This thesis offers an overview of the new rhetorical strategies of persuasion being implemented by the contemporary English Canadian anti-abortion movement. This thesis analyzes the main arguments, philosophical principles, narratives and other important rhetorical strategies used by the contemporary anti-abortion movement in English-speaking Canada. It seeks, in other words, to explain how the anti-abortion movement talks to Canadians and how it attempts to persuade them of anti-abortion views.

This thesis offers an overview of the new rhetorical strategies of persuasion being implemented by the contemporary English Canadian anti-abortion movement. This thesis analyzes the main arguments, philosophical principles, narratives and other important rhetorical strategies used by the contemporary anti-abortion movement in English-speaking Canada. It seeks, in other words, to explain how the anti-abortion movement talks to Canadians and how it attempts to persuade them of anti-abortion views.

This thesis offers an overview of the new rhetorical strategies of persuasion being implemented by the contemporary English Canadian anti-abortion movement. This thesis analyzes the main arguments, philosophical principles, narratives and other important rhetorical strategies used by the contemporary anti-abortion movement in English-speaking Canada. It seeks, in other words, to explain how the anti-abortion movement talks to Canadians and how it attempts to persuade them of anti-abortion views.

This thesis offers an overview of the new rhetorical strategies of persuasion being implemented by the contemporary English Canadian anti-abortion movement. This thesis analyzes the main arguments, philosophical principles, narratives and other important rhetorical strategies used by the contemporary anti-abortion movement in English-speaking Canada. It seeks, in other words, to explain how the anti-abortion movement talks to Canadians and how it attempts to persuade them of anti-abortion views.

This dissertation explores women's activism in the anti-abortion movement in the United States, from the 1960s through the close of the twentieth century. I study the transformation of the movement, from its origins in the Catholic Church in the 1960s, to the influx of evangelical Christians into the movement in the early 1980s. My primary sources include organizational records, personal papers, newspapers, legal documents, and oral histories. I analyze women's roles within the movement and the religious contexts that influenced their ideology and informed their choice of tactics. Anti-abortion activism provided a forum for many religiously conservative women to engage in public debates, shape public policy, and protest publicly. First, I examine the relationships between women who established national anti-abortion organizations with those women who participated in grassroots activism. I suggest that evangelical Protestant women were more likely to hold leadership positions in the mainstream movement because most leaders in the evangelical grassroots wing of the movement enforced a patriarchal organizational structure. On the other hand, progressive Catholic women had considerably more influence in the grassroots organizations they formed apart from the Roman Catholic Church. Second, I address how women responded to the rise of the New Right and the subsequent influx of evangelical Christians into the movement. I trace the history of violence in the history and suggest that women had prepared the movement to accept the radicalism of evangelical Christians by the 1980s. By focusing on women, I seek to reveal the contradictions between religiously conservative ideas about proper gender roles that many women in the movement espoused and the actual work they performed as activists.

Crisis pregnancy center advertisements like billboards that ask whether a downcast woman of color is "Pregnant? Scared?" appear to be a locus of the overlapping factors of United States racial politics, bodily control, and a neoliberal sensibility. In order to investigate these relationships, I situate analyses of anti-abortion media products alongside current U.S. political discourses. What is the relationship between the elements of racism and bodily control in CPC visual rhetoric and growing neoliberal culture? This project brings these factors into a dialogue by analyzing the anti-abortion rhetoric shaped by CPC organizations and the white U.S. mainstream. As I discuss in Chapter One, anti-abortion organizations target specific communities and use large-scale media advertising to retain disproportionate control over the image of abortion in the U.S. cultural imaginary. The second chapter details how that imaginary and the current political situation overlap in immigration, population, and border panic that reduces Latinas to sexualized stereotypes. In Chapter Three, I report on the U.S. medical and political systems' shameful oppression of black women's reproductive freedom in order to situate the advertising rhetoric of three more anti-abortion organizations. The discourses these groups perpetrate are all reflected in the moral individualism of a growing neoliberal social politic. In sum, anti-abortion organizations use neoliberal rhetoric and racialized advertising to perpetuate destructive discourses of what it means to be a person of color in reproductive crisis. These discourses approach race with entrenched stereotypes, paternalistic moralizing, and euphemistic concern for low-income people of color. A critical feminist lens helps draw serious attention to dangerous patterns in anti-abortion rhetoric and the politics of race and reproductive justice. / text

