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CHAPTER 4. ABORTION DISCOURSE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 67
attention to the current legal status of abortion in most states (Krason 1984).
Following these events, two significant changes occur with regard to public discourse
concerning abortion: First, women’s voices become, for the first time, a
significant part of the discourse. Activist women’s voices are heard through organizations
like NOW and NARAL (Staggenborg 1991, Luker 1984, Sitaraman
1994, Tribe 1990). Ordinary women began to participate in public sphere conversation
as well. In the 1960s, most women, and especially those who were
having illegal abortions, did not have the structural opportunities to speak out
publicly on the abortion issue (Blake 1971, Cerullo 1990, Smith 1990). 1 However,
the increased attention paid to the abortion issue in the mainstream media
(see Figure 4.1 on page 65), combined with the emerging women’s “liberation”
movement, made the topic less of a taboo in everyday conversation than in the
previous decades (Ginsburg 1989, Baehr 1992, Olasky 1988a). Secondly, abortion
discourse began to focus on rights, contrasting the rights of women with the
rights of embryos. Although discourse about the abortion issue in this era began
in a narrative frame – focused on story telling and presenting sympathetic
portrayals of women like Sherri Finkbine, and emphasizing the horrors of illegal,
“back-alley” abortions – it was quickly fused with core political values of equality
and choice, a transition necessary to create the substantial shift in public policy
desired (Railsback 1984, Ginsburg 1989, Condit 1990).
Once the criminalization period gave way to the era in which abortion was consistently
framed as an issue involving constitutional rights, the issue becomes,
for the first time, one in which large portions of the public participate. Ordinary
people interact with the abortion issue through their construction of public discourse
across the entire domain of the public sphere – including both news and
entertainment media (Ginsburg 1989, Condit 1990, Baehr 1992, Craig & O’Brien
1993, Krason 1984). Discourse about abortion is not only much more prevalent
than previously, but much more polarized as well (Condit 1990, Railsback 1984,
Vanderford 1989, Dillon 1993, Ferree & Gamson 1993). As a consequence, the
“consensual” voices (Stanley 1983, Barber 1984, Stanley 1988, Oldenburg 1989,
Bellah et al. 1991) who had dominated public discussion in the late criminalization
period (Luker 1984, Krason 1984) lose their access to the public sphere. In
the five years since the Casey decision, in which it became clear that a slim but
stable majority of the Supreme Court was committed to upholding the principle
1 In McAdam’s (1988) and Evans & Boyte’s (1986) terms, the “micromobilization contexts”
and “free spaces” had not yet been formed.