembly and broad domestic mobilization for a referendum that resulted in the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which effectively had denied women the right to abortion. In Poland, reproductive rights advocates have used EU law as an argument to introduce more liberal bills in the parliament, while also using EU guidelines to frame proposals as moderate compromises (Mishtal Citation2018). This shows that while interest groups will use all tools at their disposal to pursue their aims, the presence of international bodies must be contended with, even in areas established as belonging to the sovereign cultural fabric of states. This article contributes to research on how these developments may play out in a local setting.
This section has introduced previous research on how social movements may act on legal and political topographies in the context of internationalization, and has outlined relevant literature on abortion politics in the context of EU integration. The following section introduces the case study of how a court case revolving around conscientious objection was received in Sweden by explaining the data used for analysis.
Methods and data
Three types of commentary have been analyzed for this article: articles presenting, describing, and/or investigating the protagonists of the lawsuits (published between 2014 and 2018); reactions in law journals to the legal precedent (published in 2017); and wide-reaching print media articles (published between 2010 and 2016). The newspaper material in the last category has been analyzed thematically. Twenty local newspapers were selected, based on their reach; the aim was to get a wide national coverage. The two main tabloid-like papers in Sweden, Aftonbladet and Expressen, were also selected, as well as two leading morning papers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet (the latter is generally more conservative). News articles, editorials, columns, and opinion pieces that specifically mentioned the words “abortion” and “conscientious objection” between 2010 and 2016 were selected and categorized; only those that took or represented a specific position on the issue were selected (197 articles out of a total of 2,840).Footnote3 The analysis aimed to understand how the attempt at implementing conscientious objection via a lawsuit claiming discrimination was received – supported or rejected – in the Swedish public debate. This limited the scope of the investigation to include only articles presenting a clear position on the issue ( and ).
Table 1. News articles and webpages cited.
Table 2. Video clips cited.
The articles were divided into two main categories: positive (84 articles) or negative (113 articles) toward the aim of the lawsuits. Since only articles with a clear position were selected, it follows that a majority – 91 percent – were opinion pieces published either as editorials or as contributions by columnists. The rest of the articles were interviews, mostly with politicians, who took a stand on the issue. Using a qualitative analysis software program, these data were then coded, meaning that segments of the material were assigned in a two-step process to categories within a coding frame. Categories within the coding frame were first data-driven and, in the second step, concept-driven. Each specific argument presented generated or was assigned to a category. In the next step, categories within the coding frame, which I call analytic categories, were linked to the theoretical frame of the article.
Conscientious objection: reviving the Swedish debate on abortion
Abortion, available on request to all women up until 18 weeks of gestation, has been largely absent from the political agenda in Sweden in recent decades. This changed in 2014, when two midwives sued counties on the basis of discrimination. The midwives had both applied for positions in women’s clinics, and upon informing their prospective employers of their refusal to perform abortions they were told that their services were not wanted. Their legal cases focused on the issue of conscientious objection, and the lawsuits sparked what was, by Swedish standards, an unusual debate on the permissibility of healthcare workers opting out of performing abortions and on the issue of abortion in general. A Boolean search reveals a near-tenfold increase in the number of articles mentioning “abortion” and ”conscientious objection” between 2013 and 2014 (from 58 articles in 2013 to 584 in 2014), with a total of 2,392 articles mentioning both keywords between 2013 and 2018. Spikes in media attention followed the time periods of the cases being brought. Many articles thus came out in 2014, the year that the midwife who is the focus of this analysis brought her case to the Discrimination Ombudsman and later the court of first instance. The following year saw continued attention, as it became clear that the midwife would indeed appeal the decision. In 2016, while the case was being reviewed by the Labor Court, there was a decline in the number of op-ed pieces. There was a spike again in 2017, first when the decision was delivered, and then as the appeal was made to the European Court of Human Rights. Around the same time, journalists started to uncover the links to the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom, generating additional interest. However, the majority of these articles were descriptive news reports. By October 2018, 134 articles about conscientious objection could be identified, indicating a declining interest in the issue. This illustrates broadly the intensified focus on these issues that the lawsuits sparked in a country in which the right to abortion had not been seriously contested by any political actor since the 1970s.
