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Through a 'micro' and 'macro' level analysis, this study focuses on elements of questioning and question design in the Senate Judiciary hearing conducted for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Specifically, two lines of questioning are analyzed: that of Kamala Harris, D. California, and that of Ted Cruz, R. Texas. Through an analysis that builds heavily on prior research that uses Conversation Analysis (CA) to understand the news interview, this study attempts to expand such research to institutional talk done by politicians in Congress. The analysis portion of the paper investigates, on a 'micro' level, the linguistic elements at play in each line of questioning. In the discussion section, a 'macro' level analysis situates the findings of this paper within the broader US political climate among the public and in terms of the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The victory of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election was a victory for a new form of US political conservatism that emphasized both social and economic issues. Abortion was paramount among these new social issues, and opponents of abortion supported Reagan with the belief that he would work vigorously to overturn Roe v. Wade. Less than six months after Reagan’s inauguration, the national anti-abortion movement was vociferously condemning the President over the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. This article explores the nature of the passionate reaction to O’Connor and the fragility of the coalition that opposed her. Anti-abortionists were deeply troubled by the realization that their access and symbolic capital did not translate into influence, and were shocked that abortion was not a litmus test for their ‘pro-life President.' The article argues that the relationship between the right-to-life movement, the Reagan administration, and the Republican Party was often fraught, contested, and precarious. In Reagan’s first year in office, the place of the right-to-life movement in the new conservatism of the 1980s was remarkably uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of archival documents and the published writings of experts, this paper explores the relationships between the emerging field of sexology, the state, and the Catholic Church in post-1956 Poland, as these relationships play an important role in the history of sexuality under state socialism. In the period in question, experts in sexuality, mainly medical doctors, focused on how to improve sexual relations within marriage. They developed a notion known as the 'culture of sexuality' based on progressive values such as equality, rationality, and psychological health. Experts drew a connection between an improvement in people's marital sex lives and the health and welfare of both society and the nation. The Party-State supported these developments and also used them to their advantage in their political struggle with the Catholic Church. However, the experts' proposal to restrict access to abortion (in 1961) was met with decisive resistance on the part of the Party-State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with a case study situated in a public social service system in Uganda, Africa. Through case analysis, I highlight the complexities related to professional ethics in social work practice in Africa and argue that efforts to promote ethics, human rights and social justice in this context require creativity, innovation and activism to confront structural conditions that trap people in unjust circumstances. While building ethical capabilities demands grounding practice in the global social work principles, additional infusion of ubuntu ethics and African social work platforms for sharing experiences and actions are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of iconic popular culture symbols is an increasingly common strategy applied by social protest organizers. The Guy Fawkes mask from the 'V for Vendetta' comic book became a symbol of the Anonymous group, and later of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Salvador Dalí mask, popularized in the 'La casa de papel' Netflix series, was used in street protests in Spain and Italy. Motifs taken from the HBO adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' novel gained high visibility in thousands of women's protests against the introduction of the de facto abortion ban in Poland. Basing on images documenting the Polish protests published in social media, we demonstrate how popular culture symbols are transformed into cultural codes which bridge on-street and online protest actions. This connection has become crucial in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using qualitative visual content analysis, we prepared a classification of the symbols employed. Our contribution to the theory of performative protests is to reveal the importance of analogies with the political series that Polish protesters have used by means of the general connotation: Poland is Gilead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the book reviews published about the 1973 book Experience with Abortion: A case study of North-East Scotland , a volume edited by Gordon Horobin. The paper sets the scene at the time of publication of Experience with Abortion , and includes abortion as a societal issue, the 1967 Abortion Act and the role of the MRC Medical Sociology Unit in Aberdeen. The reviews were analysed using content analysis. Considering the controversy of abortion in the early 1970s, it is interesting that the book reviews were overwhelmingly positive towards both Experience with Abortion and the need for high quality social science research in this field. Several reviews highlighted the importance of having someone like Sir Dugald Baird in Aberdeen and of the Aberdeen-based Medical Research Council's (MRC) Medical Sociology Unit. Nearly 40 years later, abortion has disappeared off the sociology and social policy agenda, at least in the United Kingdom (UK) and Horobin's legacy in medical sociology appears to be in areas other than abortion or reproductive health more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist STS analyses of contemporary reproductive medicine have illustrated the proliferation of practices that position fetuses as individual subjects, and have highlighted the major implications of such practices for pregnant women. In an attempt to challenge medicine’s claims to ‘know’ the fetus, this body of literature has also demonstrated the renegotiable basis of pregnant/fetal subjectivity, using detailed empirical analyses of the practices through which particular pregnant and fetal subjects emerge in particular contexts. In this paper I contribute to this endeavour utilizing an empirical case study of an important, but neglected aspect of reproductive healthcare: the demarcation of temporal thresholds on abortion provision in the absence of diagnosed fetal abnormality. