Representing Abortion

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Representing Abortion analyses how artists, writers, performers, and activists make abortion visible, audible, and palpable within contexts dominated by anti-abortion imagery centred on the fetus and the erasure of the pregnant person, challenging the polarisation of conversations about abortion.

This book illuminates the manifold ways that abortion is depicted and narrated by artists, performers, clinicians, writers, and activists. This representational work offers nuanced and complex understandings of abortion, personally and politically. Analyses of such representations are urgently needed as access to abortion is diminished and anti-abortion representations of the fetus continue to dominate the cultural horizon for thinking about abortion. Expanding the frame of reference for understanding abortion beyond the anti-abortion use of the fetal image, contributors to this collection push beyond narrow abstractions to examine representations of the experience and procedure of abortion within grounded histories, politics, and social contexts.

The collection is organized into sections around seeing (and not seeing) abortion; fetal materiality; abortion storytelling and memoir; and representations for new arguments. These themes cover a range of topics including abortion visibility, anti-abortion discourse, pro-choice engagements with the fetus, personal experience and media representations. The analyses of such representations counteract anti-abortion rhetoric, carving out space for new arguments for abortion that are more representative and inclusive and asking audiences to envision new ways to advocate for safe abortion access through reproductive justice frameworks.

This is an innovative and challenging collection that will be of key interest for scholars studying reproductive rights and reproductive justice, as well as women and gender studies. Representing Abortion is organized to structure upper year undergraduate and graduate courses on reproductive rights and reproductive justice in a new and engaging way.

1 Representing abortion

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

How is abortion visualised, heard, and felt – particularly in ways that support safe abortion access? Representing Abortion intervenes in scholarly, cultural, and activist conversations about abortion to expand how we think about abortion. The chapters in this book challenge the continued predominance of anti-abortion images and descriptions of the fetus as the primary signifier of abortion in the public sphere, understandings that are fortified by the personification of the fetus through diagnostic medical imaging. Contributors to this collection offer in-depth analyses that highlight the artistic, performative, literary, clinical, and activist efforts to represent abortion outside of this narrow vision and, significantly, to centre the pregnant person as the subject of abortion.¹ This imaginative intellectual-political work reclaims images and narratives about abortion from anti-abortion rhetoric, but it also creates new images and narratives while destabilising anti-abortion attempts to fix the meaning of the fetal image. Contributors explore the ramifications of these acts of creativity and reclamation for how abortion is understood beyond the binary of the fetus-as-person (pro-life) and individual choice (pro-choice). A central objective of this book is to build on these expanded frameworks to imagine abortion differently. Representing Abortion proposes and inspires new arguments for abortion access grounded in reproductive justice frameworks. The chapters and examples analysed in this book incorporate images and narratives that resonate with a wider range of abortion experiences, particularly those that are ordinary and non-sensational (in contrast to, for example, the rhetorical use of unwanted pregnancy resulting from rape or incest as a difficult-to-dispute justification for abortion access). Thus, the chapters in this book contribute to a popular surge in abortion storytelling as well as the uptick in recent scholarship on abortion and reproductive justice.

This introduction outlines three key areas of scholarship that help situate the chapters and the book’s contribution overall. I begin with a truncated discussion of representation in feminist theory that emphasises how intersections with Black cultural theory and psychoanalysis have shaped feminist understandings of representation as a site of struggle and additionally as psychically complex and generative. This discussion of representation sets the scene for a consideration of feminist scholarship about the fetal image over the past thirty-five years, which helps demonstrate how and why the fetal image has come to occupy its status as the primary representation of abortion. Following this discussion, I provide a brief overview of reproductive justice approaches, which are centred in the contributions to this collection. Here I define reproductive justice, discuss the uneasy position of abortion within reproductive justice, and explain why reproductive justice offers us the best framework from which to consider representations of abortion. And finally, I discuss contemporary abortion studies. I give a brief gloss of scholarship and creative work about abortion narratives, and the connections between activists and lawmakers, abortion legislation, the anti-abortion movement today, and analyses of abortion produced by providers that reflect on the clinical context. The introduction ends with an outline of the book and a synopsis of its contributions.