A distinct feature of the abortion debate of 2014–15 was the fact that the issue was raised in the form of lawsuits. Historically, social and political change in Sweden – in sharp contrast to the US – has not been instigated through the courts but via the parliament. Linders (Citation2004, 381) draws out the sharp differences between the Swedish and US paths to abortion, stating that
the abortion challenge in Sweden developed and grew largely within existing political organizations (especially in the youth, student, and women’s factions of the major political parties) and, as a result, movement participants were much more likely to use and rely on institutional methods of political pressure.
The midwife lawsuits were launched amid different attempts by Swedish politicians and international actors to influence European policy on the matter of conscientious objection. In 2008, a Swedish Social Democrat MP introduced a motion to the Council of Europe. Aiming to reduce the right of entire hospital organizations to invoke conscientious objection and thus increase the availability of reproductive healthcare to women in EU countries such as Italy, Carina Hägg put forth a motion wherein she proposed implementing oversight mechanisms.Footnote4 The move backfired as amendments were made and the final resolution, released in 2010, instead strengthened the right of healthcare workers to invoke conscientious objection.Footnote5 The following year, the Swedish parliamentFootnote6 decided to call for a withdrawal of the resolution, prompting the European Catholic umbrella organization Fédération des Associations Familiales Catholiques en Europe (FAFCE), along with the Swedish anti-abortion organizations Provita and KLM (Christian physicians and medical students), to report Sweden to the European Committee of Social Rights for being in breach of the European Social Charter. One of the leading voices on the issue was Ruth Nordström, who published several opinion pieces in Christian outlets on the issue of conscientious objection around 2012 and 2013. In 2012, she encouraged healthcare workers to contact her with their stories, citing the Council of Europe Resolution 1763 and promising to help care workers to be relieved from certain tasks (Article 1). In another op-ed, she encouraged the public to listen to midwives who find abortions troubling and included in her text gruesome details from midwives handling aborted tissue (Article 2). In another text, she stated that it is “deeply unsettling” that Swedish institutions and politicians are “unable to implement stronger protection of pregnant women and small, defenseless children” (Article 3). In December 2013, she described receiving a letter from a nurse who had been denied employment at two hospitals for refusing to carry out abortions (Article 4). Based on the details provided by Nordström about the letter, it is fair to assume that it was penned by or at least referred to Ellinor Grimmark, the plaintiff in the so-called midwife case.
The lawsuit
One of the two cases of midwives suing counties received more attention, probably because the midwife herself, Grimmark, gave several interviews to the media about her experiences and motives. Her case was also tried first and made precedent, and is used here to illustrate the legal arguments and strategies put forward on behalf of both parties. It is this case that provides the focus of analysis in the paper.
The facts of the case that made for a Swedish precedent on conscientious objection were not contested in court; the midwife was in fact denied employment after informing her prospective employer of her refusal, based on her Christian faith, to perform or assist in aborting fetuses. The midwife first turned to the Discrimination Ombudsman, which decided in April 2014 not to pursue the case. Grimmark then turned to the court of first instance, which sided with the employer, before ending up in the final instance, the Labor Court. The case was decided there in April 2017; in June of that year, both midwives represented by Ruth Nordström appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
The midwife argued, first, that not hiring her because of her refusal to perform abortions constituted a breach of her right to conscientious objection in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court should award her damages directly on this basis, according to the suit. Second, she argued that the decision not to hire her was a breach of national anti-discrimination legislation. The lawsuit’s argument that a right to conscientious objection should be granted on the direct basis of the European Convention on Human Rights is a distinctively novel legal strategy in Sweden.
The employer argued that refusing to hire the midwife did constitute a limitation to her right to practice her faith, but that this limitation was proportional in relation to, on the one hand, the interests of women seeking abortions and, on the other hand, the employer's prerogative of organizing the tasks performed at the clinic. The midwife emphasized that allowing for conscientious objectors would not complicate access to abortion as defined in the Swedish abortion law, and thus implied that it is not unreasonable for the employer to adjust the organization of work to cater to midwives’ faith-based objections to certain tasks.
