Abstract
Reviewed by: Lisa O’Rourke Scott, Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland and The Open University, UK
This book offers a carefully crafted and insightful analysis of abortion politics, the discourses that construct abortions and the women who have them. As someone living in Ireland, where abortion services were legalised in only 2019 amidst a very divisive national debate, I found the book to be of great interest to me. Many of the arguments that Millar makes held resonance with my experience of the campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland. The book traces the development of debates about abortion since the 1970s, particularly in Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, and elegantly unpacks the ways in which emotion talk makes available to women subject positions as good mothers, potential good mothers, and loyal citizens.
Millar’s introduction opens with an analysis of the emotional scripts which depict abortion as a choice which is never easy; a choice which is only ever made under extreme circumstances, and one which must be grieved. The book is organised around five main topic chapters: The Politics of Choice; Happy Choices; The Grief of Choice; Shameful Choices, and The Nation’s Choice. The analysis draws out the links between various strands of debate about abortion whilst paying careful attention to the ways in which these discourses intersect, overlap and respond to one another. Millar demonstrates that, rather than taking up a feminist stance about bodily autonomy, anti-abortion sentiment permeates both sides of the debate. Abortion, she argues convincingly, is either presented as an assault on women and “babies”, in the case of anti-abortion campaigners, or as a difficult choice for which there are emotional consequences, in the case of pro-choice advocates. This latter claim, she argues, is pervasive in campaigns and discussion on both sides, despite psychological evidence to the contrary. Drawing on the work of Sarah Ahmed (2004), Millar dissects the emotional common sense of abortion and offers new insights into the invisibility of the idea that abortion might or should be a happy event. The “happy abortion”, she argues, has been made mostly unspeakable and invisible by the arguments that are available on the topic.
The first chapter of the book, “The Politics of Choice”, presents a history of the development of arguments in legislative and political contexts that took place in Australia, the UK, Canada and the United States during the 1960s and 70 s, about whether and under what circumstances abortion should be available. She argues that legislators and the public in Australia, Canada, and the UK have been broadly pro-choice since this time, unlike in the United States, where political figures are divided on the topic. However, she claims that the meanings that emerged in the rhetoric of abortion utilised a narrow range of arguments. Abortion has been variously constructed as the death of a foetus or baby; the act of a selfish woman; and the consequence of desperate circumstances by a woman who is not equipped to mother. These discourses reproduce women as most happily and naturally becoming mothers under the correct circumstances. Having established a history of the opposing debates which both position abortion as an “unhappy choice”, she goes on to argue that this positioning was a response to the rhetoric of assumed “damage” utilised by anti-abortion movements, which remained largely unchallenged by pro-choice activists. Abortion politics on both sides presents abortion as a choice which is not legitimate but, rather, one which can be justified in certain circumstances. Choices to abort are made, but in this formulation they are inevitably “never easy”. This, she argues, means that whist the pro-choice movement successfully won legislation to allow for abortion, it was framed as a choice which is undesirable, desperate and exceptional. The legislation governing abortion was thus constructed as allowing for compassion for the desperate. In this context, then, choice is not about women exercising freedom of choice, but about women responding to social circumstances beyond their control in the only way possible.
In the second chapter, “Happy Abortions”, Millar turns her attention to pro-choice rhetoric about abortion and argues that it relies on postfeminist discourses which position feminism as irrelevant to contemporary society and women as autonomous agents. Neoliberal “good choices” are intimately entwined with the assumption that “good motherhood” is a happy choice. As Millar puts it, “Motherhood, and its association with happiness, is no longer considered a woman’s destiny (as it was in the 1970s) but a woman’s desire” (p. 91). This formulation, she contends, inscribes inevitable identities of natural desire to mother on all women and imagines foetuses as autonomous subjects and desirable and happy outcomes. This means that abortion is framed as inevitably a difficult choice which no woman really wants to make. In this context abortion choices are explained and justified in pro-choice rhetoric in terms of lack: lack of education; lack of ability to mother; lack of social support; failure of contraception; or inability to cope with further children, for example. Happy choices, she goes on to argue, are made when women are able to mother responsibly and provide for children and are the right kind of neoliberal mother. Alternatively, abortion choices are ones which lead aborting women to grieve potential children and are chosen for the good of those children and future children. Good mothers in this context are ideally white middle-class women who make difficult choices to abort to safeguard existing or potential children, whilst aspiring to good mothering. This in turn leads to the production of what Millar terms “foetocentric grief”: the discursive construction of abortion as an experience which women must naturally grieve. Aborting women, she argues, are thus restored to “the norm of foetal motherhood” (p. 180).