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Scottish health professionals, I explore the discursive practices through which they demarcate ‘later’ abortion as a problematic decision. I argue that such practices are intimately dependent on particular co-constructions of temporality and pregnant/fetal subjectivity, and support this argument with reference to the counter-representations of the gestational timing of abortion that emerge from a minority of health professionals’ accounts. I suggest that, collectively, this body of data illustrates the opportunities that (re)presenting temporality would afford those engaged in attempts to foster the construction of less oppressive pregnant/fetal subjectivities. My broader aim is to illustrate the insights that feminist theorizations of pregnant/fetal subjectivity gain from explicit engagement with another important theme of contemporary STS scholarship, namely, the constitutive role played by representations of temporality in technoscientific innovation and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analysis of US hate crime legislation reveals a significant overall trend involving: (1) the inclusion of a notion of hate motivation on the part of the offender; (2) the provision for enhanced penalties; and (3) the identification of particular victimized groups who are listed in state and federal hate crime statutes. Whether or not a person is recognized as a hate crime victim in US statutes has been shown to be heavily influenced by the strength of social movements based on politicized identities. It is argued that this alignment problematizes the position of victims who are the targets of hate crimes yet who fail to organize on the basis of identity politics, lack political clout, have insufficient moral status, or who see hate crime legislation as an ineffective way of dealing with their particular concerns. This paper examines the barriers to achieving hate crime victim status for persons who are targeted because of their occupations or sexual orientation. The specific examples I will use are doctors and other workers in abortion clinics, sex workers and paedophiles. These widely disparate groups have been selected as examples to highlight some of the moral status, politicized identity and social movement and lobbying strength issues that are currently involved in being recognized as a victim of hate in the US. It is argued that Australia should not proceed down the track of introducing hate crime legislation. Hate crime legislation is the source of serious social disquiet and acrimony in the US. There are inequities built into the alignment between proving hate intent and the enhanced penalty approach that involve giving higher symbolic status to some bodies and not others. As the experience in the US shows, this has a dangerous potential to undermine social cohesion and community faith in equality before the law as well as creating a breeding ground of resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerned with a falling birth rate in the early 1950s, the Hungarian communist regime banned abortion and encouraged motherhood. A closer inquiry into the 1953 abortion ban and the broader cultural context of crime and policing in early communist Hungary suggests that repression alone was inadequate, as an underground abortion network provided some respite for women seeking to control their reproduction. However, the regime's pronatalist policy aligned well with the interests and biases of skilled male workers: redirecting women's efforts from productive to reproductive labor both removed them as competitors at work and returned them to their "proper", subordinate place. Internal Party documents and interviews with refugees and émigrés conducted before and after 1956 reveal that although women exerted some control over their reproduction throughout the entire period, they were thwarted as much by men's resistance to working women as by the regime's intrusive pronatalist policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the discussion of abortion in a number of US presidential and vice-presidential debates, from a scaling perspective. The interest in scales, as (co)constructed and negotiated by participants in the course of interaction, is a component of occasioned semantics. I found that, in the political debates that I examined, there are a number of different scales anchored by the contrast between 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' positions. These are as follows: (1) Stage of pregnancy, (2) Prescribed action, (3) Special circumstances, (4) Locus of enforcement and (5) Frequency. These scales are manipulated in various ways by the candidates to make their own stances seem reasonable and moral and their opponents' unreasonable and immoral. A position may be made to appear more moderate by adding a more extreme alternative to the scale, which is then rejected ('negative upgrading'). Also, common goals (in particular, reduction of abortion frequency) may be emphasized. The debaters also use 'negative downgrading' – rejection of a more moderate position – to suggest an opponent's unreasonableness. It is noted that the availability of several scales affords various ways of formulating the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a particular position. The article continues with a close examination of an extended debate sequence, illustrating the crucial role of implicature in the manipulation of scales, the attribution of attitude, and the practice of argumentation, and the possibility of dealing with implicature within a conversation analytic framework. The discussion is, at all points, grounded in and illustrated