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Sociologist Kristen Luker, in “Medicine and Morality in the Nineteenth Century,” argues that physicians became the sole arbiters of abortion access due to the professionalization of medicine and the rise of the American Medical Association. She historicizes the morality discourse in the abortion debate, arguing that abortions were not conceptualized as immoral until physicians entered the debate in the late 18th century. Prior to this point, women were not considered pregnant until they felt the fetus kick, meaning women had full agency to declare the start of their pregnancies. Physicians intervened, arguing that women's lack of medical knowledge led them into moral error because they could not properly estimate the value of the embryo inside them—a value which, allegedly, only a physician could properly assess. By making themselves the gatekeepers to medical knowledge, physicians monopolized power over both industrialized medicine and assumed power over women’s bodies. When physicians invoked morality in the abortion debate, they did so as an unquestionable authority: our society views physicians as unbiased mediators between our bodies and objective sources of knowledge. In fact, physicians imbued the question of abortions with their own subjective ethos, a patriarchal moral code which seeks to limit women’s power and dictate the treatment of women’s bodies. 

In Medical Necessity, health policy scholar Daniel Skinner argues that the rhetoric of medical necessity depoliticizes abortion by constructing it as a solely medical issue. Skinner analyzes how abortion rights advocates have utilized discourses of medical necessity in legal battles over abortion. He finds that this rhetoric is often used to preserve abortion when maternal health is threatened, but can simultaneously serve to restrict elective abortions. Skinner's analysis shows that the rhetoric of medical necessity in abortion debates ultimately serves the medical system by extending its power and prohibiting critical social analysis in the realm of abortion, making abortion an exclusively medical topic.

In “Crossing the Line: The Political and Moral Battle Over Late-Term Abortion,” legal scholar Rigel Oliveri examines the rhetorical strategies used in the debate over the abortive procedure called Dilation + Extraction, commonly known as a “D+X.” Oliveri argues that both groups, anti-abortion and pro-choice activits alike, focus on misleading samples from the population of women who seek these late-term abortions. The activists use select cases to carefully construct an image of the quintessential woman who undergoes a D+X abortion that best fits their goals. Anti-abortion activists center women who get D+X procedures once the fetus is post-viable, using graphic imagery to aid their argument. They claim that, in these cases, women are killing fetuses that could be successfully birthed babies. Conversely, pro-choice activists focus on women who seek D+X abortions in the case that the mother’s health is threatened, which only includes rare and extreme cases. This approach excludes young, poor, or otherwise vulnerable women who are forced to seek D+X abortions because they lack means to access less invasive abortions earlier in their pregnancies. Pro-choice and anti-abortion activist rhetorics both remove real pregnant women from the conversation, in favor of a hypothetical mother who is useful for their argument.

Conservative state legislators have utilized the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict abortion access, allegedly in an effort to preserve equipment and hospital space for “necessary” or "essential" procedures. These actions reveal weaknesses in the traditional rhetoric of pro-abortion advocacy, and abortion activists are struggling to find a foolproof counter approach. Current legal efforts defend abortion on the grounds of medical necessity, pointing to statements by medical groups like the AMA that affirm abortion's status as an essential medical procedure. But this approach lacks feminist appeal because the ultimate fate of abortion still lies in the hands of the medical industry; critically, out of the hands of women. The hypermedicalization of abortion limits the potential for critical analyses of the social conditions surrounding abortion access, and may end up being even worse for abortion rights than these temporary state bans in the long-term. However, framing abortion as a purely individual choice is not an attractive option in this moment either.  Such an approach detracts from current legal defenses of abortion by undercutting their definition of "necessary." Arguments that women should be able to "choose" an abortion under any circumstances inevitably lead to counterarguments from the anti-abortion camp which claim that if a woman is "choosing" the abortion, it is not a medically essential procedure, and should therefore be prohibited to free up medical resources for the pandemic response. Collectively, these scholars’ arguments provide us with the tools to analyze anti-abortion actions, understand how they impact different groups of pregnant people seeking abortions, and evaluate the rhetoric used to both uphold and fight the bans put in place.

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