Abortion and eugenics

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a revolution within foetal diagnostics. In roughly the same period, legal measures in many countries permitted the termination of pregnancies in cases of suspected foetal abnormalities. Critics have claimed that the resulting abortion policies resemble the old, state‐imposed eugenics of the early 20th century. This article presents some evidence to the contrary. In Norway, which is the article's main topic of concern, so‐called eugenic clauses in the abortion legislation were passed well before the revolution in foetal diagnostics. More importantly, other motives were historically more significant than eugenics for the development of modern Norwegian abortion policies. Consequently, any eugenic effect of these policies should be considered a result of coincidence rather than design – or so the article argues. Brief comparisons with the other Nordic countries are included.     

Discourse, Party, and Policy: The Case of Abortion, 1965–1972

The parameters of the contemporary abortion debate were established in the pre-Roe period between 1965 and 1972, when groups and forces on the state and manual level competed to redefine the issue in order to pass new policies regulating it. This article traces the abortion politics of New York and Pennsylvania, the two states that led the nation in creating abortion policies before Roe, by looking at the relationship between the discourses created by various groups, the agree of party support they received, and the disparate policies that each state pawed as a result.     

Forced Abortion in Tibet:Yes or No

AfterhisrecentsecondvisittoTibet,DeputySpeakeroftheAustralianHouseofRepresentativesMrGarryNehlcametotheconclusionthatTibetisstillpoorandunderdeveloped,butitismakingprogress.MrGarTyNehlhadpreviouslyvisitedin1992."TherewerereportsthattheTibetanswereforcedtofol-lowthebirthcontrolpolicy.Itissheernonsense,"hesaid.MrGapNehlwasmentioningoverseasreportsthattheChineseGovemmentisenforcingthebirthcontrolpolicyinTibet,andwomentherewhohavealreadyhavetwochildrenareforcedtoabortiftheybecamepregnantag…     

Political and Socioeconomic Indicators of State Restrictiveness Toward Abortion

We compare the relative impacts of political and socioeconomic factors on state restrictiveness toward abortion during the pre-Roe, pre-Webster and post-Webster time frames. This analysis tests the value of cycle theory, where shifting epochs dominated by liberalism and conservatism enhance the role of political variables in shaping policy formation. It also tests the explanatory value of public opinion theory which holds that bimodal issues which cut across party lines accentuate the role of socioeconomic variables in shaping issue evolution. The results of this analysis lend support to cycle theory and public opinion theory, although public opinion theory receives stronger support. When socioeconomic independent variables are regressed against our dichotomous measures of state restrictiveness toward abortion, they explain more variance than political independent variables. Political variables were more important in the conservative era (1989) than in the liberal era (1972).     

Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973

Creating Choice is an important collection of edited interviewswith individuals involved in the movement to secure women'saccess to birth control and abortion in western Massachusettsin the decades surrounding the Supreme Court's pivotal rulings,Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that legalized contraceptiveuse by married couples, and Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion rightscase. The collection broadens the historical treatment of thismovement, introducing activists from grassroots women's organizationsand accentuating the contributions of professionals—clergy,medical practitioners, and health educators—who establishednetworks and services that made free choice possible for somewomen even before state law extended     

Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti‐Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s

This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti‐abortion activism of the mid‐1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti‐abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti‐abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid‐1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti‐abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro‐choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal‐subjects.     

Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion

Unborn in the USA traces the activities of antiabortion activistsin thirty-five states, documenting a range of antichoice activism,from exhibiting photo displays of aborted fetuses to a folkartist who creates life-sized sculptures of fetuses at variousdevelopmental stages. It offers only one side in the abortionwar—those opposed to the procedure—and only thosewho attempt to derail support for abortion by presenting imagesof aborted fetuses, even though, curiously, the