Condit provides a close look at how pro-life and pro-choice arguments have helped shape the development of public policy and private practice. She offers readers an orderly way through the barrage of rhetoric and an opportunity to identify and clarify our own opinions on a very difficult subject.

A close look at the rhetoric of Operation Rescue. >

This work explores the emergence and evolution of the rhetoric choice rhetoric as it pertains to contemporary American abortion politics. Choice is explored from an ideographic perspective, borrowing from the theoretical framework for ideographic rhetorical criticism established by Michael Calvin McGee. The analysis begins with a diachronic analysis of the emergence of the ideograph of choice within the law with an investigation of the written decisions in four Supreme Court cases central to the construction of the right to choose: Roe v. Wade (1973), Maher v. Roe (1977), Harris v. McRae (1980), and Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989). This investigation reveals a synchronic relationship between choice and another higher order ideograph, liberty. The criticism continues with an investigation of the usage of choice by pro-choice advocates in two documents published by NARAL Pro-Choice America, Choices: Women Speak About Abortion is a collection of women's narratives about their experiences obtaining an abortion, and Breaking Barriers, a guide for the development and implementation of proactive policy campaigns for pro-choice advocates. McGee's method is employed to investigate the ideographic usage of choice within these documents, revealing the ideographic abstraction that associates the alleged idea content of ideographs. This ideographic analysis reveals the inability of choice to live up to its alleged idea content as a result of the limitations inherent in the grounding of choice within the higher order ideograph of liberty and the impact of these limitations on particular populations, mainly indigent women in the United States.

In contemporary society, public discourse about abortion remains substantially controversial. Although the U.S. abortion debate remains in the public eye, there has been little to no attention focused on race. This project interrogates the role of race and racial identity in the abortion debate through. To investigate the existence of race in contemporary U.S. abortion rhetoric, the author utilizes a three-part conceptual framework as my rhetorical method. The author examines TRF billboard campaign, paying particular attention to its employment of collective memory. Moreover, the author examines how the campaign uses African American collective memories to create and sustain an argument concerning Black abortion. The author concluds that racialized abortion rhetoric demands scholarly attention because it extends the boundaries of conversations about abortion. Furthermore, the author contends that anti-Black abortion rhetoric increases our understanding of how communication and racial/ethnic identities mutually develop.

"When journalists, academics, and politicians describe the North American anti-abortion movement, they often describe a campaign that is male-dominated, aggressive, and even violent in its tactics, religious in motivation, anti-women in tone, and fetal-centric in arguments and rhetoric. Are they correct? In The Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement, Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon suggest that the reality is far more complicated, particularly in Canada. Today, anti-abortion activism increasingly presents itself as "pro-women": using female spokespersons, adopting medical and scientific language to claim that abortion harms women, and employing a wide range of more subtle framing and narrative rhetorical tactics that use traditionally progressive themes to present the anti-abortion position as more feminist than pro-choice feminism. Following a succinct but comprehensive overview of the two-hundred year history of North American debate and legislation on abortion, Saurette and Gordon present the results of their systematic, five-year quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, supplemented by extensive first-person observations, and outline the implications that flow from these findings. Their discoveries are a challenge to our current assumptions about the abortion debate today, and their conclusions will be compelling for both scholars and activists alike."--