UC Davis

Abortion in the United States is generally considered a highly contested moral andpolitical issue. Two competing activist frameworks tend to dominate the public conversation around abortion. Yet the experience of having an abortion is socially complex, often shaped by inconsistent cultural schemas related to motherhood, medicine, life, and death. Little empirical research examines how people talk about the morality of their own abortion experiences. In this dissertation I examine how individuals who have abortions construct moral identities in the face of persistent gendered stigma. The dissertation is in the format of three research papers. In the first paper, I analyze 156 personal narratives from an abortion storytelling website. I identify four discursive frameworks used to confront the problem of abortion as a morally controversial act. In the second paper, I examine eighteen in-depth interviews with cisgender women who obtained abortions after receiving a diagnosis for a serious fetal condition. I examine how participants maintained moral worth and constructed symbolic boundaries between themselves and those who have abortions for reasons other than fetal health. In the last paper, I question why, despite an unambivalent embrace of motherhood ideals and severe fetal diagnoses, this group of women experienced abortion stigma. I identify a need for a theoretical reorientation toward defining abortion stigma as a multi-level social process embedded in existing structures of power and inequality. The findings of this research contribute to an evolving discussion of how the perspectives of people who have had abortions fit into abortion rights discourses and the broader public sphere.