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When the 1994 elections gave control of Congress to a conservative, Christian Coalition-dominated, Republican majority, what some had over-optimistically touted as a critical mass of women became a token group, notwithstanding a slight increase in numbers. Nowhere was that more evident than in the ability of that new Republican majority to re-define the agenda, raising new issues (Partial Birth Abortion Ban) and challenging seemingly non-controversial, bipartisan, well-established programs (funding for the Title X Family Planning program and international family planning programs). The continued evidence of the gender gap in prochoice support, along with the critical role played by the shrinking cohort of prochoice Republican women in challenging their leadership’s anti-reproductive rights agenda, reinforce the importance of increasing descriptive representation. Nevertheless, the gendered roles assumed by a growing vocal cohort of female Republican reproductive rights opponents, reluctance by some ostensibly prochoice Republican women to challenge their leadership, a shrinking gender gap in prochoice support within Congress, and the frustrations of those who attempted to fight these often futile battles, all highlight the critical role that institutional environments, increased ideological diversity among women, and extra-institutional forces play in shaping the probabilistic relationship between descriptive and substantive representation, in strengthening or weakening perceptions of legitimacy surrounding gender difference, and in defining and redefining the meaning of substantive representation of women and realizing the potential for difference. These case studies explore gender differences in perspectives of reproductive rights opponents, provide insight into the value of bipartisan support for reproductive rights policy agendas (despite Republicans being less prochoice than Democrats), and point to the important role of women voters in maintaining bipartisan support and political resolve.

The National Assembly in France tentatively reformed abortion law in 1975 and reaffirmed legal abortion in 1979. The women's movement campaigned on the issue but did not claim success for a policy they believed was still too restrictive. Their influence later increased under the leadership of activist women's policy agencies appointed by Socialist governments. In 1983, the Ministry of Woman's Rights initiated government funding of abortion costs. In the 1990s, a different agency fought anti‐abortion movement efforts to obstruct access to abortion clinics with an amendment to the criminal code.

Great Britain was the first country to reform its criminal abortion law with the Abortion Act of 1967, a law that was strict in form but liberal in practice. Active anti‐abortion forces sought to turn back the 1967 reform, putting movement activists in a position to defend the law on the books, and little opportunity to seek greater rights for women with respect to the abortion decisions. With occasional help of women's policy agencies, the women's movement actors were successful in defending legal abortion through the 1990s. The key to their success was the openness of the policy process through private member bills in parliament and commitment of feminist MPs in the Labour party.

After the establishment of a democratic constitution in Spain, the Socialist government included abortion law reform on its agenda to modernize Spanish policy in line with other European democracies. Facing intense opposition, the government allowed abortions only for ethical, eugenic, and therapeutic conditions. For the women's movement, abortion reform was a top priority, but activists were not heard directly, and had to settle for this moderate legalization. When the Ministry of Health sought to add further restrictions through a cumbersome set of committees and regulations, the women's movement had a women's policy agency inside the bureaucracy as an ally. The agency intervened to facilitate women's access to abortion services and thus helped the movement gain a successful response from the state.

This chapter summarizes and analyses the findings from the comparative analysis of abortion policy debates in 11 countries. The first section describes similarities and differences in abortion politics, including how abortion reform came to the public agenda, which institutions are responsible for abortion policy, and the pattern of conflict. In the second section, the summary of frames of the abortion debates show policy makers eventually incorporating gendered ideas that promote the status, rights, and autonomy of women, leading in most cases to increased substantive and descriptive representation of women. The third section shows that most women's movements have been unified in support of women's abortion rights, but have not achieved their full demands. The fourth section reports comparative findings testing the five hypotheses of the state feminist theory, and showing conditions under which states’ women's policy agencies have helped women's movement activists achieve feminist policy and participation goals.

This chapter tells the story told by an unmarried servant to a Leicestershire magistrate in 1608. Its ingredients include power and dependency, sex and violence, attempted abortion, attempted murder, suspected infanticide, and the construction of an exculpatory narrative. The story exposes the relationships of gentility and dependency, coercive male mastery and the vulnerabilities of female domestic service. Other topics exposed in the course of its unfolding include subterfuge and resistance, bribery and forgery, the misuse of literacy, and the threatened misuse of the law. The story even has religious dimensions involving the swearing of oaths, invocation of the Devil, recourse to the Bible, and a popular misrepresentation of the doctrine of predestination. The central character, Rose Arnold of Scraptoft, Leicestershire, told her story to her mother, to her minister, and to a magistrate, before retelling it, after much rehearsal, to the clerks of the diocesan court.

