| Paper:
The different conceptions
of injustice offered by Nancy Fraser in her recognition and redistribution
paradigms include alternative notions of the collectivities who suffer
injustice (this volume, p_). In the redistribution model, the class, race,
gender or other groups are, like Marxian classes, situated in relation
to a political economy and have some distinctive relation to the production
of goods and people in society. In the recognition model, these same
groups are more like Weberian status groups and are seen to suffer a lack
of respect and prestige within the culture, being stigmatized or marginalized
in their identities. Both redistribution and recognition, therefore,
are lens through which groups may be seen rather than defining them.
Important as these two lenses are, we wonder whether they exhaust the important
dimensions on which groups may be seen as politically arrayed.
Taking the connection that
Fraser makes to Weber seriously, we raise the question of whether class
and status alone define the dimensions on which groups struggle politically.
The third dimension of the classic Weberian model is that of power.
We suggest that the abortion conflict is a useful arena in which to examine
the implications of injustice conceptualized in such power terms.
We take injustices of power, and struggles over power, to contain within
them moments of both recognition and redistribution, but not to be wholly
reducible to them.
We approach the issues of
power and justice from the standpoint of feminist critiques of conventional
stratification models. Such critics have pointed to the need to widen
the lens on stratification to include more than inequality and injustice
expressed in differential access to and control over economic resources,
to look at the dimensions of autonomy (freedom to make life choices and
freedom of movement) and power (participation in decisions concerning the
social group) (Agassi, 1989; Ferree and Hall, 1996). Both autonomy
and power as defined above (i.e., as participation in political authority)
would fall within the broader domain of power with which Weber was concerned.
We think it useful to split the concept of power into the two dimensions
of autonomy and authority.
From the Weberian perspective,
autonomy reflects power as experienced at the level of the individual,
power as the expression of self-determination. Thus an ability to
act for or express oneself without or despite constraints from others in
the community, is the heart of autonomy. Autonomy can be exercised
in resistance to or with the support of society and the state. Familiar
limitations on autonomy based on gender include cultural stereotypes defining
certain feelings or actions as gender-inappropriate as well as societal
and state assaults on bodily integrity (legally allowing marital rape or
punishing women who violate the family’s honor by their conduct). Unlike
the dimension of recognition where harm is done only to symbolic or cultural
goods such as status, prestige or honor, the injustice here also infringes
physical well-being. Unlike the dimension of redistribution, the harms
may be material but are neither economic nor about resources.
Authority is the second dimension
of power. The issue is that of actual participation in decisions
concerning the social group, and reflects the ability to share in and exercise
collective authority in and over the group as a whole. Limitations on authority
based on gender include such familiar state exclusions as the denial of
the right to vote or to serve on juries, but may also be more societally
based, such as the refusal to place women in positions where they would
be supervising men. Although denial of authority may be based in issues
of cultural value or status (recognition) or lack of economic resources
(redistribution) it compounds both with a further injustice in its own
right.
Both personal autonomy
and collective authority reflect Weber’s conceptualization of power as
relational, as a matter of politically determining how the community and
individual relate. The nature of the political relationship between
individual and community is itself subject to examination in moral terms
as just or unjust, we argue, but it is this third lens that Fraser’s model
lacks. Because the political relationship between individual and
community is theoretically separable from the axes of cultural recognition
of the actors and redistribution of their goods, there are distinctive
issues of justice to be considered with regard to struggles over autonomy
and authority. The focus here is on the political process as such,
how authoritative decisions are reached, as well as the outcomes of such
decisions for all the bases of stratification: redistribution, recognition,
and power. There are both contests over the justice of how collective authority
is exercised, which is about the gendering (or racializing, etc.) of governance;
and over the justice of the decisions produced by the process, which include
those decisions governing the personal expression of gender (or race, etc.).
Examples of injustice in
the realm of autonomy would include such limitations as the restriction
on the right of movement that was imposed on serfs tied to the land or
on citizens denied visas to travel abroad or restricted by internal passports
in their own country. Assaults on African-Americans, gays or women
for "being at the wrong place at the wrong time" also express such denial
of freedom of movement. Restrictions on the right of women in particular
to control their own bodies through birth control or abortion would also
fall in the category of injustices experienced in the human potential for
autonomous selfhood. In the realm of sharing collective authority, or political
participation, injustices would include both such de jure barriers as denial
of the legal right to vote, hold office or serve on juries, but also such
de facto structures that substantially limit such participation, for example
by making registration onerous or office-holding culturally inappropriate.
The limitations of autonomy
and authority have obvious consequences for the ability of systems to create
and maintain economic injustices. Indeed, they are often linked in the
concept of political economy. Yet, we believe that it is better to keep
the distribution of power and the distribution of goods and services analytically
independent. To blur power issues into the distribution of economic
resources obscures the extent to which political structures engage not
only in the regulation of production but also in the regulation of persons
and personality. Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power diffused
through a variety of social institutions reveals more of the political
dynamic in which autonomy is contested, and in so doing, highlights the
multiplicity of forms of limitations on autonomy that may be considered
injustices (such as surveillance, emotional manipulation, and indoctrination).
With regard to the formation
of persons who are dichotomized as male and female and regulated both de
jure and de facto as such, we can speak of the governance of gender as
an arena in which injustice may be experienced directly in regard to autonomy
(Brush, 1999, building on Foucault, 1979). In parallel fashion, the
structuring of political systems based on social compacts among men, patriarchal
assumptions about natural hierarchy, and authoritarian practices grounded
in analogies with kinship systems can be seen as expressions of the gendering
of governance, constructing the state itself as a gendered social institution
(Brush, 1999; Smith 1974).
