The Social Construction of Deviance, Activism, and Identity in Women's Accounts of Abortion

205 Pages·2013·0.77 MB·English

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DEVIANCE, ACTIVISM, AND IDENTITY
IN WOMEN’S ACCOUNTS OF ABORTION

by

Mallary Allen

B.A., University of Montana, 2007
M.A., Southern Illinois University, 2011

A Dissertation
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology
in the Graduate School
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
August 2013
Copyright by MALLARY ALLEN, 2013
All Rights Reserved
DISSERTATION APPROVAL

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DEVIANCE, ACTIVISM, AND IDENTITY
IN WOMEN’S ACCOUNTS OF ABORTION

By

Mallary Allen

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the field of Sociology

Approved by:

Jennifer L. Dunn, Chair

Rachel B. Whaley

Janet M. Fuller

Kristen Barber

Christopher Wienke

Graduate School
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
June 25, 2013
AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF

MALLARY ALLEN, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in SOCIOLOGY, presented on JUNE
25, 2013, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

TITLE: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DEVIANCE, ACTIVSM, AND IDENITY IN
WOMEN’S ACCOUNTS OF ABORTION

MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Jennifer L. Dunn

The mainstream abortion rights debate in the United States, its opposing factions
popularly identified as pro-choice and pro-life, is reliant upon identifiable narratives of
abortion’s value to women and society and, alternately, its harms. This dissertation traces more
than one hundred years of evolution of popular rhetoric surrounding the practice of elective
termination of pregnancy in the U.S. and identifies the understandings of abortion and the
women who have them which are most prominent in our culture today. This dissertation
examines the ways in which women who have had abortions invoke the rhetoric of “sympathetic
abortion” in making sense of their own experiences. For the pro-choice movement, young,
childless women accomplish sympathetic abortions in light of factors like responsible birth
control use and the pursuit of empowering life goals, while factors like existing children,
previous abortions, and bad clinic experiences contradict this template. The women interviewed
for this research discuss ways in which the circumstances surrounding their abortions and their
individual approaches to their procedures align their reproductive choices with the sympathetic
template or else point to ways in which their experiences fail this standard. Women occasionally
transcend the templates of “good” and “bad” abortions and offer new meanings. This
dissertation closes with a discussion of the role of women’s stories in social movements and the
consequences of discourse which ignores abortion experiences that fall short of the contemporary
formula story.
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DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated with gratitude to my dear friend, Jenn Schweitzer, and to all
of the women who shared their stories with me. It is with a hopeful spirit that I also dedicate this
work to my children, Victor and Mica, and to the next generation of feminists and critical
thinkers.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my inspiring committee members: my chair Jennifer Dunn whose work and
ideas have shaped my research, Rachel Whaley whose mentorship and encouragement kept me
going, Kristen Barber whose methodological and writing tips vastly improved this dissertation,
Janet Fuller whose insights helped me to ask the right questions, and Christopher Wienke whose
vision helped to light my path. Likewise, thank you to Jenn Schweitzer and Kate Niman, my
colleagues and friends, for many insightful conversations. I am grateful to have learned from all
of you.
Thank you also to my children, Victor and Mica, without whom I may not have finished
this degree. Thank you for your love, your patience, your inspiration, all of your wonderful
distractions, and everything you have taught me. And thank you especially to my husband,
William Stodden, who encouraged me to pursue this degree and knew that I could do it all along.
Finally, thank you to all of the women who participated in this research and granted me
interviews. I am deeply grateful that you shared your stories.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... i
DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... vi
CHAPTER 1 ENCOUNTERING THE ABORTION REPERTOIRE .......................................... 1
CULTURAL STORIES, SELF STORIES, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ............................. 4
RHETORIC AND PATIENT STORIES .................................................................................. 13
RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...................................................................................................... 14
CHAPTER 2 THE EVOLUTION OF ABORTION RHETORIC IN THE U.S. ........................ 23
CHAPTER 3 THE SYMPATHETIC PATIENT ......................................................................... 48
TELLING A PRO-CHOICE STORY: I’m Not Sorry .............................................................. 49
TELLING A PRO-LIFE STORY: Silent No More................................................................... 61
FORMULA STORIES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TO PATIENTS ................................ 75
CHAPTER 4 WITHIN-NARRATIVE: TELLING A SYMPATHETIC STORY AND ITS
REWARDS ................................................................................................................................... 79