In the final instance, the Labor Court took as its starting point its assessment of the Swedish abortion law and the right to abortion inherent in that piece of legislation. The law demands that abortions are carried out as soon as possible, and the Court determined that providing high-quality healthcare for women seeking abortions constitutes a legitimate and objectively justifiable goal. Since women’s clinics are organized around the principle that all midwives partake in all tasks performed, and abortion services are fully integrated in all aspects of women’s clinics, every midwife employed must be available to carry out all tasks – including abortions. The Court concluded that the criterion for employment is both appropriate and necessary to fulfill the legitimate purpose of providing abortion services swiftly to any person seeking it. Rejecting conscientious objectors does not, in the Court’s analysis, constitute discrimination against Christians, a stance based on the assumption that allowing objections could impinge on the right to abortion. The Court further argued that it is not reasonable to demand that employers, who have the right to define the workings of the organization, cater to employees’ faith-based requests to be excused from certain tasks.
Life, law, and lobbyists: the actors and the issue
The 2014–15 abortion debate centered on the midwife Ellinor Grimmark. In one televised interview (Segment A), she said that while she does not oppose the current legislation, she feels that the procedure is about “a human life that is ended.” The reporter questioned her about the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies, to which Grimmark responded:
This thing about the woman’s own body – I feel that the child can’t be the woman’s body. It’s got its own heart and its own blood group which is different. […] It’s its own body. A small child, with rights, actually.
The lawyer for both midwives, Ruth Nordström, also frequently appeared in the media during this time. A section leader within the Swedish neo-charismatic Word of Faith movement’s Livets Ord (Word of Life) church, Nordström has been a prominent advocate for natural law perspectives on topics that Christian groups in Sweden have long focused on, such as abortion, prenatal diagnostics, and euthanasia. In one televised interview for the US-based Christian TV network TBN Nordic (Segment B), Nordström explained her motivations for getting involved in the midwife case:
For me, my Christian faith is a definite driving force. The way I look at it, it’s about codifying what we call natural law, that there is something about you being a human that gives you an intrinsic worth that cannot be degraded. … And from a humanistic point of view, this may seem like a good position and you can identify with this idea. But for me as a Christian, it means something more. It means that every person has an inviolable worth because she is created in the image of God and is wanted and loved by God.
Nordström is a registered collaborator with the US-based Christian-conservative advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an organization for which she has done pro bono work. ADF has been taking aim at EU bodies and was involved directly and indirectly with the two midwife cases in Sweden. On the ADF website, the executive director of the international branch of ADF is cited saying that
Our objectives are the same internationally as they are in the United States … to keep the door open for Gospel, to defend religious liberty, life, marriage and family, and to protect the sovereignty of nations. The tactics and strategies are different, because the venues are different, and the challenges are different. But when we succeed, the results can have incredible ripple effects. (Article 5)
Right now, Americans who believe that all life is sacred can feel secure that they and their children don’t have to be treated by a doctor who thinks that killing someone is a legitimate medical practice. But we can’t take that for granted. … Overseas, ADF International is representing Ellinor Grimmark, a pro-life midwife who has repeatedly been denied employment because she refuses to participate in abortions. (Article 6)
As has been established in this section, all of the actors involved on the plaintiff’s side, including the plaintiff herself, object to abortions on moral grounds based on their Christian faith. Furthermore, the lawsuit itself has a place in a national as well as an international lobbying effort to change domestic as well as European abortion policy.