Both the governance of gender
and the gendering of governance connect the actions of the state to the
experiences of collective and individual injustice against which groups
may struggle. To call such struggles about "recognition" appropriately
highlights the extent to which the stakes of the struggle involve personhood
and personality. But contesting the power of the state to make determinations
of collective will without the full participation of all its members is
also about "redistribution" of authority, not of narrowly defined economic
goods. Conversely, the issue of autonomy can be viewed as a matter of a
personal right, subject to state redistribution, even as a group’s increasing
participation in the polity implies a greater recognition of them as people
entitled to a share in collective power. Neither recognition nor
redistribution can be realized without power, and both autonomy and authority
are required to articulate what recognition would encompass and redistribution
entail.
Thus, although we are suggesting
a third dimension of power as analytically useful, we do not want to separate
it entirely from the other two. As Fraser argues, viewing these as lenses
or paradigms for viewing the same struggles rather than as discrete classifications
for different issues is helpful. Bringing recognition and redistribution
together as factually intertwined, as Fraser suggests we should, allows
for an examination of the variety of forms that particular contests over
gender relations may take in the actual struggles over autonomy and authority
in the polity.(add Fraser quote here?). Similarly, taking recognition and
power as interwoven suggests both how status and value in the community
permit the exercise of authority and protect autonomy.
In this paper, we look at
the discursive contest over legal abortion in Germany and the United States
from 1970 to 1994 as a comparative case study of the governance of gender
and the gendering of governance. Abortion regulation by the state
is a direct expression of the governance of gender through the limitations
it places on the autonomy of the female person (Bordo, 1995). The participation
of women and men as speakers and actors in the political debate over regulation
is also a manifestation of the gendering of governance, expressed in the
gender inequality of participation in collective decision-making about
important social issues. Women’s under-representation in politics generally
is made particularly unjust in the matter of legally regulating abortion
since it is a matter that differentially affects women and men.
We see the power questions
in the abortion debate in both countries as including aspects both of recognition
B of women collectively as political actors and of women as individuals
B and of redistribution B of positions of political and moral authority
to women and of the autonomy to make a deeply personal choice to specific
individual women. We focus here primarily on the element of recognition
as it intertwines with women’s authority and autonomy. We separate it into
two parts, corresponding with our dual focus on the gender of governance
and the governance of gender. In regard to the former, the gender
of governance, recognition implies the extent to which women as a group
are acknowledged as having a special stake in the abortion decision and
have a greater collective voice in the debate over abortion. Recognition
struggles in this case are about authority. In the second instance,
the governance of gender, recognition struggles are about limitations of
autonomy and self-realization imposed on the individual by the construction
and maintenance of stereotyped and limited conceptions of the person.
In this latter case, recognition struggles are about autonomy.
We argue that German
women have achieved greater recognition of abortion as a gendered issue.
They have in this way also achieved greater legitimacy as political actors
and speak with greater authority than US women have on this issue. They
have, in effect, more successfully challenged the gendering of governance,
at least within the domain of abortion. However, we also argue that
the success of German women in being recognized as speakers in the debate
is tempered by their mis-recognition as merely mothers and potential mothers.
American women, by focusing on the pregnant woman as an autonomous individual,
have succeeded more than German women in breaking boundaries of what womanhood
necessarily entails and thus challenging the governance of gender.
The political context
of abortion in Germany and the US
The choice of Germany and
the US for this analysis reflects a comparison of two countries that are
both similar and different in important ways[1].
Fundamentally, both are modern, industrial democracies with a federal structure,
independent judiciaries with powers of judicial review, and privately owned,
politically independent newspapers. In Germany, there was a lively
debate about abortion in the early part of the century that came to an
end when the Nazis came to power, while in the US there was a "century
of silence" on the abortion issue that only gradually ended in the 1960s
(Luker 1984). In both countries, the issue of abortion surfaced on
the national political agenda in the early 1970s. The political developments
from that point both diverged in substance but paralleled each other in
timing for the next twenty-five years. This period from 1970 to 1994
is the focus of our attention.
In the US, the early state
efforts to reform abortion law were dramatically accelerated in 1973 when
the Supreme Court in its famous Roe v. Wade decision argued that there
was a constitutional right to privacy that extended to cover the autonomous
decision of a woman to terminate a pregnancy. Although recognizing
the state’s right to regulate abortion in the interests of women’s health
in the first trimester and concern for developing fetal life in the third,
the court’s decision swept away existing state laws and ushered in a period
of experiments on the part of state legislatures as to how much regulation
would be permitted. It also stimulated efforts to pass a constitutional
amendment that would give the fetus the status of a child, and other protest
actions to overturn or limit the court’s decision.
The ensuing years were a
period of intense social conflict over abortion, with significant mobilization
of social movements on both sides of the issue (Staggenborg, 1991; Blanchard,
1994). Presidents Reagan and Bush lent the moral support of their
office to the restrictionist forces, and in particular appointed justices
to the Supreme Court who were viewed as likely to overturn Roe. In
1989, the Court revisited the principles of the Roe decision in hearing
the Webster case. In the months around the decision, attention to
abortion as a political issue rose still further. The Court’s decision
in Webster shifted the principle from a virtually absolute protection of
the autonomy of the pregnant woman to a more limited affirmation of the
illegality of states imposing restrictions that place an "undue burden"
on women’s exercise of their right to decide, but it did not overturn Roe.
In this period also
anti-abortion activists increasingly resorted to non-violent direct action
(such as "rescue" protests aimed at closing clinics) and to violence. Since
1992, there have been six murders and numerous attempted murders, arsons,
bombings and assaults on abortion providers and clinic staff. Although
practical access to legal abortion became more limited, both through the
action of the Court in allowing more state regulation and through the violence
and intimidation directed at abortion providers by those protesting abortion
rights, the principle of freedom of choice is still fundamental to American
abortion politics.
