The mainstream abortion rights debate in the United States, its opposing factions popularly identified as pro-choice and pro-life, is reliant upon identifiable narratives of abortion's value to women and society and, alternately, its harms. This dissertation traces more than one hundred years of evolution of popular rhetoric surrounding the practice of elective termination of pregnancy in the U.S. and identifies the understandings of abortion and the women who have them which are most prominent in our culture today. This dissertation examines the ways in which women who have had abortions invoke the rhetoric of "sympathetic abortion" in making sense of their own experiences. For the pro-choice movement, young, childless women accomplish sympathetic abortions in light of factors like responsible birth control use and the pursuit of empowering life goals, while factors like existing children, previous abortions, and bad clinic experiences contradict this template. The women interviewed for this research discuss ways in which the circumstances surrounding their abortions and their individual approaches to their procedures align their reproductive choices with the sympathetic template or else point to ways in which their experiences fail this standard. Women occasionally transcend the templates of "good" and "bad" abortions and offer new meanings. This dissertation closes with a discussion of the role of women's stories in social movements and the consequences of discourse which ignores abortion experiences that fall short of the contemporary formula story.

W. E. B. Du Bois‘ legendary reflections on the ―peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one‘s self through the eyes of others‖ has been applied almost exclusively to the souls of African American people (Du Bois 1903). This thesis shows how the concept of double-consciousness is alive in the stories told by Native Americans. I draw upon data from two websites that have recorded the stories told by ―exemplary indigenous elders, historians, storytellers and song carriers‖ and their oral traditions that serve the ―purpose of cultural preservation, education, and race reconciliation‖ (Wisdom of the Elders, 2009). From that population, I chose one hundred and three stories for my sample in this study. Employing qualitative methodology – thematic analysis, grounded theory, and narrative analysis - I examine these stories for the ways in which they claim to present a more satisfying identity for Native people than the myths, formula stories, and stereotypes of Native Americans that circulate through the dominant culture. They construct subversive stories that arise from their double-consciousness and challenge hegemonic concepts of Native identity, nature, and knowledge. This research will begin to fill the large gap in sociological literature on Native Americans in general and Native Americans in particular, while offering a novel application of ―double-consciousness,‖ a foundational concept in critical race theory.