Pro-Choice Discourse and Feminist Theory

Introduction | Ultrasound Technology | Images and Anchorage in Medical Discourse | Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Auteur Theory | Silent Scream Analysis

Word Choice is an important part of creating effective Pro-choice discourse. Due to the positioning of men in the background, the image almost acts as anchorage for the text. There is a structure of power/ knowledge at play within this image due to the boldness of the statistics and the facial and body expressions of the men in the background. Ideology is also at work by implying that women are subject to the beliefs, policies and power of men.

A strong aspect of the Pro-Choice argument lies in the Medical discourse that is tied in. For this image to make sense to a viewer, there has to be some existing knowledge of the medical procedure in how abortions are performed. Knowledge of the history of "back alley abortions" and the lengths of desperation that women feel when faced with unwanted pregnancies. Ideology states that the ideas of the ruling class are in every age the ruling ideas. In contemporary capitalist societies as in most other social formation there are inequalities in the distribution of power and other goods. As a result there are divisions in the social fabric between rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited: such societies exhibit characteristic structures of domination the dominant groups attempt to represent the world in forms that reflect their own interests, the interests of their power. (Rose 75, Hodge and Kress 1988: 3)

Metaphor is used in this image to equate the choice of abortion with the choice (or lacktherof) in the past times of Civil War era slavery. The metaphor is the most basic of all tropes because it is founded on the most basic of logics by defining identity: that "A is B." While Pro-Life images function to by menas of using metaphors to construct that "the fetus IS human" and "abortion IS murder", this is one example of the use of metaphor in pro-Choice discourse.

Since only women can give birth from their own bodies, it is significant in the Pro-choice movement to utilize women as the main focus of this debate. Institutional apparatuses come into play in the feminist discourse surrounding the abortion debate. Institutional apparatus is the forms of power/knowledge that constitute the institutions like architecture , regulations, scientific treatsies, philosophical statements, laws, and morals and the discourse articulated through all of these. One pro-Life activist claims, "Every place you go it's just for two children, or for families with two children. Children's furniture, they make only to last for two kids, and you go to restaurants and there's only enough room for two kids, and games, they are only for two people and maybe four, including the parents. When you look at these things it's amazing" (Luker 170). Foucault descibed that apparatus as an architectual design and a moral and philosophical treatise. These structures are evident in our society and therefore have social consequences linked to feminism, pregnancy and the right to choose what to do with that pregnancy. It is interesting that this woman creates the function of metaphor by labeling her stomach as baby. The boldness of that label allows her to emphasis the meaning of "choice" for women in this debate and even the choice for her to call it "My Baby."







Works Cited

Gillian, Rose. Visual Methodologies . Sage Publications: Los Angeles, 2007.

Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the politics of Motherhood. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1984.

Images: Google