In Germany, the first post-war
Social Democratic government re-opened consideration of the law making
abortion a criminal act, known as Section 218 of the Criminal Code, by
setting up an expert commission in 1970. After extensive hearings,
parliamentary debates, and public demonstrations, the federal legislature
(Bundestag) passed a reform of Section 218 that de-criminalized abortion
in the first trimester. The Constitutional Court intervened and struck
down the law, finding that the general provision in the post-Nazi federal
constitution (the Basic Law or Grundgesetz) that said that the first duty
of the state was the protection of human life extended to cover fetal life
as well. Unlike the American Court, which found that there was no scientific
or moral consensus on when life began, the German Court explicitly considered
this a matter on which there was no debate. The Bundestag rewrote
its reform in 1976, permitting abortion only under special circumstances,
the so-called four "indications": the life or health of the mother,
a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, fetal deformity, or "social
need/emergency"[2].
In the following decade,
the Catholic Church and other anti-abortion groups attempted to close the
"social necessity" loophole through which approximately 90% of all legal
abortions were done, while feminists and other opponents of restriction
encouraged and supported women who sought abortion outside the country
(so-called abortion tourism). The conflict remained relatively low-key
as a national political issue, despite ongoing but sporadic prosecutions
that were seen by both sides (for different reasons) as indicting the inadequacy
of the social necessity exception. Attention rose in 1988 with the prosecution
of a doctor in a rural and conservative area (Memmingen in Bavaria) for
illegal abortion by inappropriate use of the social necessity indication.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent move toward German unification
forced the issue back on the agenda of the Bundestag. East Germans,
who since 1972 had the right to legal abortion in the first trimester in
their own country, strongly resisted the imposition of restrictive West
German law. Given two years after unification to arrive at a new
law for the unified state, the Bundestag in 1992 passed a modified de-criminalization
of abortion in the first trimester. The law mandated counseling and a waiting
period for the woman, and forbade any advertisement of or encouragement
to use abortion services. This law, too, was overturned by the Constituytional
Court as inadequately protecting life. Under the direction of the
Court, the Bundestag in 1994 added provisions directing that the counseling
be aimed at protecting the life of the child and reaffirming the criminal
nature of the act at all times (by denying insurance coverage among other
things), even when the state might chose not to punish it in the first
trimester. Despite these restrictions, practical access to legal
abortion was seen to have improved for West German women, since the risk
of arbitrary prosecution diminished.
Thus in both countries there
were essentially three chronologically parallel phases of the debate. In
the first period, there were reform efforts and a landmark constitutional
court decision establishing the fundamental principle defining the legal
status of abortion. In the US, this principle was privacy and the
rights of the autonomous individual. In Germany, the principle was
the definition of the fetus as a human life subject to the protection of
the state. In the second period, there was controversy over the new laws
in both countries. The protests were more pronounced and public in
the US, but discontent with the law was articulated in both countries and
some restrictions on funding abortion appeared in both. In the third
phase, the conflict escalated in both countries as, for different reasons,
the constitutional courts returned to re-evaluate their fundamental principles.
In both countries, the courts re-affirmed their widely variant original
decisions, while practical access became more similar -- easier in western
Germany and harder in the US.
The similar time periods
and different trajectories of the conflict in the two countries allow us
to examine the role of women as political actors in the debate under sharply
different conditions. The discursive opportunity structure created by the
respective constitutional court decisions favored a pro-life position in
Germany and a pro-choice position in the US. Although favoring a
particular side, neither framing of the issue prevented conflict from emerging
in both countries. Despite recurrent protests and other actions,
the abortion issue never left the legislative and judicial arena in Germany
and overall coverage of and attention to the issue ebbed substantially
in the second phase. In the US, social movement mobilization of both
sides of the issue was considerably greater, and the media’s attention
to abortion as a political issue grew steadily from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Social movement actors play a correspondingly larger role in the American
abortion debate.
Women’s movements in the
two countries are also differently situated in the abortion conflict. In
the US, feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women
and the Feminist Majority have a national as well as local structure and
are represented in Washington as part of a coalition of interest groups.
Other national organizations make the defense of abortion rights their
central concern (such as NARAL) and some situate abortion as one of a number
of fundamental constitutional rights to defend (such as the ACLU).
This coalition confronts anti-abortion groups that also have a national
presence independent of any church (such as the National Right to Life
Committee) as well as national church groups (such as the Catholic Bishop’s
Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities). American feminist organizations -
on abortion as well as on other issues such as welfare reform -- are thus
national "players" in a conflict among interest groups and their legislative
supporters (Peattie and Rein, 1983; Spalter-Roth and Schreiber 1995).
Most German feminists, in
contrast, resist forming any sort of enduring national organization(cf.
Ferree 1987; Kaplan 1992). Committed to the principle that non-hierarchical,
grassroots organization is the only appropriate means to challenge patriarchy,
German feminists center their organizational efforts on local projects
and typically temporary networks among such local groups and projects that
focus on single issues. Thus the leadership group for feminists on
the abortion issue was their Federal Network for the Repeal of Section
218, a group that has since dissolved.
However, the feminist impulse
that revived internationally in the 1970s, giving rise to a plethora of
new women’s movement organizations around the globe, did not only affect
German women who saw themselves as feminists and limited themselves to
working in local projects. The 1970s also saw the formation of new women’s
organizations within existing political parties (such as the Association
of Social Democratic Women, AsF), while the 1980s included the involvement
of feminists in forming and supporting the new Green political party and
participating in campaigns for women’s influence in German and European
politics. This wider women’s movement, of which local feminist groups
are only a tiny part, also largely supported abortion rights. Germany
does not have a strongly developed interest group sector apart from the
representatives of business and labor, who with the state, form a widely
recognized "tripod" for legitimate policy-making. Thus there are no national
level abortion pressure groups for women’s movement groups to either work
with or oppose. Insofar as women seek a policy voice in Germany,
the primary route that is open to them is the parties. Since the formation
of the Green Party in 1980, which led the way in formalizing representation
of women in government, all of the parties have competed to a greater or
lesser extent to include visible women among their spokespeople and candidates
(Meyer, 19xx; Mushaben, 1989).