Framing a message, seizing an opportunity
Why is it relevant to analyze the media debate surrounding court cases? Social movement organizations’ capacity to mobilize depends, according to Koopmans and Olzack (Citation2002, 201), on the “opportunities and constraints offered by the political-institutional setting in which collective action takes place.” The circumstances and relations that create an institutional framework within which social movements act to mobilize and demand action are called political opportunity structures. Scholars have employed this concept to analyze how movements act in relation to “political openness and closure, institutional structures, political alliances, and state centralization or strength” (King and Husting Citation2003, 297). While outcomes of favoring a certain way of framing are “anchored in institutionalized texts,” Ferree (Citation2003, 309) argues, they are also expressed through expert discourses and media presentations; in fact, mass media is what mainly mediates public discourse. I use the concept of political opportunity structures to explore how the issue of conscientious objection was raised and packaged at the height of the public debate around the so-called midwife case in Sweden.
As movements provide a diagnosis and a prognosis of a problem, and as they call for action to resolve the problem, they engage in a process that scholars call “framing.” A successful framing process creates resonance with a wider audience (Benford and Snow Citation2000). Framing is thus a strategic issue for social movements in their efforts to control the rhetoric and understanding of a struggle (Rose Citation2011, 3). Aligning a message with already existing ideas, such as using symbols or language that are already familiar to the target population, can enhance cultural resonance. Frames resonate as they “strike a responsive chord” with target audiences (Snow and Benford Citation1988, 198). Movements cannot, however, simply scan the field to sense what kind of political opportunity structure is available and then strategically put out messages with high resonance. Movements “struggle to define the meaning of specific policies and practices,” according to Ferree (Citation2003, 307), and the production of meaning is “essentially contested collective action” (Steinberg Citation1999, 737).
What do the positions of and ties among the different actors tell us about the opportunity structure of abortion politics in Sweden? The fact that the case ended up in the Labor Court points to the centrality of workers’ rights as a specific cultural condition; the case is presented as an issue of workers’ rights, not of the rights of fetuses. The ambivalence of the main protagonists’ stance on the issue of abortion suggests a strategic framing. As Luker (Citation1984) illustrated, the balance between strategic positions and moral logics has always been a delicate issue for pro-life activists. If they are to seem reasonable and politically respectable, they must contend with the fact that people in general support abortion under some conditions, Luker argues (Citation1984, 229). However, pro-life activists who accept abortion under certain conditions then have to admit that embryos do belong to a “different moral order” from people who have already been born, or that some persons (women) have more rights than others (embryos). Tolerating abortions, even to save the life of the mother, would be the first step on a “slippery slope” that would begin a “long slide away from the logic” of anti-abortion activists’ moral position, Luker contends (ibid.). In this regard, the concept of conscientious objection creates a space for anti-abortion activists to seem “reasonable,” because this strategic position avoids the contentious issue of the status of embryos. Conscientious objection as an issue of workers’ rights transforms the conflict from one between women’s bodies and the rights of embryos to one between workers and employers. The choice to raise the issue of conscientious objection in the form of a lawsuit also points to the increase in strategic options available for actors in the “multilevel governance” provided by the European integration project (Eder Citation2005). “The European Court of Human Rights was always our goal,” the plaintiff told a Christian newspaper in 2015 (Article 10), acknowledging that no domestic court was likely to judge in her favor.
Framing conscientious objection: the media debate
In this section, I present the analysis of the data, beginning with articles expressing support, followed by articles criticizing the lawsuit and its aims. All articles were published between 2010 and 2016.
Supporting the lawsuit
Out of 197 analyzed articles in print media, 84 take the position that it is desirable and/or legitimate to allow healthcare workers to opt out of performing abortions on the grounds of conscience. Those that express such support tend to have been published early on in the process of the lawsuit, in 2014 and 2015.
The frames presented in support of conscientious objection can be described as
the co-determination frame
the “adjustment to international law” frame
the pluralist democracy frame.
The Christian Democrats and myself stand behind Swedish abortion law. However, we believe that it should be possible, in the workplace … to resolve this issue … Conscientious objection is at its core a question of coworkers not being forced to carry out tasks that go against their conviction in matters regarding life and death.
Precisely to avoid a situation [where] conscientious objection collides with the right to care, we argue that the employer and the employee already as the employment contract [is negotiated] should agree on how work tasks should be organized.