by the actual talk of the political candidates. It is suggested that viewing specific occasions of interaction in terms of the creation and negotiation of scales can yield a unique and revealing perspective on what is taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the emerging context of hashtag feminism, this article explores the #SupportIslandWomen pro-choice initiative in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. The movement gained visibility by using the altered image of Anne of Green Gables (rogue Anne) on posters and graffiti throughout PEI and on social media. Drawing from organizational discourse theory, we analyse how rogue Anne was invoked by activists who spoke in her name, thus enacting the polyphonic nature of discourse. Our case study was built by performing non-participant observation online and by conducting a search in Canadian blogs and newspapers. First, we detail the discursive practices developed within the #SupportIslandWomen movement and underline their constitutive effects, namely, by focusing on the organizing properties of the hashtag feature. Then, we investigate the benefits and limitations of using rogue Anne as a unifying symbol and reflect on the discursive struggles that led to and were generated by her usurpation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009 a couple in Cairns were charged, and later found not guilty, of illegally obtaining a medical abortion through the use of medication imported from overseas. The court case reignited the discussions surrounding the illegality and social acceptance of abortion in Queensland, Australia. Based on a discourse analysis of 150 online news media articles covering the Cairns trial, this article critically examines the language and key words relied upon by media when covering the Cairns trial. It argues that, despite popular support for the decriminalisation of abortion, emotive language that aligns with a pro-life ideology is still being employed which has the power to shape perceptions of deviance and stigma surrounding abortion. This is useful to demonstrate how media discourse surrounding abortion needs to further align with a pro-choice ideology for women to be empowered for their choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an approach to studying processes of transnational exchange and reception between social movements. It does so by focusing on a locally situated case study: the movement for women's reproductive and sexual health and rights in 1970s Rome. A focal point in 'second-wave' Italian feminism, these groups were profoundly shaped by feminist debates and practices in, notably, the USA and France. The analysis highlights the centrality of local actors in translating, appropriating and re-(and de-)contextualizing transnational sources, thus transforming their meanings. Questioning the often automatic status ascribed to the nation-state as analytical framework, the article illustrates that re-contextualization equally takes place on the local (as distinct from national) level, and that these layered transfer processes are central to understanding the complexity and effectiveness of postwar social movements such as feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to interrogate when the use of images in moral persuasion is legitimate. First, we put forward a number of accounts which purport to show that we can use tools other than logical argumentation to convince others, that such tools evoke affective responses and that these responses have authority in the moral domain. Second, we turn to Sarah McGrath’s account, which focuses on the use of imagery as a means to morally persuade. McGrath discusses 4 objections to the use of imagery, and outlines responses that may be used to legitimate the use of imagery in moral arguments. Assuming that we accept her account and that the invocation of affect has authority in the moral domain, we, using McGrath’s responses, examine whether the use of foetal imagery in anti-abortion campaigns is a legitimate instance of this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The lack of a clear and accessible law specifically outlining when abortion is legal in Northern Ireland has led to confusion and misinformation among the public, health professionals, politicians, lobby groups and the media. Hard won Departmental Guidance and legal challenges to it provide evidence of religious and cultural bias at an institutional level against abortion in any circumstances. The introduction of Northern Ireland’s first private abortion clinic in 2012 has brought the debate into sharper focus. This commentary explores recent developments in abortion regulation and the failings of the two legislatures in Belfast and Westminster to live up to both domestic legal standards and international human rights law on reproductive health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will outline the legislative history of the Global Gag Rule and will describe the key stakeholders responsible for the policy’s passage and promotion. The negative effects associated with the policy’s implementation will be discussed, as well as its implications for human rights discourse and political activism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of therapeutic cloning research sparked a scientific controversy pitting patients’ hopes for cures against religious and anti-abortion opposition. The present study investigates this controversy by examining the production and content of Anglo-American print media coverage of the branch of embryonic stem cell research known as “therapeutic cloning.” Data collection included press articles about therapeutic cloning (n = 5,185) and qualitative interviews with journalists (n = 18). Patient activists and anti-abortion groups emerged as key news sources in this coverage. Significant qualitative differences in the mediation of these subpolitical groups and their arguments for and against therapeutic cloning are identified. Results suggest that the perceived human interest news value of narratives of patient suffering may give patient advocacy groups a privileged position in journalistic coverage. Finally, Ulrich Beck’s theoretical arguments about subpolitics are critically applied to the results to elicit further insights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]