In sum, this overview of
the political opportunities available to women on the abortion issue indicates
that American feminists have more organization, resources and potential
allies outside of the formal political structures of parties and legislatures
and German women with feminist inclinations have relatively more organization,
resources and allies within the parties than outside them. The abortion
issue itself is more decentralized in the US, being governed by state rather
than federal law, but the women’s movement is more decentralized in Germany,
being largely split into local projects and women’s groups formed within
contending political parties.
Given the differences in
the discursive opportunity structure and the trajectory of the abortion
issue as well as these differences in institutional opportunity structure
for women’s movements concerned with abortion rights, we are not likely
to be able to advance any single causal argument to account for the differences
in outcomes we identify. Here we hope only to be able to describe how the
struggles over abortion differ in the way that gender is made relevant,
that is, how women’s recognition struggles focus differentially on problems
of authority and autonomy in this particular case.
Data and methods.
The data we discuss here
are drawn from a larger study conducted in collaboration with Jürgen
Gerhards, Friedhelm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht. The research
project involved a content analysis of 1243 American newspaper articles
sampled from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and
1423 German newspaper articles sampled from the Frankfurter Allgemeine
and the Süddeutsche Zeitung from the period between 1970 and
1994[3]. In addition, a survey of organizations
that were involved in contesting abortion rights in the period 1989-92
was conducted, documents from these organizations collected, and interviews
with leaders and media directors of particularly significant groups also
carried out. The project as a whole thus connects the efforts of
the contending groups to use the media with their actual representation
in these policy-relevant newspapers. While inclusion of other media,
such as radio and television, would have been desirable to get a fuller
picture of the public debate, these materials are not archived in both
countries for this whole period. In order to have a long time series
and a balanced comparison between the two countries, a narrower spectrum
of discourse had to be used.
The newspaper articles were
analyzed by means of a hierarchical coding scheme. We coded the characteristics
of articles themselves, the speakers within articles, and the properties
of the utterances of each speaker. We selected only articles that had abortion
as a major theme. We considered a speaker to be anyone who was given an
opportunity to present a view on abortion, whether or not this opportunity
was used. Thus anyone who was directly quoted or paraphrased in the
context of the article’s coverage of abortion was considered a speaker,
even if the speaker merely said "no comment", since such opportunities
to present a viewpoint are themselves a recognition by the media of the
speaker’s legitimate right to have an influence on public opinion. Journalists
themselves were also considered speakers, but unlike other public actors,
journalists were only counted as making an utterance on abortion when they
used their access to the public to present a statement on what abortion
meant. Opportunities to speak afforded to individuals and groups are what
we consider standing, or the legitimate right to have a voice in the debate
on an issue. There were 3,736 speakers in Germany and 4,763 in the
US[4].
Every utterance, or distinct
speech act, by each speaker in an article was also coded for the way that
abortion was framed (if it contained any framing at all). By framing
we mean the context of meaning that was imputed to the act of abortion
. We coded eight major frames of meaning in which abortion could be placed[5].
For this paper, we consider only two of these eight frames in any detail,
the framing of abortion as a matter of individual rights vis à vis
the state or state rights vis à vis the individual (individual/state
frame) and the framing of abortion as a matter of women’s rights or gendered
roles and responsibilities (women/gender frame). Each of these frames
was further sub-divided into claims and ideas that advanced or tended to
be favorable to a position of greater restriction on the availability of
abortion, those that tended to support fewer restrictions and more access,
and those claims that were neutral as to whether abortion should be more
or less available. Every frame contained both pro-restrictionist, anti-restrictionist,
and neutral ideas. For example, the individual/state frame contained arguments
that abortion was a matter of individual privacy, an issue of freedom of
conscience, and separation of church and state (anti-restriction),
that those who opposed abortion should not have to pay for it or perform
it (pro-restriction) and that decisions about abortion should be a mattter
of respecting a democratic majority (ambiguous/neutral, used both to support
more restrictions or fewer depending on the local majority). In addition,
we coded the specific nature of the particular claim within each directional
frame group (thus a claim that abortion was about separation of church
and state was distinguished from a claim that it was about individual privacy).
Each specific different claim, called an idea element, in each utterance
was coded. There were 12,323 idea elements in the US, and 6,932 in Germany.
Overall, the general distribution
of standing and framing found in our data reflects the structure of both
institutional and discursive opportunity discussed above. In the
US, the proportion of speakers who represent a social movement organization
is roughly the same as the proportion who spoke for the state in some form
(about a third in either case), while in Germany about half of all speakers
represent the state and social movements contribute only a tiny frction
of the discourse. In the third phase of the debate in the US, the proportion
of speakers coming from the social movement sector rises while the state
share remains fairly stable over time. In Germany, the social movement
share falls in phase three, while the proportion coming from state and
party actors rises. But from the very beginning, social movements are not
nearly as prominent in Germany as in the US, where weak parties and strong
and diverse interest group organizations have long been characteristic
(Clemens 1998).
The framing differences
between the two countries are also consistent with the discursive opportunities
presented by the courts: in Germany, the single most common frame used
is fetal life (25% of all idea elements) and in the US the single most
common frame is the individual and the state (23% of all idea elements).
Overall, 46% of German speakers frame the issue in a way that supports
a restrictionist understanding, while only 35% of American speakers do.
Instead, 50% of American speakers are on balance prochoice in their framing,
compared to only 37% of German speakers. Although these differences are
important for understanding the overall shape of the discourse in both
countries, for our purposes, the comparison that matters is not between
pro-life and pro-choice arguments or the various types of arguments offered
to defend restrictionist legislation, but how the justice claim for less
restriction is framed.