墮胎的道德爭議一直是倫理學的重要課題。美國哲學家茱蒂絲．湯姆森在一九七一年發表〈為墮胎辯護〉 一文，這篇論文不但試圖反駁反對墮胎論者的立場，湯姆森藉由著名的小提琴家思想實驗，以女性的身體自主權為基礎論證 墮胎並非是道德上不可被允許的行為。本文研究〈為墮胎辯護〉該文之論點，並探討針對此文的批評爭端，接著藉由反駁對〈為墮胎辯護〉之批評，進一步為〈為墮胎辯護〉一文辯護。最後，本文同意湯姆森之主張：墮胎並非道德上不可被允許之行為；並呼籲人們在道德議題上公平地審視墮胎爭議。 / The moral debate on abortion has been a hot issue in Ethics. In 1971, American philosopher Judith Javis Thomson launched her famous thesis ‘A Defense of Abortion’ in which she argued against anti-abortionists. By the violinist thought experiment, she began with women’s bodily autonomy as her basic argument and claimed that abortion is not morally impermissible. My thesis here studied Thomson’s view on abortion and discussed the critics that ‘A Defense of Abortion’ evoked. Furthermore, I try to fight back those critics and defense for “A Defense of Abortion.” Finally, this thesis agrees Thomson’s claim: Abortion is not morally impermissible, and suggest that we should fairly examine the debate on abortion.

Recently, some in the anti-abortion movement have begun to assert that abortion harms women and access to abortion should be restricted or prohibited to protect women’s rights. This paper suggests that woman-protective anti-abortion (“WPA”) arguments could become more recognizable in Canada if other kinds of woman-protective legislation are adopted. In particular, this paper focuses on private member’s Bill C-510, an Act to Prevent Coercion of Pregnant Women to Abort (Roxanne’s Law). This paper suggests that Bill C-510 is problematic because its differential treatment of women reinforces historical stereotypes of motherhood and female vulnerability, the same stereotypes upon which the WPA relies. By reinforcing these same stereotypes, Bill C- 510 creates a climate in which WPA restrictions on access to abortion appear more reasonable. The paper concludes by suggesting that the existing aggravated circumstances sentencing sections in the Criminal Code already provide judges with discretionary powers to deal with offences like coerced abortion.

Recently, some in the anti-abortion movement have begun to assert that abortion harms women and access to abortion should be restricted or prohibited to protect women’s rights. This paper suggests that woman-protective anti-abortion (“WPA”) arguments could become more recognizable in Canada if other kinds of woman-protective legislation are adopted. In particular, this paper focuses on private member’s Bill C-510, an Act to Prevent Coercion of Pregnant Women to Abort (Roxanne’s Law). This paper suggests that Bill C-510 is problematic because its differential treatment of women reinforces historical stereotypes of motherhood and female vulnerability, the same stereotypes upon which the WPA relies. By reinforcing these same stereotypes, Bill C- 510 creates a climate in which WPA restrictions on access to abortion appear more reasonable. The paper concludes by suggesting that the existing aggravated circumstances sentencing sections in the Criminal Code already provide judges with discretionary powers to deal with offences like coerced abortion.

Since the introduction of a new type of anti-abortion legislation in the United States which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, women’s options regarding abortion are being limited. How “problems” are represented or constituted in legislation shows that problems are time, place and context dependant. By using Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the problem represented to be?” approach to policy analysis, problem representations and subjectification effects in the heartbeat bills were identified. The problem representation of abortion as “lack of information” emerged as the central problem representation and the subject positions that were made available limits women’s choices regarding abortion. Fetal rights emerged as the core of the argumentation in the legislation, excluding women’s rights. How the problem of abortion is represented to be, the subjectification effects and the way rights are used and argued for in antiabortion legislation shows how they effectively limits women’s abortion choices.