When journalists, academics, and politicians describe the North American anti-abortion movement, they often describe a campaign that is male-dominated, aggressive, and even violent in its tactics, religious in motivation, anti-women in tone, and fetal-centric in arguments and rhetoric. Are they correct?
In The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon suggest that the reality is far more complicated, particularly in Canada.
Today, anti-abortion activism increasingly presents itself as ""pro-women"": using female spokespersons, adopting medical and scientific language to claim that abortion harms women, and employing a wide range of more subtle framing and narrative rhetorical tactics that use traditionally progressive themes to present the anti-abortion position as more feminist than pro-choice feminism.
Following a succinct but comprehensive overview of the two-hundred year history of North American debate and legislation on abortion, Saurette and Gordon present the results of their systematic, five-year quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, supplemented by extensive first-person observations, and outline the implications that flow from these findings. Their discoveries are a challenge to our current assumptions about the abortion debate today, and their conclusions will be compelling for both scholars and activists alike.
By:
Paul Saurette,
Kelly Gordon
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 236mm,
Width: 162mm,
Spine: 33mm
Weight: 800g
ISBN: 9781442647619
ISBN 10: 1442647612
Pages: 456
Publication Date: 09 February 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Further / Higher Education
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface Ch. 1 – Introduction Part I: Historicizing the Abortion Debate in North America Ch. 2 – The History of the Abortion Debate in the United States Ch. 3 The Abortion Debate in the United States Post Roe v. Wade Ch. 4 – The History of The Abortion Debate in Canada Ch. 5 – The Abortion Debate in Canada: Morgentaler and Beyond Ch. 6 – Intermezzo: The History of the Abortion Debate in North America Part II: The Changing Voice of Canada’s Contemporary Anti-Abortion Movement Ch. 7 – Shifting Strategies: A Little Old, A Lot of New, A Bit of Both Ch. 8 – Women Up Front, God Out Back: The Changing Anti-Abortion Arguments Ch. 9 – We’re All Progressives Now: Rebranding the Movement Ch. 10 – Anti-Abortionism as the New Feminism: Reframing the Position Ch. 11 – From Jezebel to Snow White: Moralizing Through Narrativizing Part III: Comparisons, Conclusions, Implications Ch. 12. Pro-Woman’ Discourse in the United States Ch. 13 – Theoretical Implications Ch. 14 – Where to Now? Practical Implications For Abortion Rights Advocates Appendix A: Glossary of Key Legal and Political Events, Organizations and Individuals Appendix B: Historical Timeline – Abortion Politics in UK, Canada and US Appendix C: Historical Timeline – Abortion Discourse in Canada and US
Paul Saurette is a professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Kelly Gordon is a PhD candidate in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.
Reviews for The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of ""Pro-Woman"" Rhetoric in Canada and the United States
""Saurette and Gordon's book is a major contribution to our understanding of abortion politics in Canada and a compelling example of how to analyse political strategy through discourse. It will be a 'go-to' text for gender and politics courses."" --Lois Harder, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta
- Winner of Donald Smiley Prize awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association 2016 (Canada)
- Winner of The Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award awarded by the American Political Science Association 2019 (United States)