We therefore turn to look
at the contrast between two of the frames that are most important in arguing
against restrictive abortion legislation, the individual/state frame and
the women/gender frame. These two different frames have quite
different significance in the two countries. In Germany, the most
prominent frame with a pro-abortion-rights direction is women/gender (28%
of all pro-rights idea elements), which clearly overshadows arguments based
on individual autonomy and freedom (12%). In the US, the reverse
is the case: individual/state arguments against restriction (30%) are twice
as common as women’s rights claims (15%). We turn now to consider
why this more strongly gendered form of the argument for abortion rights
is so dominant in Germany and what relation it has to the voice that women
have gained in the discourse of each country.
Challenging the gender
of governance.
Over time, the increased
global political mobilization of women is reflected in the increasing proportion
of speakers in each country who are women. As Table 1 indicates,
the share of women in the discourse at least doubles in each country.
It rises from about 20% in the US in the earliest days of phase one to
approximately 40% of all non-journalist speakers by the mid-1990s.
In Germany, the picture is a little more complicated, since women are 30%
of all speakers during the earliest period, before the legislature begins
debating the bills and while feminist protest activity is prominent. Women’s
share then sinks to only about 20% once the issue becomes a matter for
the Bundestag and the court before rising to 50% in the 1989-92 period
of renewed legislative debate and about 70% in the most recent period.
There is clear evidence here that women are considered more relevant speakers
on abortion now than they were two decades ago. See Table 1 below:
This shift in the prominence
of women who are given legitimacy to speak to the abortion issue is particularly
evident in Germany with regard to the visibility of women within the formal
institutions of politics. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the share of
those in state and party roles with a voice in the media who are women
rises dramatically in Germany but comparatively little in the US.
While less than 10% of American state and party speakers on abortion were
women in the early 1970s, this has climbed to just under 30% by the mid-1990s.
Without any comparative data, this might seem a fairly substantial rise.
Yet in Germany over the same period,
the proportion of women
among the state and party speakers rises from about 20% to about 70%. Even
if one just compares the two periods of most intense media debate in Germany,
the periods from 1973-76 and 1989-92, the difference in women’s share of
the official political discourse is strongly evident. Although women were
just 20% of the official speakers in the first period of legislative debate
they are over half the official speakers when the legislature returns to
the issue after unification. See Table 2 below:
Moreover, while American
women in this first period do not offer a markedly different share of the
official discourse on abortion than German women do, by the time of the
Webster decision the differences in standing between American and German
women are profound. German women in official state and party roles enjoy
much more visibility and legitimacy in speaking on the abortion question
than do their American counterparts (50% vs 20%).
Some of this difference
may have to do with the greater inroads that German women made in official
political representation in this period. Between 1980 and 1994,
for example, the proportion of members of the German federal legislature,
the Bundestag, who were women rose from 8% to 26% while in the US the increase
of women in the House of Representatives in the comparable period was only
from 7% to 12% (and even less in the Senate). Yet it is also clear
that women are particularly over-represented among the official speakers
on abortion topics relative to their share of seats in the legislature
or proportion of office-holders in the executive branch.
Moreover, the gendering of
governance is not only expressed by women who hold formal roles in policy
making positions. The ability to speak on this issue that the media selectively
accords to some individuals and representatives of organizations is itself
a form of governance that can be gendered. The nature as well as
extent of women’s standing has changed in both countries. The extent
to which media discourse on abortion has altered its form to give women
a distinctively legitimate voice on this issue can also be captured by
the way that articles have become differently constituted as public forums
for the debate. To see this, we shift from looking at the shares of speakers
to looking at the articles as units, the way that a reader would see them.
As Table 3 indicates, both in Germany and in the US in the 1970s, most
articles on abortion were dominated by male speakers. In the earliest period,
about 60% of US articles and 70% of German articles contained only male
speakers. See Table 3 below:
Over time the proportion
of articles in both countries that give men alone voice declines steadily
until by the most recent period they account for only about a quarter of
all articles. Thus the idea that men alone could speak legitimately to
the regulation of abortion has eroded, and the public discourse that governs
how abortion is to be understood is, as we have seen before, one in which
women play an increasingly prominent role. However, the way that the gendering
of public discourse governing abortion has changed is very different in
the two countries. In the United States, this discourse has become
less gendered. It now is much more likely to include both men and
women (the majority of articles have become mixed in regard to gender and
are about as likely to include more women than men as more men that women).
The proportion of articles that only included men has declined, but the
share of articles that contain only women has not increased. Abortion is
presented as an issue in which both men and women have something legitimate
to say.
This is in striking contrast
to the situation in Germany. Here the proportion of articles containing
only men dropped while the proportion that contain only women speakers
rose dramatically, particularly in the most recent period. Half of
all articles in the recent period dominated by legislative debate (1989-1992)
are composed entirely (23%) or mostly (27%) of women speakers. The
proportion of articles containing only women speakers is even higher (44%)
in the last period, even though the total number of articles has begun
to decline again. The shift from abortion being publically discussed by
men to being a matter discussed by women begins to occur even before it
re-emerges as a significant legislative matter, and the trend continues
in the period after the reform of the law is essentially complete. The
issue of abortion in Germany is re-gendered from being a male domain to
being one in which women’s voices are increasingly dominant.
Thus, in conclusion, relative
to the gendering of governance of abortion, we can see that German women
have succeeded more than American women in exerting a specific claim to
standing on this issue. Both in terms of their role as speakers in the
formal halls of government and in their position in articles that define
the nature of the debate, German women have emerged in a particularly prominent
position. While American women have also succeeded in obtaining more
voice in the discourse, this increase in standing is not so profound among
those with formal policy roles as it is in Germany. The public forum,
as represented by newspaper articles, has apparently become more de-gendered
in the US as women participate more equally with men in the same discussions,
while in Germany it has been re-gendered as more appropriately female than
male. German women and men largely appear in separate articles, speaking
as it were in separate rooms rather than as part of the same conversation.
