Before Roe: Abortion Policy in the States

2. Competing Discourses

2 Competing Discourses Why a topic becomes a political issue is a central question addressed by theorists of agenda-setting.1 Although these theorists focus on different aspects of the agendamaking process, what unites them is the significance they assign to discourse as a tool used by competing forces to get their respective issues into the policy stream. Discourse is the critical link between grievance and action. As Edelman notes, “political beliefs, perceptions, and expectations are overwhelmingly not based upon observation or empirical evidence available to participants, but rather upon cuings among groups of people who jointly create the meanings they will read into current and anticipated events.”2 These cuings are often based on the discourses introduced by political actors who seek to control policy outcomes. For example , until the nineteenth century, when physicians defined abortion as murder, most people did not consider early abortion to be a criminal offense. Similarly, it was not until radical feminists in the 1960s defined access to abortion as central to women’s liberty that people made that connection. To make sense of the conflicting discourses provided by competing forces in any policy debate, people order ideas and concepts around narrative structures or stories that resonate with their beliefs and principles.3 The concept of discourse coalitions, “a group of actors who share a social construct ” and act on it, describes the process by which various groups of people who view an issue in a similar way form coalitions and organizations and attempt to shape policy 28 outcomes.4 This approach to policy analysis highlights the significance of discourse in agenda-setting by focusing on the “story lines” or narratives that unite coalitions, and that shape their definitions of problems and the solutions they propose.5 The concept of discourse coalitions is particularly relevant to the pre-Roe debate, where different story lines united opposing sides. Antiabortion forces adopted a narrative based on the sanctity of human life to build support against abortion reform; pro-abortion activists argued that restrictive abortion laws violated women’s rights to privacy, equality, and liberty, and were therefore unconstitutional. Antiabortion groups favored prohibiting access to abortions; their opponents proposed reforming and later repealing the existing abortion laws. Discourse coalitions frame an issue in a particular way, promoting one set of values over another—in this case the sanctity of human life versus the right to privacy. This is an especially significant dimension of the abortion debate, given the inherent ethical nature of the issue. The elasticity of discourse coalitions, which enables them to unite various groups with related but somewhat different views on an issue, was well suited to the abortion conflict because differences soon emerged within each coalition in terms of how strict or loose the laws should be.6 On the antiabortion side, some individuals and organizations were prepared to allow abortions when the embryo was likely to be severely deformed, while others thought that no exceptions should be made, except when the woman’s life was endangered. The factions were united, however, in their opposition to the vast majority of abortions and their support of legislation to make abortions more difficult to obtain. Within the pro-abortion coalition, some members favored allowing abortions in cases of crimes, Competing Discourses 29 deformity, or when the pregnant woman’s health was endangered, while others held that all abortion restrictions should be repealed. Generally speaking, however, they all agreed that existing abortion laws should be made less restrictive. The focal point of the conflict over abortion policy was thus how to define abortion. Since the nineteenth century, various groups had argued that their respective positions qualified them to regulate abortion policy. Physicians framed abortion as a medical issue and maintained that their expertise , their duty to care for all stages of life, and their role in determining when a woman’s life was threatened by a pregnancy gave them a deciding voice on the issue. Attorneys argued that since abortion regulations conflicted with fundamental rights, the courts were the arena in which abortion policy should be created. The Catholic Church regarded abortion as a predominantly moral and religious issue, which it considered itself best suited to define and regulate. In the late 1960s, radical feminists claimed that access to abortion was a central component of women’s liberty, and that the decision to have an abortion should be made by the woman involved, not by...