Fetal Politics

Americans have been arguing about abortion for almost half a century. The controversy's tenacity reflects the power of abortion as a symbol, one so capacious that it can represent many political concerns.1 The charge sheet against abortion lists evils ranging from sexual immorality to blasphemous defiance of womanliness to murder to undermining the family to endangering civilization. Abortion's many associations may seem disconnected but in fact they are relatively well integrated, as far as political discourse ever is. The controversy was born in the early 1970s, along with the ‘New Right’, helping to create a new political majority focused on ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ issues, terms that both refer to and mask its gender politics and their economic and political consequences. Today abortion talk is imbued with the Tea-Party politics of shutting down government and denying public responsibility for the wellbeing of the populace, reducing ‘the state’ to police and armies – in gendered terms, shutting down the ‘caring state’ and embracing a carceral and warfare state. Abortion condemnation has become part of a campaign to redistribute wealth from the poor, the working class and the middle class to the rich.

Abortion · Civilization · Immorality · Morality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Symbol (formal) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law