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Abortion, Moral Maturity, and Civic Journalism
Maggie Jones Patterson
Communication Department
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA 15282
(412) 396-6447
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Megan Williams Hall
Duquesne University
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Submitted to the Commission on the Status of Women, Association for
Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, for presentation at the 1996
convention in Anaheim.
Abortion, Moral Maturity, and Civic Journalism
Abstract
Journalistic coverage of the abortion issue has matured in tone and
content since the 1940s when women's magazines first broke the public silence on
the issue. Early coverage included grisly stories of women's suffering along
with attempts to find solutions to the social problems that were driving women
to seek abortions. After a return to silence in the 1950s, the reform movement
of the 1960s gave way to a demand for repeal of abortion regulation. Feminists'
contention that "the personal is political" helped to blur the line between
private and public issues in America and to push abortion to the political front
burner. Journalistic coverage and public rhetoric bleached out all shades of
gray between the pro-life and pro-choice arguments until the 1990s, when a new
common ground rhetoric has begun to emerge, aided by the communitarian spirit
that has given rise to the civic journalism movement.
This paper asserts that public rhetoric on abortion and the
journalistic coverage of it provides a framework for the discussion of the
public and private implications of gender-based ethical orientations, the stages
of moral maturity, and the need for a guiding narrative to direct both public
debate and the journalistic coverage of it.
Abortion, Moral Maturity, and Civic Journalism
Abortion, Moral Maturity, and Civic Journalism
Introduction
From the time of ancient Greece to the present, Western
societies have employed an array of arguments to regulate abortion
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(Flanders, 1991)
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. Abortion's meaning has been hard for most to fix, perhaps because it
represents a unique nexus of human concernsDlife, death, sexual mores, religious
beliefs and gender definitions. Pregnancy is itself a condition that defies
metaphor.
In the 1960s and 70s in the United States, this old debate
flared up with unprecedented vigor and aligned itself with other movements in
societyDthe sexual revolution (and the social effects of the birth control
pill), the zero population growth movement, and most particularly the new wave
of feminism
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(Luker, 1984; Maloy & Patterson, 1992a)
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. Converging social forces, which also included the civil rights movement and
the after effects of the war against Nazism, influenced the shape of modern
American rhetoric on abortion
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(Mensch & Freeman, 1993)
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. The result, as documented by Celeste Condit (1990), has been the abortion
debate's peculiar frame in American discourse as a simple polarity between the
two ideographic[1] conceptsDLife and Choice.
In the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which
legalized abortion in the United States, this polarity between the two extreme
arguments of pro-life versus pro-choice received legal recognition. The court's
majority, giving nearly complete sanction to the pro-choice argument, also gave
the United States the most liberal abortion policy among Western democracies.
Despite the court's definitive language and its repeated willingness to renew
its stand, the current law has failed to settle the abortion issue in the
public's mind. Instead, abortion became a central battleground in America's
culture wars
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(Hunter, 1994)
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.
Recently scholars have begun to explore how and why the
abortion debate has divided the country so meanly
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(Condit, 1990; Dionne Jr., 1991; Glendon, 1987; Hunter, 1991, 1992; Mensch &
Freeman, 1993; Rosenblatt, 1992a, 1992b; Tribe, 1990)
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. Some scholars have identified alternative approaches to the issue in other
developed nations
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(Glendon, 1987)
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. Others have cited areas of common ground within and outside the current
arguments, tentatively expressed by grassroots movements for common ground
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(Chasin & Herzig, 1994; Ginsburg, 1989; Hunter, 1992; Rosenblatt, 1992a; Sass,
1990)
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, or in the voices of women who actually face birth-or-abortion decisions in
their own lives
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(Gilligan, 1982; Maloy & Patterson, 1992a)
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.
The popular media, especially journalism in its feisty
post-Watergate form, are frequently blamed for inflaming abortion rhetoric and
reducing it to simplistic terms
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(Hunter, 1994)
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. Notwithstanding the accuracy of such blame, an examination of the popular
media's treatment of the abortion issue from the 1940s through the 1990s shows
that during these fifty years Americans have used frameworks other than the
pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy to discuss the abortion issue. Abortion coverage
has changed considerably in its tone and substance during this period.
This paper will apply a feminist voice/experience analysis
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(Bristor & Fischer, 1993)
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to the coverage of abortion in American popular media from the 1940s to the
1990s. This analysis will be used:
(1) to establish that the feminine means of moral
reasoning, i.e., the ethic of care
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(Gilligan, 1982)
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that is
generally relegated to the private sphere, has emerged
gradually into
the foreground of American public discourse on abortion, and
(2) to trace a gradual maturation of public discourse
along the path of moral development established by Belenky,
Clinchy,
Goldberger, and Tarule (1986), and other scholars in the
feminist voice
tradition.