Feminist theory, representation, and fetal images

Lisa Disch astutely observes that in feminist theory and practice since the mid-twentieth century, representation occupies a place of significance eclipsed perhaps only by the concept of gender (2016, 781). Feminist analyses of representation have drawn attention to the paucity of women as legitimate subjects of culture, history, and politics; this book focuses on cultural representation and the roles of language and image in shaping meaning through interpretation. Feminist analyses have not materialised in isolation, and have benefitted enormously from exchange with critics who challenge prevailing cultural representations that fortify oppressive structures of power like white supremacy, heterosexism, ableism, classism, and transphobia. The scholarship of Black cultural theorists, particularly Stuart Hall and bell hooks, has been invaluable to feminist thought because this work incisively critiques the relationship between representation, ideology, and domination (Hall 1990; hooks 1992). Rooted in a discussion of Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic inquiry into the psychical violence of colonisation, Hall’s brilliant insights that “dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalisation,” and that these regimes possess the “power to make [Black people] see and experience ourselves as Other,” provide a rich ground from which to consider the ideological use of representation as central to domination (1990, 225). Writing about the generative capacity of film to do something more than simply “unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed,” but rather to produce identity through “retelling the past,” Hall claims representation as a process that is additionally illustrative and imaginative (1990, 224). For these reasons, bell hooks names representation as a “site of struggle,” a field in need of intervention and transformation “in our political movements of liberation and self-determination … be they anti-imperialist, feminist, gay rights, black liberation, or all of the above and more” (1992, 3–4). Throughout this volume, contributors are invested in representation as a site of political struggle for improved abortion access; a field that is in need of critiques that dismantle dominant ideas, maxims, and images about abortion, but also of creative and liberatory retellings.

Psychoanalytic theory also intersects with feminist considerations of representation and Black cultural studies in imaginative ways. A common second-wave feminist assumption that continues to hold authority is the idea that dominant images of women in popular culture have a straightforward negative effect on women, and that solving this problem is as simple as creating more realistic or empowering images (Hollows 2000, 21–4). Indeed, while “what we can see is in every way related to what one can say,” feminist efforts resulting in an endless proliferation of new images can be co-opted by the dominant culture as a way of capturing the “other” as knowable and containable (Phelan 1993, 2). Psychoanalysis is rooted in an acknowledgement of the unconscious, or the notion that our psychical life is not fully conscious but also motivated by unconscious mental representations. Psychoanalysis offers a way to think through another logic – one of fantasy and desire – that embraces what might appear nonsensical when understood through consciousness. Psychoanalytically inflected feminist thought considers representation as following “two laws,” according to Peggy Phelan: “it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing” (1993, 2). Representation always contains ruptures and absences because it can never replicate the real, and Phelan argues that close readings of this excess and failure to totalise can engender “psychic resistance and, possibly, political change” (1993, 2). As Kaja Silverman argues, the “aesthetic text can help us to do something collectively which exceeds the capacity of the individual subject to effect alone” because it can destabilise and forge new identifications that are not directed by dominant cultural ideals that reinforce domination; representation is thus an imperfect way of creating more expansive psychical space (1996, 5). What is exciting about so many of the representations of abortion discussed in this book is their capacity to tease out the excess meaning in dominant representations, to resist dominant understandings of abortion that intend to be totalising, and, through this work, to inspire more complex conversations about abortion as an experience and as a central element of healthcare.

Visual representations of the fetal body are central to anti-abortion discourse. Karen Newman carefully traces images of the pregnant female body and the fetus from the ninth century to the present, and argues that they share a “core schema” whose meaning changes through time alongside the history of ideas; these modes of visualisation have “profoundly determined ‘fetal politics’” in the present (1997, 2). Ultrasound images of the fetus in utero and photographs of the mutilated fetal body are the most tangible representations of what abortion is in public contexts, reaching far outside of anti-abortion discourse into popular culture. Although this use of images began with American anti-abortion activism in the 1960s, this strategy has been taken up internationally. For over three decades, feminist scholars have analysed the contemporary cultural significance of images of the fetus, particularly the fetal ultrasound but also photographs like the notorious series by Lennart Nilsson published in the April 30, 1965 issue of Life under the title “Drama of Life Before Birth.” Although schoolchildren commonly receive media literacy education and there is widespread awareness and reportage about the existence of deepfakes and the manipulative power of photo editing, the fetal image maintains its status as truth even in the present day. Fetal images continue to be understood as capturing the real of bodily interiority and are employed in public and private settings as confirmation of the fetus’s personhood – its life. Faye Ginsburg referred to this as the “conversion power of the fetus” in 1989 – the belief held by anti-abortion activists that there is an integral “truth” of the fetal image that cannot be rationally denied after viewing ultrasound images of the fetus in utero or magnified photographs of mutilated fetal remains (1998, 104–5). The fetal image is imbued with two logics generated within anti-abortion discourse, according to Janelle S. Taylor: the creation of an aura through ultrasound that confirms both the singularity and universality of the fetus’s humanity, and the manufacture of trauma through photography that suspends language, particularly the stories, reasons, and justifications for having an abortion (1992, 70–4). The creation of fetal personhood and traumatic experience are fundamental to anti-abortion ideology and would be impossible without the manipulation of the fetal image.