In the gendering of the process by which abortion is governed discursively,
German women have taken dominant and more often exclusive standing, while
American women are less central among policy-making speakers. American
articles on abortion show a remarkable degree of gender balance in the
most recent period, but women can hardly be said to enjoy any stronger
or special standing. German women have to some degree won a recognition
struggle that gives them special authority as speakers on abortion, and
in doing so have challenged the gendering of governance. This is an important
part, but not the entire picture, of what recognition entails.
Challenging the governance
of gender.
The second primary dimension
of struggle is over autonomy. This includes the practical rights of individual
women to make an abortion decision, but also the recognition of the pregnant
woman as a person who is not reducible either to her status of mother-to-be
or to her gender alone. The diversity of women’s needs and expectations
become flattened into a stereotype when the discourse around abortion assumes
that all women are or want to be mothers, and the autonomy of women to
define their own needs and demand recognition of their own personalities
is overridden by state policies that assume the government knows best.
We consider the governance of gender therefore to be expressed in large
part by the relative role that personal autonomy plays in the discourse
relative to the role played by claims that women need protection.
The formal nature of government
abortion policy in the two countries clearly recognizes autonomy
as a more central issue in the US. As we have seen, the Supreme Court
placed abortion rights under the rubric of privacy, casting them as a matter
of defending the individual from the incursions of the state in this personal
domain, and American abortion discourse echoes this priority, making the
individual’s rights to privacy, religious freedom and personal self-determination
the most common theme in the discourse overall and about 30% of all prochoice
ideas. Even the American arguments that would tend to support limitations
on abortion rights are often cast in terms of limits on the state (freedom
of conscience not to perform or pay indirectly for abortion for example).
These arguments, on both sides, are typically presented as a matter of
"being let alone." For example, when asked in our interview what "the role
of government should be in the abortion issue," one abortion rights activist
said "get the hell out of it totally! Obviously. We don’t think government
or religion or any group has any role."
American abortion policy
as established by Roe and Webster in fact admits only such interventions
that place "no undue burden" on women who are attempting to exercise such
rights but also offers no support, financial or otherwise, for women who
are pregnant. As feminist critics of American abortion policy have often
pointed out, women who cannot support another child, or who are being pressured
by their families or boyfriends to have an abortion they do not want are
offered no support to have a child and thus have little practical ability
to exercise their theoretical freedom of choice. Poor women of color have
often faced pressure for abortion and sterilization, for example. Reflecting
such concerns, some pro-abortion-rights organizations have adopted names
that affirm their commitment to "reproductive rights," at least nominally
widening their scope to include both having and not having a child
as a matter of choice to be defended (thus the leading pro-choice social
movement organization, NARAL, officially changed its name from National
Abortion Rights Action League to National Abortion and Reproductive Rights
Action League in 19xx).
German abortion policy reflects
a stronger welfare state tradition and thus is both more actively interventionist
and more committed to connecting rights to the economic opportunity to
exercise them. Thus, while the 1993 German court decision affirmed that
abortion was always a criminal act even when it was not to be punished
in the first trimester, it also held that women on welfare who choose to
exercise their right to a non-punished abortion have the right to have
it paid for by the state, since they would otherwise be denied in practice
a freedom that others could exercise. The law regulating abortion also
included provisions for expanding the state’s supply of public pre-school
places as part of its inducement to women to choose to bear children.
At the same time, however, the court authorized mandatory counseling directed
at persuading the woman to have the child, pointing out the benefits that
the state provides to mothers as an inducement to do so, and enforcing
significant waiting periods and repeat counseling sessions to ensure that
the woman was obdurate in wanting an abortion. Those in the woman’s immediate
circle could also be punished legally for trying to persuade or coerce
her to have an abortion. Thus both in terms of positive inducements
and negative sanctions, the state more actively takes a role in directing
women’s choices in the way that it considers morally and socially appropriate.
This interventionist stance
is reflected in a considerably higher proportion of German than American
prochoice idea elements that affirm a specific moral role for government
in the abortion issue. Conversely, the argument against restriction in
the US often takes the form of making a claim for privacy of the individual
against the state’s intervention. In Table 4, we compare the relative frequency
of two specific clusters of idea elements in each country among pro-choice
speakers who are identified as male, those who are female and those with
no gender identification (e.g. institutional spokespersons and editorial
writers who are not named). See Table 4 and 4B below:
As one can readily see, the
privacy argument is much more dominant in the US among speakers of all
gender than it is in Germany, and conversely, the pro-choice argument for
government taking a moral role of some sort is clearly evident in Germany
and virtually invisible in the US. About a quarter of all pro-choice speakers
in the US include at least one argument about privacy compared to less
that 10% of German speakers. By contrast, prochoice German men especially
(14%), but prochoice German women as well (9%) affirm some affirmative
moral role for government in regulating the abortion decision, while virtually
no pro-choice American speakers do.