The ethic of care and responsibility, which Gilligan (1982) and
Belenky, et al. (1986) identified in studies of women, calls into question the
stages of moral development defined by Kohlberg (1981) and Perry (1970), who
equated moral maturity with considerations of rights and justice after
conducting studies only with men. According to Belenky et al. (1986), the
masculine orientation, which is based on ideals of rights and justice, is
predicated on separation and individuality, while the ethic of care and
responsibility is grounded in a commitment to the connectedness of human
relationships.
For both men and women, however, moral maturation means progressing
from selfish, black-and-white thinking to increasing levels of complexity and
concern for others, a process accomplished by wrestling with questions about the
nature of competing social goods, the meaning of justice, the extent of
responsibility, and other dialectical quandaries. Such questioning is prompted
by a guiding narrative,[2] an agreed-upon set of public virtues that tells us
who we are as a people and what our public and private roles should be. In the
post-modern climate of individualism and diversity, the religious, secular, and
civic narratives that once guided us have yielded to competing personal and
provincial imperatives. The therapeutic culture
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(Lasch, 1979; Rieff, 1966)
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encourages a focus on private convictions at the expense of the common good and
public dialogue. Such self centeredness stymies the moral maturation process
for individual women and menDand even societyDdespite our widespread need for
social and ethical clarity.
Hopeful signs of the re-emergence of common ground
rhetoricDreminiscent of care-based narratives in pre-Roe v. Wade women's
magazinesDrecently have been seen in the courts
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(Sullivan & Goldzwig, 1995)
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, the media
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(Gillooly, 1995)
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, the popular press
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(McKenna, 1995; Wolf, 1995)
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, and in the formation of organizations such as the Common Ground Network for
Life and Choice. This paper argues that the search for common ground on the
abortion issue represents a push to a higher level of moral maturity in our
society, guided by a narrative of responsibility and justice with mercy, as the
feminine ethic of care emerges at last into the public dialogue, tempering the
long-dominant language of individual rights with a relational concern for
others. It also argues that civic journalism may become a beacon for guiding
Americans beyond their culture wars to find maturity and commonality in the
post-modern age.
Because this paper is an outline for what the authors hope will
be a much larger work, its findings are necessarily distilled and condensed.
The authors ask the readers' indulgence as they gloss over assertions with an
understanding that further empirical support will be included when the argument
is presented in its entirety.
Public discourse on abortion
Journalism and other nonfiction writing often bridge the gap
between private and public life in America. Story telling is the vehicle
sometimes used to cross that bridge. Such publicly told stories connect the
readers to the lives and experiences of persons who may otherwise remain foreign
and strange to them.
"Narrative ways of knowing function collectively to affirm the
values of multiplicity and connection," Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings (1991)
write. "Furthermore, narrative processes function as a connected medium for
knowingDan embodiment of an intimate relation between the knower and the known"
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(Witherell, 1991, p. 50)
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. Public story telling helps diverse Americans define who they are as a
people,
a major means for societal self-definition.
The technique that modern journalism texts refer to as the Wall
Street Journal formula
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(Rich, 1994, p. 216-219)
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, is a well established way of personalizing a public issue by framing it in the
narrative of an affected individual. Such personal narratives spell out the
relational implications of policy issues, that is, how this public policy
affects people where they liveDin communities and families. Studies show that
those peopleDmainly womenDwho evaluate personal ethical choices on the basis of
care and responsibility considerations need such narrative details in order to
understand relationship obligations and decide what is moral in any given
situation.[3]
Rhetorical use of the personal narrative has been a primary
means of persuasion in the abortion debate of the last six decades, but the
stories being told have changed. In the 1940s the stories searched into family
and workplace conditions for the root causes of why women were seeking
abortions. In the 1950s and 1960s, they became morality tales told by doctors.
In the late 1960s and 70s, pro-life and pro-choice advocates used them as
rhetorical weapons to polarize the arguments. In their most recent appearance
they are being used again as a means to explore common ground.
1940s: Woman to woman
Until the 1940s, abortion was only discussed in hushed tones on
the private level, where women had always "pass(ed) abortion information behind
the backs of men and 'moral' society"
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(Luker, 1984
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, p. 99). Abortion was not a suitable subject for polite company, much less
public discourse. Nonetheless, the subject was opened boldly, if not
frequently, in articles by women, for women, and in magazines largely edited by
women. The message was clear and strong: Women were being butchered by
unscrupulous abortionists. Stories told of women losing their fertility and
even their lives in filthy back alleys.
