Abstract
Chapter 1 situates this project within the abortion debate in the USA, focusing on the more recent developments: the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the Supreme Court ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014. The analysis of the pro-life discourse and public policy is based on data collection from multiple fields. The discourse analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected mainly through the analysis of newspaper items and pro-life websites. The analysis of public policy is based on data collected at state and federal levels regarding abortion and abortion-related services. The chapter ends with an introduction of the framework of analysis, focusing on human rights, reproductive rights, and right-wing politics.
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Notes
- 1.
The data does not include The Washington Post publications between the years 1973 and 1976 due to limited access. The data includes articles published until June 30, 2015.
- 2.
In general, The Washington Post published more items on this issue, and has a higher percentage of items that include references to the pro-life discourse. However, since the analysis of the newspapers is used to better understand the pro-life discourse as it appears in the mainstream media, the data from both newspapers is often presented together.
- 3.
- 4.
As will be further discussed in Chap. 3, these scientific claims are often rejected by many in the scientific community, who argue that research finds that abortion rarely leads to feelings of regret and emotional harm (Charles et al. 2008), and that induced abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer (Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer 2004; Jasen 2005).
- 5.
The Guttmacher Institute is a nonprofit organization which operates primarily to provide research and public education on reproductive health issues in the USA and abroad (Guttmacher Institute Website 2015).
- 6.
- 7.
As is shown in the chapter, until the case of Hobby Lobby, there was very little pro-life discourse concerning the rights of third-party actors in the abortion debate.
- 8.
In her analysis of the pro-life amicus briefs in Webster, Woliver (2013) found that the term “fetus” was never used. Instead, the pro-life discourse used more than 40 different terms to describe the unborn child, including “children in the womb,” “human life before birth,” “minor child,” “unborn grandchildren,” and “those who will be citizens if their life are not ended in the womb” (7). Instead of woman, the briefs mainly used the word “mother.”
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Hagel, A.V., Mansbach, D. (2016). The Reproductive Rights Debate in the Age of Human Rights. In: Reproductive Rights in the Age of Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53952-6_1
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