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The first major abortion debates in the United States—in Roe vs. Wade legalizing abortion in the first 24 weeks and the Hyde Amendment denying funding—established the terms of conflict over the issue: right to life of the foetus versus women's right to seek and choose abortion services. These debates also constructed two great social movements which have confronted each other ever since. Although women's movement and pro‐choice forces form an alliance that has successfully maintained access to legal abortion, the pro‐life movement has robbed them of energy and time to achieve full reproductive rights for women. In the latest skirmish over the ‘partial birth’ abortion ban, women's movement actors would have failed without the assistance of a Democratic president and his women's policy agency. Even so, their frame of activism has been narrowed to women's health.

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 addresses the question of how we should understand the moral status of the prenatal human being and the attendant ethical issues of abortion and embryo research. The first section defends a framework for understanding prenatal moral status, a framework that supports liberal views about abortion and embryo research. The next section rebuts the three strongest arguments in favor of a pro-life approach. It is argued in the next section, perhaps surprisingly, that one might reasonably doubt the author’s framework. Hence a sort of pluralism regarding prenatal moral status. In view of this stalemate, the discussion is redirected to the level of political philosophy and social policy; a liberal approach to policy is defended. The final section sketches and defends such an approach to abortion and embryo research.

Evaluates “pro‐life” and “pro‐choice” media campaigns, featuring fetuses and coat hangers respectively, and shows how both reflect individualistic ideologies about responsibility and freedom. Rather than participate in public discourses that construe individual responsibility and liberty as simple moral alternatives, considers feminist political art that raises questions about our collective responsibilities to support others. Also considers visual and performance artwork that draws attention to the way that pregnancy and persons are culturally constructed. Urges reproductive rights activists to jettison the coat hanger image in favor of images that would promote constructive public dialog on access to contraception, child and family support, the duties of all citizens to provide life‐saving help, the positive aspects of enabling women to control their fertility, and the dangers of religious extremism.

This Chapter explores to what extent the Personhood Dependent Principle (PDP) as it is developed in Chapter One is an attractive solution for pro-choice advocates and supporters of research that involves the destruction of embryos in the U.S. One might think that both have something at stake in continuing to bracket the question of when life begins. However, this attitude is prone not to appreciate the importance of insuring that some embryos are protected, i.e., those that will become persons. A look at tort and criminal law, however, shows that it is indeed possible for pro-choice advocates to endorse a principle such as the PDP without having to give up on their commitment to protecting women’s right to self-determination. The same is true for supporters of technologies that involve the destruction of embryos such as PGD or stem cell research. They too can endorse a principle that mandates the protection of embryos that will be born while holding on to their commitment that there is nothing wrong with destroying embryos or using them for research purposes.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the current terrain of abortion debate in the UK, covering calls for decriminalisation as well as debates on sex-selection, disability and pre-abortion counselling. It argues that the classic image of abortion politics as a war between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ actors cannot adequately accommodate these recent developments – nor does it fit with how abortion debates have actually unfolded in Britain historically. Instead, it offers an interpretation of abortion law as resting on a coalition between government and medical actors formed to govern women’s reproductive decisions. The chapter closes with an overview of the book.

This chapter assesses abortion debates in the 1980s and 1990s. By this point, anti-abortion actors were attempting to solve their PR problem by mimicking their opponents’ arguments, moving away from a conservative emphasis on morality and vice, and towards an appropriation of the liberal-paternalist and feminist arguments that had been put forward in support of legal abortion. This was done by adopting seemingly feminist language in talking about medical power, exploitation and women’s rights. Pro-choice and feminist actors, on the other hand, typically avoided challenging the logics underpinning the Abortion Act. Few alternatives to the current, highly medicalised system of abortion provision were proffered; rather, pro-choice actors were forced into a reactive position defending the Abortion Act from anti-abortion attacks.

This chapter explores UK abortion debates in the 21st century. It describes new anti-abortion strategies which emerged in the 2000s and went beyond the familiar attacks on abortion providers. It demonstrates how issues such as foetal viability and calls for changes in pre-abortion counselling provision evolved as a consequence both of past anti-abortion activity and how pro-choice feminist actors have made their arguments. The chapter argues that counselling amendments are proposed because they undermine the association between a ‘right to choose’ and feminist politics and call into question the medical authority on which the Abortion Act 1967 was based.

This chapter focuses on the newest battlegrounds in the UK abortion debate. This includes growing calls for decriminalisation, involving the repeal of sections of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and the increasing purchase these are finding inside Parliament and among the medical profession. It also includes new debates about sex-selective abortion and abortion in the cases of severe disability, and the need for the pro-choice movement to organise horizontally to address the needs of all women. It ends with an assessment of the future prospects of both the movement for decriminalisation, and the movement for more restrictive abortion law.

This chapter places abortion debates in Britain in the context of both anti-abortion strategy worldwide and the global struggle for reproductive justice, touching on issues of race, ethnicity, migration and nation. There has recently been a twofold shift in the terrain of British pro-choice argument. One the one hand, the British pro-choice coalition has shifted from a politics of protection – which emphasises women’s vulnerability and thereby supports a paternalistic, medicalised regime of abortion regulation – to a politics of liberation, which emphasises women’s authority over their own reproductive decisions. On the other hand, there is a growing need to acknowledge intersectional or reproductive justice claims in abortion politics. The chapter closes by asking whether the pro-choice movement is being pulled in two different directions, and how it can steer between them.

This chapter traces the role of Catholic social thought within the contemporary alliance between Protestant and Catholic social conservatives. Drawing on Fr. Richard John Neuhaus' hope that Catholicism might serve as a guiding public philosophy, the chapter shows how this Catholic moment is rendered brief—disabled by the sexual abuse crisis, a Democratic Party committed to a pro-choice position on abortion, and a powerful libertarian strain within the Republican Party. Still, at one point, the fate of the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s—President Obama's healthcare bill—seemed to lie in the hands of the Catholics, with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Michigan congressman Bart Stupak deciding how to balance competing claims about the bill's effect on the public funding of abortions.

The contemporary abortion debate is too often dominated by dichotomous thinking, including and especially a false dichotomy between women's reproductive rights and respect for fetal life. In this chapter I argue that it is possible to embrace a pro-choice ideology while respecting fetal life.

The rise of the largely Evangelical-led Christian Right movement profoundly altered the Southern political landscape and eventually the national one as well. The “Solid South,” long a predominantly white Protestant and Democratic Party dominated region, has become largely Republican and anchored by white Protestants. As the South has become increasingly diverse and somewhat less distinctive, coalitions of minority groups, including religious minorities, are the backbone of the Democratic Party in the region. Since the 1980s, white Evangelicals have remained firmly committed to the GOP. What began in the South as a marginalized social movement focused on a narrow agenda eventually reconfigured the national party coalitions and played a major role on the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

Since the 1960s, public debates about abortion have powerfully shaped how Americans think about pregnancy and miscarriage. Activists have staked out “pro-life” and “pro-choice” positions, neither of which provides comfort to a woman who has chosen to become pregnant but then miscarries the pregnancy. Pro-life activists have argued that embryos are babies from conception, and when they are lost, deserve to be mourned as such, and miscarriage support literature often draws upon pro-life language and imagery. The reality of frequent early miscarriages has been little recognized in the abortion debates.