And abortion was as common as it was horrible. In 1941, Jean
Ward, quoting medical experts, estimated that "twenty to forty percent of
pregnancies terminate in abortion"
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(Ward, 1941, p. 17)
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. Three years later, in a Good Housekeeping article, Maxine Davis
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(1944)
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said that abortion was "increasing in this country today at an alarming rate,"
with some estimates claiming one abortion was performed "to every two or three
full-term deliveries" (p. 45).
These articles also brought surprising news: "Contrary to
general opinion," wrote Davis (1944), "it is not the unmarried mother who
supports the abortionist. Nine-tenths of all abortions occur among married
women between 25 and 35 who already have several children" (p. 45). The harm
done by illegal abortionists, these articles pointed out, devastated not only
the women but their already strained families.
As horrible as these abortions were, the articles indicated
they were also symptoms of other problems. Morris Fishbein, editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association, thought the current abortion
statistics called for "serious consideration of this widespread sociological and
economic problem"
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(Ward, 1941,
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p. 17). Ward also quoted a Dr. Robert L. Dickerson of the Academy of Medicine
as saying that poor women needed to be supplied with better birth control
information and that "present laws should be adjusted so that abortionsDif
abortions must beDcan be done openly by properly trained surgeons with proper
medical and nursing care, rather than in the unclean, furtive and dangerous
manner now prevalent" (p. 21).
Yet most articles spoke out against legalizing abortion.
Abortion, Ward (1941) implied, was too drastic a solution for a temporary
problem. These writers pointed out women were being driven to abortion by a
lack of family planning services and by unsympathetic family and workplace law
and regulation. Gretta Palmer
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(1943)
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, writing in Woman's Home Companion in 1943, reported that many working wives
found war-time factories were inhospitable to pregnancy. Palmer said women
"bootlegged" their pregnancies, hiding bulging bellies in order to keep their
jobs. "Half the war factories discharge women as soon as their pregnancy is
reported," Palmer reported (p. 137).
While fellow workers gossiped about birth control and helped
women cover their pregnancies, they also met in the restrooms to discuss how to
get an abortion. One Midwest midwife told Palmer she had done 45 abortions the
previous Saturday. "The girls like Saturday because that gives them the weekend
to rest," the midwife said. Most took Monday off, and the "three-day absence"
became a euphemism for illegal abortion
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(Palmer, 1943, p. 138)
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.
These 1940s articles constructed a social mythology about who
was having abortions and why. Using "good" women caught in unfortunate
circumstances allowed readers to identify and sympathize with their plight. The
women were not just "good" because they were married, or young, or "innocent" in
another way; they were also "good" because their motives were based in what they
saw as their responsibility to others. By noting the woman's situation within
her family, the narratives often stressed the high cost a child would exact upon
other relationships. The specific details would be important to the magazine's
readers. If abortion reform was to become a subject of public discussion, then
women were most likely to be drawn into it by claims that current policies were
harming relationships, especially in families.
Writers during the 1940s did more than nod to the social
factors that caused so many women to seek illegal abortions. In this historic
moment, during and immediately after the war, these popular magazines criticized
a society too hard at war and too little concerned with the wives and children
left behind. They also lifted the lid off the issue and introduced itDalbeit
tentativelyD into that still small corner of public discourse where women could
discuss their concerns among themselves.
Early 1950s: Return to silence
After the war, the pressure was on women to return to home and
family and give the jobs to men. The gross national product soared, allowing
many families to thrive on one income. Most of the century's earlier trends for
women were reversed. Women began to marry earlier, have more children, and stay
at home. In 1950 nearly 60 percent of Americans lived in the vaunted
traditional family with a stay-at-home wife, and in the largest migration in
American history 1.2 million moved to suburban areas, where women became more
isolated.
Unwholesome subjects like abortion virtually disappeared from
women's magazines, which now touted the fulfillment to be found in domestic
life. Ironically, despite the silence, the practice of abortion continued and
even grew more legitimate.
Many states allowed legal abortions to be performed if the life
or health of the woman were in danger. While medical science was solving most of
the renal and cardiovascular problems that had once necessitated abortions, some
were performed because the woman suffered from severe vomiting or because she
had been exposed to rubella measles, a known cause of birth defects. Doctors
now interpreted the law even more broadly. Many hospitals convened boards to
review abortion requests in which the woman was distraught because of an
unplanned pregnancy. Middle-class patients who could afford the required
psychiatric consultationsDand were willing to say they would have a breakdown if
the child were bornDcould now obtain abortions for mental health reasons.
