The changing voice of the anti-abortion movement : the rise of "pro-woman" rhetoric in Canada and the United States /

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Saurette, Paul (Author), Gordon, Kelly, 1984- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [2015]
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Description
Summary: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.
Physical Description:xx, 429 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9781442647619
1442647612
9781442615694
1442615699