Nilsson’s photographs frequently appear as a reference point from which to begin analysis of anti-abortion uses of fetal images (Duden 1993; Stabile 1992), and for good reason. His composition of the photographs translates fetuses and embryos tenderly into tiny personas that swim through shadowy space and suck their thumbs like babies. The warm colours, rendered more vivid through contrast against the black background, belie the reality that these fetuses and embryos were dead specimens obtained through legal abortion in Sweden and posed by Nilsson (Buklijas and Hopwood 2014). The ideological possibilities of the fetal image were seized early on by anti-abortion activists. Floating in darkness, the fetus occupies a space that is prior to the social and, importantly, independent of the pregnant person’s body. Drucilla Cornell notes that such images create “a vision of the pregnant mother and her fetus that artificially separates the two,” deployed by anti-abortion activists to argue for separate rights held by the fetus and mother, obscuring the reality that the fetus’s life is “inseparable from the physical and mental well-being of the woman of whose body it is a part” (1995, 32; emphasis in original). This separation facilitates an understanding of the rights of women and of fetuses as oppositional, and as advances in medical imaging produce even finer and more detailed fetal images for public consumption, access to such images is also conceived of as the right for citizens to know and see the “reality” of abortion (Palmer 2009, 174). Fetal images have nimbly traversed from anti-abortion placards into the courtroom. The expansion of legislation in the United States that compels pregnant women to view an ultrasound scan prior to obtaining an abortion is publicly framed as “Right to Know Acts” that force a confrontation with the fetal image in order to sow doubt in the mind of the woman seeking an abortion and dissuade her from proceeding (Sanger 2017, 109). Mandatory ultrasound viewing shrewdly capitalises on the private understandings that intentionally pregnant people hold about fetal images as a way of confirming the pregnancy, bonding with the fetus, or as simply a diagnostic procedure (Mitchell 2001, 6) as well as the activist work of the women’s health movement and patients’ rights organisations that resulted in an improved awareness of informed consent. It is also a crystallisation of how the fetus becomes a fetish object that must be considered outside of the pregnant person’s body.

Feminist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s describe this representation as the “public fetus,” to use Barbara Duden’s keen phrasing, arguing that it shapes the psychical and physical perception of pregnant women (1993, 52). The interior of women’s bodies has been “publicised” since the nineteenth century, according to Duden – transformed paradoxically into the subject of administration, the law, and medicine while the exterior of her body is privatised ideologically and culturally (1992, 336). Scientific and medical interventions into pregnancy diminish the significance of quickening – feeling fetal movement – by subordinating it to a new continuum of technological practices that “discover” the fetus by “recognizing it as a public fact” (Duden 1992, 343). In her ground-breaking essay “The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Abortion,” Rosalind Pollack Petchesky observes that anti-abortion activism over the past fifty years has struggled to control the symbolic meaning of the fetus through the image (1987, 263). Consequently, the fetal image comes to be the signifier of abortion, and because “feminists and other pro-choice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain,” we are left with an empty abyss in place of representations of abortion that are positive and support abortion access (Petchesky 1987, 264).

Cultural producers like writers, visual artists, and performers, as well as healthcare workers and advocates like abortion providers and reproductive justice activists, have directly responded to anti-abortion representations of abortion through their work. Curiously, however, feminist scholarship has not adequately taken up the critical call to systematically analyse the significant theoretical and political work of representing abortion accomplished by these cultural workers, abortion providers, and activists – an absence that this book addresses. This kind of feminist scholarly investigation is urgently needed, as it provides alternatives to the preponderance of anti-abortion fetal imagery and addresses the impasse of the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” binary through providing more complex understandings that address feelings and ideas presently not accepted within the rhetoric of “choice.” Contributors’ chapters argue for safe and legal access to abortion, and their analyses are aligned with reproductive justice approaches that locate abortion rights within a complex web of relations of land, class, race, colonialism, and bodily sovereignty.

Abortion and reproductive justice approaches

Reproductive justice frameworks bring together the theories and movements of reproductive rights and social justice, and are organised around three central principles: “(1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments” (Ross and Solinger 2017, 9; emphasis in original). The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective formed out of the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, and amongst their many imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Representing abortion
• Part I Seeing (and not seeing) abortion
• Part II Fetal materiality
• Part III Abortion storytelling and memoir
• Part IV Representations for new arguments
• Index