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Abstract
The contemporary U.S. debate over abortion has been waged as a battle between <life> and <choice>. The author traces the development of these ideographs, arguing that through their verbal and visual strategies, advocates on both sides of the issue have rendered ideographic meaning concrete. Whereas the fixed definitions have served the cause of <life> well, they have been detrimental for <choice>, leading advocates to seek out ways to revitalize the debate. The 2004 March for Women's Lives was a key event in this larger effort; through it, participants revitalized the abortion debate, bringing renewed flexibility to the ideograph <choice> at the same time it challenged the fixed status, and the veracity, of the ideograph <life>.
Acknowledgements
She would like to thank Lynn O'Brien Hallstein, Suzanne Daughton, Elissa Foster, Cindy Griffin, Shiv Ganesh, Steve Schwarze, John Sloop and the reviewers of this journal for their helpful advice on the essay. Special thanks to Anya Jabour who provided feedback on the essay and with whom the author attended the March for Women's Lives.
Notes
1. Marcy J. Wilder, “The Rule of Law, the Rise of Violence, and the Role of Morality: Reframing America's Abortion Debate” in Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000, ed. Rickie Solinger (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), 73–94.
2. See Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars.
3. Mark P. Moore, “Victimage and Victimary Rhetoric in Social Controversy and Public Policymaking,” paper presented at the 2004 convention of the National Communication Association, Chicago. Also see Randall Lake, “The Meta-ethical Framework of Anti-Abortion Rhetoric,” Signs 11 (1986): 478–99; William Saletan, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
4. Michael Calvin McGee, “The Ideograph: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 15.
5. Dana Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terror”: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Arguments, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 365–94.
6. Janis L. Edwards and Caro K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310.
7. Edwards and Winker, 299.
8. Palczewski, 388.
9. Cloud, 289.
10. Celeste Micelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 68.
11. Celeste Condit Railsback, “The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy: Stages in the Argument,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 20 (1984): 411–42; Condit, 1990.
12. Wilder; also see Condit, 1990; Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).
13. Lake, 490.
14. Schiappa, 39.
15. Schiappa, 42–43.
16. Schiappa, 7.
17. Luc Boltanski, “The Fetus and the Image War,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, ed., Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 78–81; Condit, 1990; Railsback, 1984; Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1996).
18. National Right to Life, http://www.nrlc.org/ (accessed 11 February 2008); also see “Pain of the Unborn,” National Right to Life flier, available for purchase at http://www.nrlc.org.
19. For discussion of fetal imagery see Condit, 1990; Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Newman, 1996; Rosalind P. Petcheskey, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 263–92 and Abortion and a Woman's choice: The States, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); Laurie Shrage, Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nathan Stormer, “Prenatal Space,” Signs 26 (2000): 109–44.
20. I write “supposedly” because some of these images are likely the products of natural still births and not abortion procedures; see Newman.
21. National Right to Life.
22. John Leland, “Under Din of Abortion Debate, an Experience Shared Quietly,” New York Times, http://www.newyorktimes.com (accessed 18 September 2005).
23. See Duden, Newman, Schrage, Stormer.
24. Cara A. Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representations in the “Skull Controversy,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 135.
25. Finnegan, 147.
26. Finnegan, 147.
27. Bruno Latour, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 19.
28. Condit, 64.
29. Railsback, 416; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000); Shrage.
30. Railsback, 415–16.
31. Rosen.
32. Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, & Elena R. Gutiérrez, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004): 5.
33. Wilder, 79.
34. National Right to Life.
35. Wilder, 79.
36. Jane Gilooly, Leona's Sister Gerri (1994), Newton Television foundation, Massachusetts.
37. Roberta Brandes Gratz, “Never Again,” Ms. (1973): 45.
38. Condit.
39. Lake, 497.
40. Schiappa, 101.
41. Condit, 93.
42. Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutiérrez, 30.
43. Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutiérrez, 30.
44. Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutiérrez.
45. Wilder, Rosen.
46. Saletan, 2003.
47. Saletan, 2003.
48. Saletan, 2003, p. 72.
49. Condit, 94.
50. Saletan, 2003, 99–100.
51. Saletan, 2003, p. 106
52. William Saletan, “Electoral Politics and Abortion,” in Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 111–123.
53. Saletan, 1998.
54. Saletan, 2003.
55. Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor, Jr., “Queen of the Center,” Newsweek, 11 July 2005, 25–32.
56. Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutiérrez, 7.
57. Speeches discussed throughout the essay were transcribed by the author from March for Women's Lives (2004), CSPAN, West Lafayette, Indiana. Images reflect the author's ethnographic notes, personal photographs, and photographs accessed from the following web pages: March for Women's Lives, http://www.marchforwomen.org; Planned Parenthood, http://www.plannedparenthood.org, and the National Organization for Women, http://www.now.org.
58. Saletan, 1998, 119.
59. McGee, 14.
60. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in US Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 42.
61. In addition to representatives from every state, including Hawaii and Alaska, representatives from 57 nations participated in the march.
62. McGee, 10.
63. Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 387–419.
64. Gilooly.
65. See Jean Kilbourne, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (New York: Touchstone, 1999).
66. Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–51.
67. Fried, x.
68. Silliman, Fried, Ross and Gutiērrez, 41.
69. Bonnie J. Dow, “Spectator, Spectatorship, and Gender Anxiety in Television Coverage of the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality,” Communication Studies 50 (1999): 143–57.
70. Hariman and Lucaites, 62.