This book compares the political process and role of the media using controversy over abortion.

Using controversy over abortion as a lens through which to compare the political process and role of the media in these two very different democracies, this book examines the contest over meaning that is being waged by social movements, political parties, churches and other social actors.

Weaving together analyses of archival material, news coverage, and interviews conducted with journalists from mainstream and partisan outlets as well as with activists across the political spectrum, Deana A. Rohlinger reimagines how activists use a variety of mediums, sometimes simultaneously, to agitate for - and against - legal abortion. Rohlinger's in-depth portraits of four groups - the National Right to Life Committee, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, and Concerned Women for America - illuminates when groups use media and why they might choose to avoid media attention altogether. Rohlinger expertly reveals why some activist groups are more desperate than others to attract media attention and sheds light on what this means for policy making and legal abortion in the twenty-first century.

Condit provides a close look at how pro-life and pro-choice arguments have helped shape the development of public policy and private practice. She offers readers an orderly way through the barrage of rhetoric and an opportunity to identify and clarify our own opinions on a very difficult subject.

The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what’s to come. When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed—and how millions of women sought abortions regardless of the law. With this edition, Leslie J. Reagan provides a new preface that addresses the dangerous and ongoing threats to abortion access across the country, and the precarity of our current moment. While abortions have typically been portrayed as grim "back alley" operations, this deeply researched history confirms that many abortion providers—including physicians—practiced openly and safely, despite prohibitions by the state and the American Medical Association. Women could find cooperative and reliable practitioners; but prosecution, public humiliation, loss of privacy, and inferior medical care were a constant threat. Reagan's analysis of previously untapped sources, including inquest records and trial transcripts, shows the fragility of patient rights and raises provocative questions about the relationship between medicine and law. With the right to abortion increasingly under attack, this book remains the definitive history of abortion in the United States, offering vital lessons for every American concerned with health care, civil liberties, and personal and sexual freedom.

When Henry Morgentaler, Canada’s best-known abortion rights advocate, died in 2013, activists and scholars began to reassess the state of abortion in the country. In this volume, some of Canada’s foremost researchers challenge current thinking about abortion by revealing the discrepancy between what Canadians believe the law to be after the 1988 Morgentaler decision and what people are experiencing on the ground. Showcasing new theoretical frameworks and approaches from law, history, medicine, women’s studies, and political science, these timely essays reveal the diversity of abortion experiences across the country, past and present, and make a case for shifting the debate from abortion rights to reproductive justice.

Much of the political polarization that grips the United States is rooted in the so-called culture wars, and no topic defines this conflict better than the often contentious and sometimes violent debate over abortion rights. In Sign of Pathology, Nathan Stormer reframes our understanding of this conflict by examining the medical literature on abortion from the 1800s to the 1960s. Often framed as an argument over a right to choose versus a right to life, our current understanding of this conflict is as a contest over who has the better position on reproductive biology. Against this view, Sign of Pathology argues that, as it became a medical problem, abortion also became a template, more generally, for struggling with how to live—far exceeding discussions of the merits of providing abortions or how to care for patients. Abortion practices (and all the legal, moral, and ideological entanglements thereof) have rested firmly at the center of debate over many fundamental institutions and concepts—namely, the individual, the family, the state, human rights, and, indeed, the human. Medical rhetoric, then, was decisive in cultivating abortion as a mode of cultural critique, even weaponizing it for discursive conflict on these important subjects, although the goal of the medical practice of abortion has never been to establish this kind of struggle. Stormer argues that the medical discourse of abortion physicians transformed the state of abortion into an indicator that the culture was ill, attacking itself during and through pregnancy in a wrongheaded attempt to cope with reproduction.