The Christian Democrats don’t want to force any employer to relieve staff from performing tasks linked to providing abortions. However, if it is possible from a scheduling and organizational aspect, we don’t see any hindrance to employers and employees agreeing to organize work in a way that … accommodates the individual’s conscience. … In the end, this is not, however, a question for politicians but for employers and their staff.
A version of this argument is that allowing for conscientious objection would amount to only a minor adjustment of organizational practices (Article D):
women’s right to abortion will not be restricted because someone doesn’t want to perform it. What someone wants to avoid, another will do. When someone stays home from work … someone else fills in.
Several articles that argue in favor of the midwife’s case also contend that because the European Convention on Human Rights already protects healthcare workers’ rights to conscientious objection, the matter is already settled, in their view. I identify this as the “adjustment to international law” frame. Examples are provided by two opinion pieces, one written by a law professor who wrote an expert brief for one of the midwives (Article E) and the other by a politician for the Christian Democrats (Article F):
Conscientious objection for care workers is protected by the [Convention]Footnote7 … [hence], it is problematic when politicians from several parties talk about being “against” conscientious objection, because this means they are against current legislation.
Swedish abortion legislation is in line with Article 9 of the [Convention], which is binding for Sweden since 1995. … There is also a European consensus on respecting conscientious objection. To say that the Christian Democrats are against current legislation is gravely misleading. It’s the opposite.
However, there are examples of articles that claim the lawsuit to be of fundamental significance. The pluralist democracy frame links the issue of conscientious objection for healthcare workers to essential freedoms (again in Article D):
Rules are important. But if rules and regulations are allowed to surpass individual rights, then we are approaching political ideas that most of us would like to avoid. Conscientious objection is only really a problem in systems where the aim justifies the means and hence, where individual beliefs perturb the anonymous masses’ movements toward the final goal.
The issue of conscientious objection [is] a question of how we understand society. It is often said that democracy and market economy are the solutions to everything. It is important to underline that democracy and capitalism are systems, while the heart of society is the culture. In culture, values are carried on by individual people through the notion, the conviction and the faith in what is right and wrong, in what the purpose of life is. The systems do not carry culture, culture carries the systems. … I can hardly imagine a more disconcerting development than one in which moral conscience is delegated to the system.
In a multicultural and pluralist society, we should protect the obvious right for anyone to defend their ideals and conscience.
The pluralist democracy frame contradicts this, because it attempts to portray the issue as a complex question of fundamental rights and the good society. This frame links justice and democracy to plurality, individual notions of morality, and the right to integrity. Accordingly, the lawsuit and its claims should be of major concern to everyone, since core values and systems are at stake. However, abortion as practice is not explicitly challenged in these texts. According to the pluralist democracy frame, it is not aborting fetuses that threatens the moral fabric of the nation; it is the inability to fully accept those who object to abortions on moral grounds that poses a threat to society. This is a novel take on the issue of abortion in Sweden, but it is paralleled by the ways in which the political right has portrayed the social democratic corporatist state as overly instrumental in relation to its public, and unwilling to accept challenges to its secular political hegemony (cf. Boréus Citation1994; Kumlin Citation1997; Gustavsson Citation2000).
The three frames relied on to support the lawsuit seek to establish resonance, I argue, by invoking notions of Swedish exceptionalism in three ways:
Conscientious objection is part of a traditional Swedish model for employment relations wherein the employee can claim control over the workplace.
Conscientious objection should be accepted as part of Sweden’s commitment to democratic values and respect for international conventions on human rights.
The disrespect to conscientious objectors is unbecoming of a democratic, pluralistic, and inclusive nation that recognizes and values not just polity and market, but civil society and culture as well.
Rejecting the lawsuit
Those who oppose the lawsuit frame their rejection in several ways, but all portray the issue as one that is centrally about abortion and continued access to (safe) abortions. In this material, the main frames can be described as
the individual freedom frame
the employer freedom frame
the political frame
the moral-legal frame
the nationalist frame.