Estimates of legal and illegal abortion rates ranged from
200,000 to more than one million annually. Dr. Christopher Tietze, chairman of
the statistical committee for a 1955 Planned Parenthood conference on abortion,
contended that 1.2 million abortionsDor about one pregnancy in fourD was the
accurate figure
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(Calderone, 1958)
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. Such figures were supported by Dr. Albert Kinsey's findings
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(Kinsey et al., 1953)
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. They would indicate that abortion was as common two decades before abortion
was legal as it is in the post-Roe era.
Late 1950s and early 1960s: Doctor experts
The subject of abortion crept tentatively back onto the public
agenda in the late 1950s. Narratives again contained lurid details of botched,
illegal abortions that ended in tragedies of death or sterilization. Now,
however, mainstream news magazines carried the stories, and they were often told
by doctors, instead of women. Physicians lamented that they were forced to turn
away desperate women, only to treat them later for the aftermath of abortions
these patients had self induced or obtained in bed bug hotels.
Doctors now became the main advocates of change. Although many
showed a deep concern for their patients' well being, these physicians focused
on medical problems and solutions. Their concerns for social conditions were
largely limited to the inequity of abortion practices that allowed wealthy women
to afford safe hospital abortions and forced the poor into the hands of
unscrupulous butchers. Few physicians saw the social conditions that led to so
many ill-fated pregnancies as falling within their medical scope. Abortion came
to be seen as an isolated and private concern, no longer nested in other social
problems and policies, as it had been portrayed in the 1940s.
Articles continued to claim that most abortions were performed
on married women, but the 72 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births between
1950 and 1960 was clearly pointing to an increase in sexual activity among
single people. Still, as Celeste Condit (1990) points out, the single women in
these rhetorical narratives were never portrayed as promiscuous because these
narratives did not explore ambiguous cases. The women and girls were helpless
victims, raped or seduced by older men, deserted or too young to be held
responsible.
Then in 1962, Sherri Finkbine stepped forth onto this
rhetorically prepared stage to play the heroineDor villainDof the most
captivating public narrative on abortion. Finkbine, a Romper Room host and
paragon of idealized motherhood, unknowingly took thalidomide during her fifth
pregnancy. Confirming that her baby was almost surely deformed, Finkbine's
doctor arranged for a local hospital abortion, although Arizona law allowed
these only when the mother's life was in danger. Finkbine's abortion would have
gone quietly unnoticed, like the 8,000 others performed in U.S. hospitals that
year. Instead it became the subject of a grand national debate when Finkbine
took her case to the local newspaper to alert other women to the dangerous drug
she had ingested. Squirming under the publicity that followed, the hospital
canceled the procedure. Others shrank back from the controversy, and Finkbine
eventually flew to Sweden for her abortion. Her story brought the abortion
debate to a political front burner and focused public attention on the morality
of abortion itselfDrather than the dangerous illegal methods, the sexual
behavior of the woman, or contributing social conditions.
1960s: Speaking out
The medical community and a core of professional elites led the
ensuing reform movement by insisting that the law align itself with modern
medical practice
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(Luker, 1984,
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p. 67-73). Physicians focused on the constraints the law imposed on their
medical practice. Making abortion legal would free them to make what medical
recommendations seemed appropriate for each woman. They stressed the injustice
of the current inequity between rich and poor. While middle-class women could
afford the psychiatric consultations required by most hospital boards for
physician-performed abortions, poor women had to fend for themselves. As state
legislatures began to debate and pass abortion reform statutes, physicians then
added inequity among the states to their cries of injustice.
In 1963, Betty Friedan ignited the new feminism with her
publication of The Feminine Mystique. The resulting feminist movement
disparaged traditional definitions of gender and advocated that women take
control of their own lives. These new feminists believed that women needed
readily available contraception and saw abortion as the logical fail-safe
backup.
Late 1960s: Taking sides
Around 1967, the last of the "spirit of compromise and
civility"
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(Luker, 1984,
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p. 92), which had thus far characterized the abortion debate gave way to the
ideological fervor and "rights talk"
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(Glendon, 1991)
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typically associated with the '60s. The abstract ideological arguments of Life
and Choice replaced complex human narratives as the main form of public
discourse on abortion.
In one of its last gasps, civility yielded the most interesting
and prescient discussion found in the popular literature. McCall's magazine
asked Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of the late president, and Dr. Alan F.