Chapter 3, “The Grief of Choice”, explores in more detail the construction and consequences of the foetocentric grief. Millar argues that foetocentric grief constructs pregnant women as already mothers and embryos and foetuses as babies. She further argues that grieving and loss following abortion is taken as emotional common sense by both sides of the debate. Anti-abortion rhetoric, she claims, initially focused on the killing of babies as a moral issue. Over time, arguments were added which focused on concern for women. This rhetoric takes up the psychologisation of abortion and positions women as being coerced to undergo abortion against their “natural” desire to be mothers. Choices, anti-abortion activists argue, are not informed choices: aborting women do not understand the emotional damage inherent in the loss of a baby. In addition, mothers and babies are produced in anti-abortion discourse by association of abortion grief with grief experienced at miscarriage. Millar unpacks anti-abortion studies, which purport to identify lasting damage to “mothers” who have abortions, from the perspectives of the samples from whom the data are obtained, the methodologies used and the productive, rather than descriptive, nature of the research. On the pro-choice side of the debate, Millar argues that rhetoric regarding concern for the physical well-being of women who, unable to obtain legal abortion, resorted to backstreet abortions, resulting in the medicalisation of abortion, was an important initial source of argument in favour of legalisation. Millar counters that a network of skilled abortion providers existed prior to legalisation. In addition, arguments from pro-choice advocates also took up a position of concern for women which constructed aborting women as choosing reluctantly, and at personal cost, to abort. These choices are taken up as unhappy but justifiable in some circumstances. The chapter concludes that foetocentric grief is a constituent of abortion grief and that women are not, in these formulations, addressed as active choosing subjects by either side of the debate.
“Shameful Choices” is the topic of Chapter 4. In it, Millar turns her attention to shame, which she argues is the result of failure to adhere to social norms. Abortion, she demonstrates, is positioned as a failure: a failure to control reproductive function; to live up to the norm of female selflessness; to accomplish motherhood; and a failure on the part of the nation to prevent too many abortions. If there is any weakness in this book it is that the treatment skates too lightly over the topic of sexual shame. Women’s internalised traditional views in relation to sexual activity are mentioned, but there is no analysis of the discourses that produce sexual shame, nor is there an analysis of the production of sexual shaming in positioning aborting women as lacking in sexual restraint. In the context of an argument about women as ideal mothers, the positioning of the ideal mother as locating her sexual activity within marriage or sexually monogamous relationships (e.g. Kaplan, 1990) is important to understanding the production of maternal identities. Inclusion of this kind of analysis would have allowed space for an argument to advocate the replacement of choice discourses, which from this analysis are deployed inadequately, with sex positive ones (Ross, 2016).
The final topic of the book, Chapter 5, “The Nation’s Choice”, returns to the analysis of ideal maternal identities, but in the context of nation-building, cultural politics, nationhood and white supremacy. Millar argues that the good mother is produced as white, middle class and financially productive and the argument is, that this is the kind of mother that the nation needs. Drawing on the theoretical framework proposed by Barbra Baird (2006), she argues that the construction of a foetus as a baby is developed in white supremacist discourse to frame the foetus as a citizen. She identifies examples of discourses of moral panic in relation to rates of abortion and an assumed decline in the family and argues that these have been linked to concerns about population decline among white populations along with the pathologisation of indigenous and non-white, non-Christian mothers as a threat to security and to nationhood. Millar returns to the topic of children as happy objects in this chapter, in the context of a fantasy of white nationhood comprised of two-parent heterosexual families. In this line of rhetoric, white women choose the nation over abortion. This linking of anti-abortion sentiment to white supremacy was a particularly interesting line of argument.
In conclusion, this book offers new insights into the ways in which the rhetoric of abortion constructs aborting women and ideal forms of motherhood. It considers the links between strands of discourse that construct abortion as problematic; motherhood as the happy choice of women; the foetus as a happy object and as a baby; abortion as a shameful choice; and reproduction of white, Christian populations as an assumed necessity for safe and happy nations. The book is a valuable resource for anyone thinking through the politics and consequences of debates about abortion as well as an impressive social constructionist analysis of discourse as productive of emotion. An important contribution of the book it its analysis of the combination of choice and emotion discourses together to characterise abortion. The discursive construction of what Millar describes as “the economy of familial happiness” (p. 134), the positioning of aborting women as grieving and the foetus as a happy object, and the deployment of abortion stigma and shame demonstrate an important and useful development of discursive work on the construction of emotion, maternal identities, cultural politics and discourses of nationhood. Most importantly, the book provides a valuable example of how rhetoric coheres and combines to produce and reproduce gender roles and identities, which will be of interest to scholars interested in discursive work in many topic areas.