“The Politics of Abortion Care in Ohio” is based on 16-months (November 2021- February 2023) of ethnographic fieldwork and 47 semi-structured interviews conducted before and after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision (2022) overturning the right to abortion in the United States (US). Currently, 14 states have banned abortion and three have bans prior to six weeks of pregnancy. I assert that the criminalization of abortion care is a form of structural violence that leads to direct harm experienced by pregnant people. My dissertation strives to make significant contributions to theories of state-based violence with particular attention to reproductive governance, the anthropology of policy, and the politics of care. First, I develop my concept of reproductive gerrymandering, which names a particular phenomenon wherein the political power of voters who support reproductive healthcare access is suppressed across political party lines. It gives the false impression that the majority of residents in states that predominately elect Republican representatives want government elimination of abortion and related services. I argue that reproductive gerrymandering is a form of bureaucratic violence used to promote anti-abortion agendas, which then causes everyday structural harm to pregnant people. Second, building upon theories of agnotology, or the study of ignorance, I argue that “heartbeat” bans—legislation that advances medical misinformation—manipulates biomedical terms to imbue a particular social meaning to embryos at a very early stage of pregnancy. I explore how biomedical practices, in this case the use of ultrasound technology to detect a “heartbeat,” furthers the cultural production of ignorance around pregnancy and sends a strategic message about the beginnings of life. Third, I demonstrate how constant fluctuations in abortion policy shape temporalities of care in clinic settings. Finally, I reveal three overlooked dimensions of reproductive governance to better understand political control of reproductive bodies: administrative and regulatory, the spread of ignorance, and the political reconfiguring of reproductive time. Ultimately, I argue for the conceptual value of attending to temporalities of structural violence, and specifically the pace with which political violence unfolds.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Although the main emphasis of this study is Lane and his part in the Republican Party, another important part to this thesis is the examination of Indiana and national politics in the 1850s. This thesis studies the development of the Hoosier Republican Party and the obstacles the young organization experienced as it transformed into a major political party. Party leaders generally focused on states like New York and Pennsylvania in national elections but Indiana became increasingly significant leading up to the 1860 election. Though Hoosier names like George Julian and Schuyler Colfax might be more recognizable nationally for their role in the Republican Party, this thesis argues that Lane played a guiding role in the development of the new third party in Indiana. Through the study of primary sources, it is clear that Hoosiers turned to Lane to lead the organization of the Republican Party and to lead it to its success in elections. Historians have long acknowledged Lane’s involvement in the 1860 Republican National Convention but fail to fully realize his significance in Indiana throughout the 1850s. This thesis argues that Lane was a vital leader in Hoosier politics and helped transform the Republican Party in Indiana from a grassroots movement into a powerful political party by 1860.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / I examined a panel of all 50 states over a period of 30 years between 1981 and 2010, estimating a random effects model to examine the relationship between the party of a state’s governor and changes in pretax and transfer income inequality. Though the literature has quite consistently shown that income inequality increases more quickly under Republican governors or when policies favored by Republicans are implemented, I find no evidence to support this, though this is perhaps because I did not allow a long enough lag time for new policies to have an effect. I did, however, find that pretax income inequality increases more quickly under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, in spite of the fact that all previous research shows the opposite to be true. I suspect that this unusual finding is the result of a quirk in my 1981-2010 time frame, namely the effects of the shift in welfare policy under the Clinton administration in the 1990s.