Importantly, the framing
of abortion as a right in Germany is also more gender-specific. As
noted earlier, claims that abortion is a matter concerning women or gender
are 28% of German abortion-rights discourse and only 15% of American pro-choice
discourse, while claims that abortion is about an individual right vis
a vis the state are 30% of all American pro-choice idea elements but only
12% of the German ones. Here we shift our level of analysis from
counting the number of times a specific idea is used to consider which
speakers include which frames overall. We contrast the relative likelihood
of a pro-choice German speaker employing any pro-choice idea from the individual/state
frame and/or from the women/gender frame with the probability that an American
pro-choice speaker will do so. See Tables 5 and 5B below:
As we see in Table 5, which
looks only at pro-choice speakers using specifically pro-choice ideas,
German women are by far the most likely group to use the women/gender frame
for abortion. Over half of German women use the women/gender frame, either
alone (51%) or in combination with the individual/gender frame. Although
German men are only about half as likely to frame in gender terms alone
(25%) as German women are, they are still more likely to be using the gender
frame only than American women are (20%). American pro-choice speakers,
in contrast, all strongly prefer the individual/state frame to the gendered
one. Even American women, who are twice as likely as American men
(20% vs. 10%) to use just a gender-based argument, are still more likely
to offer only an individual rights argument (32%) than only the gender-based
one (20%). American men are more than three times as likely to use
just the individual rights framing than just a gender-based claim
(45% vs. 10%), while German men actually offer the gender-based framing
alone slightly more often than just the individual-rights one (25% vs.
18%).
It is thus clear that the
gender-based definition of what abortion rights are, as something particular
and special for women rather than an example of a general right that happens
to apply to women in this case, is much more strongly established in Germany
for all gender groups of speakers than it is in the US. Conversely,
the general individual rights claim is far more likely to be advanced in
the US by all groups of speakers than by any group in Germany. The
specificity of the gender-based claim, however, seems to particularly privilege
German women speakers as advocates of abortion rights. Unlike the US, where
all three groups of speakers are equally likely to make these two rights
claims either separately or together, in Germany women are about 20 percentage
points more likely than either men or speakers of unknown gender to do
so. Since these are all pro-choice speakers, those who are
not making a rights claim here are not arguing against abortion but are
offering some different sort of argument against restrictions. Rather
than advancing women’s autonomy, either as women or as individuals, German
men and ungendered speakers are defending abortion on other grounds.
In order to get a better
idea of what those other grounds might be, we constructed two clusters
of specific framing arguments. One cluster, which we call autonomy, specifically
selects individual idea elements that address the issue of self-determination,
whether as women (the gendered form) or as individuals entitled to a right
to privacy (the non-gendered form). The other cluster picks up those
idea elements that speak of protection, whether specifically emphasizing
women as needing protection (the gendered form) or more generally of the
state’s need to act morally, offer alternatives to abortion, consider the
reasons that women might have for abortion, and attempt to address social
need (the ungendered form). In other words, when abortion is framed
as an aspect of the welfare state and justified in terms of helping those
in need, we coded this as part of the protection cluster.
In Table 6 we look at the
relative share of autonomy claims of both autonomy and protection claims
combined. Considering first how prochoice speakers use these ideas,
we see that autonomy outweighs protection as an argument for abortion for
all three groups of Americans, but only for German women. The average
proportion of autonomy arguments for all four of these groups of American
speakers is about 56% (+/-3%). By contrast, German men favor protection
over autonomy by an even greater margin (only 32% of their arguments are
about autonomy compared to 68% that are about protection). German
speakers for whom no gender is given, typically institutional speakers
and non-bylined journalists, are also inclined to favor protection over
autonomy, suggesting the extent to which German welfare state thinking
is formally institutionalized, not merely a reflection of individual men’s
tendency to think in protectionist terms about women. See Tables 6 and
6B below:
In effect, German women’s
pro-choice arguments in favor of autonomy, which we have seen tend to be
gender-specific arguments, do not carry the rest of the discourse with
them. Instead, German women, influential as they are in terms of authority
and standing in the discourse, remain isolated as advocates of seeing abortion
as a matter of women’s autonomy rather than of help for the needy.
Indeed, the Social Democratic Party, the largest single institutional advocate
for reducing legal restrictions on abortion, framed its approach to abortion
with the slogan "Help, don’t punish" arguing that women who seek abortion
are in need of the state’s help rather than criminal prosecution.
The pro-choice arguments in favor of autonomy in the US, by contrast, are
equally strong among all three gender groups. American women, who we saw
earlier also tend to make their argument for autonomy in non-gender-specific
terms, are supported in this argument by both men and institutional speakers.
However, this also means that American women who are in fact needy and
seeking help from the government, whether to have an abortion or to avoid
one, are left without any specific group that represents them.
[DROP? Taking this
argument a little further to consider how these autonomy and protection
claims play out among all speakers, whether they are pro-choice, pro-life
or neutral in the overall balance of their framing, we see in the second
part of Table 6 that autonomy arguments continue to make up a substantial
share of all Americans’ and German women’s framing. However, among all
German men and non-institutional speakers the predominance of protection
over autonomy is even more strongly pronounced. The share that autonomy
arguments hold relative to protection claims drops greatly (by more than
22 percentage points, from 40% to just 18%) when moving from just pro-choice
speakers to all speakers, and nearly as much among German women (16 percentage
points, falling from 56% to 40%). But the drop among American women
and institutional speakers is much less pronounced (only 10 percentage
points).
What this indicates is
the extent to which the overall discourse is pro-choice as well as pro-autonomy.
For Americans, the autonomy theme is a very substantial part of the overall
discourse and is just about equal to concerns about protection for women
in need that come additionally from the pro-life camp. In German discourse,
the concern for protecting women expressed by pro-choice speakers joins
with the concerns expressed for protecting women (from the dangers of legal
as well as illegal abortion, from social pressure to have an abortion,
etc) expressed by the pro-life side of the debate to make concern about
women’s autonomy virtually disappear from all but women’s speech.]
In sum, what we have seen
here is a focus on the state as moral and helpful in Germany and as dangerous
and intrusive in the US. This underlies the concept of the welfare state
as a positive construct in Germany but a negative one in American discourse.