CERTAINTY ............................................................................................................................ 82
ORIENTATIONS TO UNINTENDED PREGNANCY .......................................................... 84
GOOD REASONS .................................................................................................................... 85
HEALTHY CHILDREN .......................................................................................................... 88
OTHERING FELLOW PATIENTS ......................................................................................... 92
NARRATIVES OF EMPOWERMENT ................................................................................... 95
CLINIC AS TURNING POINT ............................................................................................... 96
CHAPTER 5 GOING AGAINST NARRATIVE: FAILED STORIES AND OPPORTUNITIES
FOR TRANSCENDENCE ......................................................................................................... 101
DEMOGRAPHICALLY DISQUALIFIED ............................................................................ 103
DISEMPOWERMENT ........................................................................................................... 114
COMPETING IDEOLOGIES ................................................................................................ 126
BEYOND NARRATIVE: CHALLENGING THE RHETORIC OF THE SYMPATHETIC
ABORTION ............................................................................................................................ 130
NEW NARRATIVES ............................................................................................................. 135
CHAPTER 6 WHAT ABORTION STORIES TELL US: WOMEN, MOTHERS, EMOTIONS
AND MOVEMENTS.................................................................................................................. 141
MAPPING THE NARRATIVE: ABORTION, MOTHERHOOD, AND AMBIVALENT
FEMININITY ......................................................................................................................... 142
STORIES, EMOTIONS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ..................................................... 145
REPRODUCING ACTIVISM ................................................................................................ 147
INVISIBLE HISTORIES AND CHALLENGES: BLACK WOMEN AND MAINSTREAM
STORIES ................................................................................................................................ 149
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FROM PATIENT COMMUNITY TO CONDEMNATION ................................................. 152
LOOKING AHEAD ............................................................................................................... 156
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 161
APPENDIX A METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX ................................................................ 173
CONTENT ANALYSIS ON PRO-CHOICE AND PRO-LIFE WEBSITES......................... 177
INTERVIEWING WOMEN WHO HAVE HAD ABORTIONS .......................................... 179
SELF AS RESEARCHER ...................................................................................................... 186
APPENDIX B PARTICIPANT APPENDIX ............................................................................ 190
APPENDIX C COVER LETTER .............................................................................................. 191
APPENDIX D INFORMED CONSENT .................................................................................. 193
APPENDIX E INTERVIEW SCHEDULE ............................................................................... 195
APPENDIX F FACE SHEET .................................................................................................... 196
VITA ........................................................................................................................................... 197

v
LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1 PARTICIPANT APPENDIX ……………………………………………………….190

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CHAPTER 1

ENCOUNTERING THE ABORTION REPERTOIRE

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in
collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by,
whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying
language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
-Adrienne Rich
(From Of Woman Born, 1976)

A couple of years ago, my good friend told me that she was unexpectedly pregnant and
that she and her husband had decided to “keep it.” I thought the latter part of her announcement
a little odd. Of course you are going to keep your baby, I thought, you’re married. You have a
college education and a career. You are twenty-eight and planned to become a parent one day
anyway. The question of terminating her pregnancy, an alternative to which she alluded when
she said she had chosen to keep it, was inconsistent with my assumptions about abortion as a
woman of the same age and status. What I will refer to frequently throughout this dissertation
as the ideal reproductive timeline – which I had seen propagated by middle-class friends, family
members, and media representations – is one which puts perhaps one unwanted pregnancy (and
thus one abortion) before the accomplishments of college degrees and marriages, feats with
which childbearing is presumed to interfere. Once partnered and earning a decent salary,
however, motherhood is the normative goal and one to which I knew my friend aspired.
Around the same time, another close friend discovered that she was pregnant in very
different circumstances and in fact had an abortion. Money was tight for Alicia, finishing
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