The first position, the individual freedom frame, challenges the logical premise of the lawsuits and attempts to disqualify the entire reasoning behind them. Allowing for conscientious objection on the grounds of discrimination or labor law is futile and illogical, since midwives who cannot stand certain aspects of the work in a women’s clinic can always choose to work somewhere else. This frame seeks to destabilize the position that conscientious objection is about either employees’ or individual rights, as exemplified in this article in liberal daily Dagens Nyheter (Article G):
Someone who rejects the right to abortion can absolutely work in healthcare. One cannot, however, count on getting a position in the very clinic where abortions are performed, where complications after abortions are handled, where IUDs are inserted and morning-after pills administered, if you can’t imagine participating in such things.
The second position, the employer freedom frame, is a logical effect of the first one but moves further by pointing out that allowing for conscientious objection would essentially upend the employer prerogative. Thus, in these articles, many of which are written by left-leaning pundits, the right of the employer to command the employee is explicitly defended, such as in an article stating that “such discretion would be devastating and can never be part of employees’ rights” (Article H).
The political frame centers around the notion that the lawsuits are not what they seem; they are an attempt at smuggling in a sinister agenda under the guise of a more benign concern. Many op-ed pieces frame the issue as a Trojan-horse maneuver, a new strategy from an old movement (Article I). In the words of a Social Democrat politician, the lawsuit has “come out of dark corners” and is “obviously … an attempt at restricting abortion without having to debate the issue” (Article J). The following excerpts from Articles K and H are representative:
The resistance is sneaking up … Instead of signs with bloody fetuses and demands for a total ban, they are trying to go through the courts to secure conscientious objection. But it is nothing but anti-abortion activism in a new shape.
[The case] seems deceptive – who wants a society of people without conscience? But the aim is not to protect an individual, it is to infringe on the right to abortion by packaging the issue in a new and more sophisticated cover.
The moral-legal frame instead aims at the human rights issue, including the tensions between national and international law. Some texts acknowledge and confront the legal dispute at hand, even recognizing that the European law argument may have merit. These texts tend to challenge instead the legitimacy of imposing international law by representing Sweden’s law as superior at defending or upholding human rights, such as this editorial in Aftonbladet (Article L):
[A writer for a competing daily] argues that Sweden may have to accept conscientious objection because of a decision in the Council of Europe. … But please? Would [the editors] accept the opinion of Saudi Arabia just because they at times represent UN Human Rights Council? … Regardless of who wins in court, there is a principal issue here: what do we do if women’s rights to abortion were restricted because of a decision in the Council of Europe? What do we do if the international institutions that we have created to further human rights instead infringe on those rights? … If they actually win at the European level or Saudi Arabia has its way in the UNHRC, our entire view on these institutions will change.
This argument ties into yet another recurring line of defense for the current abortion law and the employer’s right to refuse to hire the two suing midwives, namely the nationalist frame. Here, the notion that abortion is wrong in the first place, as well as the tactic of suing for conscientious objection, is represented as an import from more conservative parts of Europe, and as such at odds with Swedish attitudes, traditions, and beliefs. These texts often describe the situation abroad as dire for women’s reproductive rights and health, and some texts cite how many women die from botched abortions yearly around the globe. In an interview with a writer, liberal daily Dagens Nyheter quotes: “[Abortion resistance in Sweden] is there, even if the support for free abortion is solid. But the activists learn from friends abroad. … it’s like this idea with conscientious objection. These concepts sound nice and human” (Article M).
From this perspective it follows that conscientious objection is a reactionary position, a move backwards when Sweden instead should try to export Swedish abortion law to aid women in other countries. The notion of exporting solutions to social problems is at the heart of Nordic exceptionalism (Browning Citation2007). As Andersson (Citation2009, 241) argues, Swedish nationalism reflects a highly ambiguous relationship to Europe: “we are happy to export our Model and teach its values to a surrounding European culture perceived as Catholic, conservative and latently corrupt.” One article explicitly cites globalization as a threat in this regard, arguing that the decision by some right-wing politicians to support a law on conscientious objection for healthcare workers “shows how strongly and quickly values travel across national borders” (Article N).
