Envisioning Life: Discourse, Vision, and Reality Construction in Contemporary U.S. Abortion Debates
with Savannah H. Finver, The Ohio State University
Savannah H. Finver is a doctoral student in Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University with an emphasis on religious studies, especially looking at questions related to religion, politics, and law in the United States. Working primarily through discourse analysis, she examines how the category of religion is made manifest in and through U.S. legal discourse in the form of legislation and court documents, as well as how these legal documents and decisions are contested and expressed by organizations and practitioners. Relying on scholarship emerging out of fields/disciplines such as religious studies, political science, history, cultural studies, and legal studies, she aims to trace the context in which “religion” became a category in need of protection in the U.S., how this protection became encoded in U.S. law, and the ways in which it manifests (and the socio-political implications thereof) in various ways across different groups and subjects.
Page Abstract: In their chapter "'Learning Medicine': The Constructing of Medical Knowledge at Harvard Medical School," Good and Good (1993) explore the dissonance experienced and expressed by medical students at Harvard as a new curriculum introduced increased standards of both professional competency and compassionate patient care. They write that "[o]ne of the critical and multifaceted changes through which medical students pass en route to becoming competent physicians is the reconstruction of the person who is the object of the medical gaze" (94). Crucial to Good and Good's argument is the notion that, as a result of adopting the specialized, scientific vocabulary offered to them through their studies in the anatomy lab, medical students--along with their perceptions of physical bodies--are phenomenologically transformed from a person-centered view to a body-centered, almost mechanized view. Extending this argument to both sides of contemporary abortion debates in the United States, this paper explores the idea that the differences in vocabulary between so-called "religious" pro-life advocates and so-called "secular" pro-choice advocates lead to the creation of visually and ontologically distinct realities, fundamentally unable to be reconciled. In other words, our language informs how we "see," both literally and metaphorically, the fetal tissue which has become an object of such contentious debate in the U.S. legal sphere.
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