Cases illustrating variables relevant to women’s choices about contraception, sterilization, and abortion are presented. With regard to abortion, these include duration of gestation, condition of the fetus, methods of termination, availability and cost of the procedure, medical risks to the woman or potential child, capacity for parenting, responsibilities based on relationships to others, and different positions about the moral status of the fetus. For each topic, empirical and theoretical factors are discussed from an egalitarian perspective that privileges women’s standpoint vis-à-vis men’s not only on grounds of nondominance but also on grounds that women, not men, are directly affected by pregnancy.

This chapter describes the situation of mizuko kuyō in Japan, the country of its origin. A common but also contested rite, mizuko kuyō has been used by Japanese male Buddhist priests as a way to condemn promiscuous women and make money, while women have sought relief from symptoms believed to originate in spirit attacks and to reestablish ties broken by abortion. Despite widespread disapproval of abortion in Japan, it remains a common practice, and there are no serious movements to outlaw it. This chapter also provides a brief history of the relationship of abortion and religion in America. Abortion was initially outlawed for medical, rather than religious, reasons, but since its re-legalization in 1973, abortion has become a key issue of American religion and politics. Finally, methods used in this study are discussed.

This chapter discusses how Catholics, Evangelicals, feminists, and other non-Buddhists have rhetorically appropriated mizuko kuyō in the various battles of the American cultural wars, especially abortion. Pro-life advocates have actively disseminated information about mizuko kuyō as a way of proving that post-abortion trauma is a universal phenomenon and of demonstrating that they care about women, not just fetuses. Pro-choice activists have pointed to mizuko kuyō as proof that religion doesn’t need to condemn abortion and that ritual, rather than legal, means can be used to deal with abortion’s effects on society. This points to the need for a new category in the historiography of American Buddhism: Buddhist appropriators, who are non-Buddhists that strategically employ selected elements of Buddhism for their own purposes, thus contributing in often unrecognized ways to the Americanization of Buddhism.

This chapter examines the reason why many non-Buddhist Americans are appropriating mizuko kuyō rituals as a form of healing, either for themselves in the wake of pregnancy loss or for the nation as a whole during a time of deep cultural division. Pro-life advocates, pro-choice advocates, Christians, Jews, Pagans, feminists, and other groups have all discussed mizuko kuyō as evidence that American society is lacking in certain important ways when compared to Japan. Some have gone so far as to seek out mizuko kuyō at Buddhist temples either in America or Japan, or to hold their own mizuko kuyō rituals privately. Others seem to experience healing just by learning about mizuko kuyō, which gives them a new religious idiom and framework with which to talk about and conceptualize their pregnancy losses. It is possible that Buddhism will become a preferred provider of post-abortion and post-miscarriage services to non-Buddhists in America.

This final chapter returns to practical problems arising from accepting a plurality of true or justified moralities: (1) problems about how to have confidence in one’s moral commitments while recognizing that different commitments are equally justified, and (2) problems about how to act toward others who have those different commitments and about how we might learn from others. Regarding (1), it is suggested, following Zhuangzi, that we can strive to make our moral commitments broader and more inclusive, trying to incorporate what we appreciate in others’ commitments. With regard to (2), approaches embodying the value of accommodation are advocated: accept that serious disagreement is a pervasive, inescapable fact of our moral lives, strive to maintain constructive relationship toward those with whom one disagrees, remain open to compromise, to joining forces with them on other issues, and to working on those parts of one’s moral projects that more likely to gain consensus. Particular issues such as abortion and substantial inequality in income and wealth, and the alleged divisiveness of multiculturalism are discussed. Finally, a conception of ritual derived from Confucianism is applied to the problem of how one might regard voting in elections as a means to promote the spirit of accommodation.

Since 1989, church and state have tried to impose on the society their views of morality by extolling the virtues of the traditional family and by condemning homosexuality and abortion as dangerous practices threatening the very existence of the Romanian nation. The parliamentary debates on lifting the ban on homosexual behavior and on legalizing abortion have proved illustrative of the tension between church and state, and of the churches’ efforts to influence the legislative vote occasionally by persuasion and at times by condemnation.

This chapter investigates a new set of measures of attitudes about abortion policy. It argues that the standard ANES battery violates several principles of good question wording and also fails to take into account the timing of abortion, which is a central element of American law and current discourse. Strikingly different conclusions about the electorate's views about abortion emerge in the comparison of the standard and new items: whereas the traditional item indicates that a majority of Americans are opposed to abortion in all circumstances, or support it only in the limited rape–incest–life options, the new items suggest a symmetry in abortion attitudes, with as many Americans supporting the extreme pro-choice as the extreme pro-life options.