Another aspect of Nordic exceptionalism is what has been known as “Sweden, the Moral Superpower”: the nationalist sentiment that Sweden is morally superior to other nations, “a guide to other actors in the system” (Dahl Citation2006, 895). Traces of this position can be seen in Left Party MP Hans Linde’s article in liberal evening paper Expressen (Article O):
The world is in great need of countries standing up to sexual and reproductive health and rights. But too many countries lack the courage and will to take these issues on. At the same time, we see how those forces objecting to abortion are mobilizing in Central America and Eastern Europe, as well as in the US and the EU. If Sweden doesn’t stand up for the right to abortion, silence might ensue. Unless Sweden is ready to direct its international aid to help pro-abortion activists in Nicaragua, contribute to safe abortions in Bangladesh, or sex education in Georgia, there is a great risk that no one else will either.
The frames relied on to reject the lawsuit sought to establish resonance, I argue, by invoking notions of Swedish exceptionalism in two ways: by presenting conscientious objection as
foreign to Sweden’s labor market model, which is based on high levels of organized consensus;
and/or foreign to Sweden’s exceptionalism in terms of the country’s dedication to women’s rights.
To summarize, in the media debate the lawsuits are framed as either not-abortion or anti-abortion-again. Proponents of conscientious objection draw on features of what has been conceptualized as Scandinavian exceptionalism: the assertion of Swedish society as worker-friendly and highly civilized with a deep-seated respect for the rule of law and dedication to universal rights and international treaties. The effort to take these norms to support anti-abortion positions represents a reversal in what is expected of nationalist framings of abortion access (cf. Kozlowska, Béland, and Lecours Citation2016). What is unusual about this case is that it is the pro-choice side that invokes threats of alien values traveling across borders, whilst the pro-life side draws on notions such as pluralism, justice, and inclusion.
Conclusion
Scholars have identified a tendency of both pro-choice and pro-life organizations to extend or transform frames. As opportunities arise for new frames to leverage policy success, organizations will use them to position for tactical advancement (Rose Citation2011, 3). In Sweden, the anti-abortion movement has been widely disregarded and wholly unsuccessful for four decades, in part because the highly centralized political system and the consensus-oriented policy process protect the political center from outside challenges (Linders Citation2004, 391). Introducing the concept of conscientious objection, with its implicit emphasis on moral integrity, and taking up the strategy of pursuing a judicial route supported by international lobbying efforts, has successfully placed anti-abortion activists in the political spotlight in Sweden. As feminist and postcolonial scholars have shown, abortion ties into notions of nationhood and nationalist imaginings (cf. Bannerji Citation2000, 69). But the midwife case undermines the perception that pro-life groups are the ones more prone to relying on nationalist frames, and instead shows that seizing the opportunity, abortion activists can think, act, and talk global and local at the same time. Furthermore, as this article has demonstrated, interest groups and social movements are taking advantage of more open opportunity structures that follow from internationalization, whilst being able to successfully adapt frames to local contexts and pursue resonance with national self-image and nationalist imaginings.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rebecca Selberg is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies in the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She earned her PhD in sociology at Linnaeus University in 2012. Her main research area is gender, work, and organization, with a special focus on care work and the public sector.
Notes
1 Loosely inspired by Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, I use “nationalist imaginings” here to refer to competing collective understandings of the imagined community of the nation and of nationalism and/or national belonging (Anderson Citation1991, 6).
2 At the time of writing, the European Court of Human Rights has not delivered its judgment.
3 Close to 45 percent of the opinion pieces appeared in wide-reaching dailies Aftonbladet, Expressen, Svenska Dagbladet, and Dagens Nyheter, suggesting that this issue was considered less relevant in the local papers.
4 Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (Doc. 11757).
5 Council of Europe, Resolution 1763 (2010).
6 The only party in the Swedish parliament to vote against was the far-right Sweden Democrats; the Christian Democrats abstained.
7 In both quotes, “the Convention” refers to the European Convention on Human Rights.
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