In addition, German prochoice speakers, especially but not at all exclusively
women, tend to frame abortion as a gender-specific concern rather than
as a matter of individual rights in relation to the state that just happen
in this instance to be applicable to women. American prochoice speakers
do just the opposite, and tend to downplay the gender-specific arguments
in relation to making non-gendered individual rights claims. The ideas
of the welfare state as a benevolent force and of women as having gender-specific
claims in regard to abortion then come together to advance the idea of
women as being in special need of state protection rather than as autonomous
moral agents, whether expressed in gender-specific terms or not.
Although German women have advanced women’s claims to autonomy, largely
in gender-specific language, they have found less resonance for this claim
among other speakers in the discourse than American women have found for
their claim that women’s autonomy is a matter of abstract individual rights.
Thus the efforts of women
to challenge the governance of gender by asserting a right to self-determination
have been more successful in the US than in Germany. In the US, broad
suspicion of the state and support for an individual right to privacy articulated
by the Supreme Court have served to buttress women’s claims for autonomy.
In Germany, women have instead faced a discursive opportunity structure
that privileges the fetus’s right to life and views the welfare state positively.
Within this framework, women have been more likely to be constructed as
needy victims of circumstances who can be Ahelped’ rather than "punished"
when they seek abortions. German women have actively contested this definition,
making a distinctive plea for considering abortion a matter of women’s
autonomous choice. Within the welfare state framework of protection
advanced by other speakers however, they have not made much headway in
challenging the governance of gender.
Conclusions
In Germany, there has been
a dramatic change in gendering of governance on the abortion issue. Women
have achieved a notable level of standing both in the media and among policy
makers on this issue, and abortion is framed much more a gendered
issue there than in the U.S. But on the autonomy side -- the governance
of gender -- the U.S. is much more likely to frame women as moral agents
compared to Germany and to justify abortion in terms of an individual’s
right to make decisions concerning his/her own body and life. German
abortion law constructs pregnant women as needy victims whom the state
is obliged to help, largely by counseling them to have the child and by
pointing out the social supports the state makes available for them in
that case. German discourse as a whole also tends to follow this
model, and women speakers’ claims to autonomy, advocating the individual
woman’s right to decide whether motherhood or abortion is the moral course
of action for her, are not echoed by other speakers
German women have succeeded
more than American women in gaining access to political and social authority
on the abortion issue. However, American discourse and law both grant
women more autonomy in making abortion decisions. These are both
important gains that the women’s movement has helped to win and to defend
in both countries. Both the gendering of governance and the governance
of gender have changed in both countries to a significant degree, even
if the changes in one dimension or the other are relatively more pronounced
in a single country. The changes that have occurred both in law and
in discourse over these 25 years are significant and do reduce injustice
for women in the dimension of power. Yet, neither victory is without
its contradictions. Redistribution and recognition remain issues of justice
that are only incompletely addressed in either country.
The practical autonomy that
American women can exercise in choosing between abortion and motherhood
is limited by the endemic problems of economic maldistribution that constrain
women in the US. Women who would prefer not to have an abortion are
not protected or assisted by the state in realizing that choice.
The de jure autonomy of women’s decision-making, which both the law and
the discourse support, is undercut by de facto financial and social constraints
on women, especially poor women and teenagers, that may force them into
decisions that do not express their free preferences at all. Indeed,
the
woman who is left with no choice but to have an abortion that she deeply
regrets has become a figure invoked by the anti-abortion side of the debate,
and pro-choice forces are therefore reluctant to even acknowledge her existence.
The distinctively American focus on women as autonomous individuals with
rights under the law has obscured the injustices of access to abortion
and to mothering that real women -- especially poor women -- confront in
practice. Both the stigmatization of teen motherhood and the absence of
any significant material state support for motherwork in the US make abortion
still a matter of injustice with regard to recognition and redistribution.
The practical authority
of German women is diluted by the devaluation of women who choose abortion
as criminal and immoral actors. Abortion is still defined by the
state as a crime and women who abort are thus still criminals, even though
the state has decided to help rather than punish them. The state’s
decision not to punish women in the first trimester is legitimated by the
Constitutional Court as a means of inducing women to come for counseling,
the prerequisite for a certificate allowing the abortion to be performed,
specifically so that the state can try to induce her to change her mind.
Because the counseling is defined by law as directed to convincing the
woman to bear the child to term, and explicitly justified as reducing the
risk that she will leave the country for an abortion elsewhere, the substitution
of Foucauldian manipulation and surveillance for direct use of force and
punishment is relatively transparent. The coercion of women into
motherhood is legitimated as a state purpose, nonetheless.
In this context, the ability
to speak of women as free moral actors who can legitimately choose between
abortion and motherhood is greatly limited in practice, even for
those women who have gained standing in the parties and in the media to
address this issue. Although women speakers in Germany are far more
likely than other German speakers to affirm women’s right to decide
as a principle, even they are likely to disavow the woman who chooses abortion
as immoral and unwomanly. Several in depth analyses of the Bundestag debates
themselves showed how women legislators distanced themselves from "the
woman who would choose an abortion" and affirmed motherhood as women’s
true calling (Lennox, 199x; Sauer, 199x: Kamenitsa, 199x).
Their insistence that women would never choose to have an abortion for
anything less than grave reasons, because all women want their babies,
was intended to rebut the pro-life arguments about the triviality and callousness
of women who abort. Ultimately, this argument undermines the possibility
of recognition of those women who do not want to be mothers or who make
free moral choices of which one personally does not approve.
In effect, some women are
mis-recognized and made invisible in both countries. In the U.S. the women
who are most unacknowledged are those whose practical choices are not as
free, particularly for economic reasons, as the law imagines. In
Germany, the women who vanish from the discourse are those who make or
wish to make free choices that conflict with the gendered perceptions of
women’s proper role and responsibilities. In both countries, the
victories that have been won in terms of authority and autonomy are significant
gains in justice for women, but in neither country has the need for further
struggle for recognition and redistribution ended.
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