New paper
Posted
Thursday, April 17, 2008 3:16 PM
by
John Nann
Professor Siegel has posted on SSRN a version of a paper to be published in the Duke Law Journal. The paper is entitled: "The Right's Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protective Antiabortion Argument". Here is the abstract:
"This Lecture investigates the social
movement dynamics that produced woman-protective antiabortion argument.
The Lecture explores the political conditions under which leaders of
the antiabortion movement began to supplement or even to supplant the
constitutional argument abortion kills a baby with a new argument,
abortion hurts women - a claim that achieved widespread public notice
with the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.
The
Lecture's genealogy of a social movement claim begins in the 1980s,
when members of the antiabortion movement asserted that abortion
subjects women to regret, trauma, and psychological illness, a
condition they termed post-abortion syndrome (PAS). My story then
follows changes in the abortion-harms-women claim as it was transformed
from PAS - a therapeutic discourse initially employed to dissuade women
from having abortions and to recruit women to the antiabortion cause -
into woman-protective antiabortion argument (WPAA), a political
discourse forged in the heat of social movement conflict that sought to
persuade audiences outside the movement's ranks in electoral campaigns
and in constitutional litigation.
Whereas PAS grew up as a
mobilizing discourse deployed primarily among women volunteers and
clients in the antiabortion movement's crisis pregnancy network - a
context in which abortion-hurts-women testimonials had important
expressive functions - WPAA took shape in political contexts in which
the abortion-hurts-women argument had important strategic functions. In
the 1990s, antiabortion advocates sought to explain to audiences that
ambivalently supported the abortion right why women would benefit from
legal restrictions on abortion. As they did so, they fused PAS claims
and stories with traditional gender-paternalist argument, justifying
restrictions on women's agency as needed to protect women from male
coercion and to free women to be mothers. As a political discourse
designed to rebut feminist, pro-choice claims, WPAA came to internalize
elements of the very arguments it sought to counter - fusing the public
health, trauma, and survivors idiom of PAS with the idiom of the late
twentieth-century feminist and abortion-rights movements. As the
Lecture shows, social movement mobilization, conflict, and coalition
each played a role in the evolution and spread of the woman-protective
antiabortion argument, in the process forging new and distinctly modern
ways to talk about the right to life and the role morality of
motherhood in the therapeutic, public health, and political rights
idiom of late twentieth-century America.
The Lecture concludes
by considering the new gender-paternalist justifications for abortion
restrictions discussed in Carhart. With the spread of woman-protective
antiabortion argument and its seductively modern justifications for
using law to impose motherhood on women, Justice Kennedy and the nation
will once again have to decide - not only how to balance the liberty of
the pregnant woman against the state interest in protecting potential
life - but more fundamentally, about the kind of women that
constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality protect. This
question is far from abstract, as South Dakota once again considers
whether to adopt an abortion ban, justified by fetal-protective and
woman-protective argument, in the 2008 elections."