Guttmacher, physician and noted advocate of abortion reform, to comment on two
sides of the question "When Pregnancy Means Heartbreak, Is Abortion the Answer?"
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(Shriver & Guttmacher, 1968)
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. While Shriver answered no and Guttmacher yes, both agreed that abortion
inevitably would be legalized. They also agreed that abortion on demand was
undesirable and that society has the right and duty to modify and affect
individual abortion choices. Their arguments, both thoughtful and persuasive,
were vastly different and ironically complementary. Shriver applied what later
came to be known as feminist ethics of care
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(Gilligan, 1982; Held, 1993)
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. Guttmacher's commentary followed a masculine style, one based on principles
of equity and pragmatics, especially for medical practice.
Reminiscent of the 1940s arguments in women's magazines,
Shriver contended that rising abortion rates were "only a symptom" of "profound
social disorders." She forewarned against "this permissive libertarian,
individualistic temper of our times" (p. 60). Guttmacher argued the morality of
justice and equal treatment under democratic law. His views were those of a
kindly physician, frustrated by his inability to help desperate patients.
Widespread opposition to existing statutes made rigid enforcement impossible,
Guttmacher said, pointing out the disproportionate hardship on the poor.[4]
Guttmacher saw abortion reform as a great healer of social ills
and made a series of rash predictions: "Abortion on demand would greatly speed
the goal of making each child a wanted child, which would reduce the vast army
of neglected and rejected children and cut by half the 300,000 illegitimate
children born in this country each year" (p. 132). Even the divorce rate would
diminish as legal abortion brought an end to shotgun marriage, Guttmacher said.
Nonetheless, he advocated slow legislative reform and predicted that all 50
states would liberalize abortion statutes by 1975 and do away with all legal
controls by 1990.
On the other side of the magazine fold, Eunice Kennedy Shriver
speculated that abortion reform alone would worsen the very social ills its
advocates hoped to address. Shriver suggested that Americans address the
conditions that could reduce the need for abortion by encouraging more
involvement and accountability of fathers, promoting parenting education,
providing birth insurance to help parents with the financial burden of a child
with congenital abnormalities, passing a family allowance plan, reducing the
rate of unplanned pregnancy through better birth control, and encouraging sexual
responsibility.
Without some legal recognition of the value of fetal life,
Shriver warned, America would "drift into what I would call the 'Hard
Society'"Done in which individualism would override the sense of responsibility
for others in personal relationships and for the common good in society. She
predicted a "separateness between rich and poor, between whites and blacks,
between an intellectual elite and the unlearned masses, where both individuals
and blocs are concerned solely with maximizing their own comforts and enforcing
their own prejudices" (p. 140).
Abortion rights activists challenged public opinion, addressed
their rhetoric to the people, not the professionals, and declared the personal
political, using the language of rights to move from private discussion to
public dialogue in a newly vociferous tone
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(Luker, 1984)
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.
Just as the quiescence of the 1950s was tied to larger social
trends like post-war prosperity and the suburban nesting of traditional
families, conditions of the 1960s gave rise to a grass-roots reform movement
that was grounded in the feminist consciousness raising, civil rights and
anti-war movements. This new contemporary feminist movement challenged the
medical experts' control of the abortion issue and framed it instead in terms of
women's rights. This group saw access to abortion as an essential component of
equal rights for women. Without abortion reform, they argued, women could not
take total control of their reproductive capacity.
The 1970s and 1980s: Bitter polarity
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe v.
Wade established privacyDa Constitutional equivalent of ChoiceDas the
underlying justification for the elimination of all abortion regulation in the
first six months of pregnancy. Roe's sweeping change gave a complete victory
to the pro-choice side. Back alley abortions that had claimed the lives and
health of so many American women were ended; so was legislative reform.
In The Politics of Virtue, Mensch and Freeman (1993) propose
that ". . . the [Roe] decision may be fairly characterized as a mistake for
three combined reasons: it was legally problematic at best, sociologically
inaccurate, and politically disastrous" (p. 126). Luker (1975) notes that "what
neither the Court nor anyone else anticipated was that the Roe decision would
mobilize a new and much stronger opposition to abortion reform" (p. 144).
Following the Roe v. Wade decision, the public debate over abortion became
entrenched in the incommensurable pro-life and pro-choice positions. This
rhetorical framing effectively closed off discussion of compromise and common
ground, which had played an important role in the abortion debate in this
country before Roe v. Wade and which remained the mainstay of abortion
discussion in other developed Western countries
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(Glendon, 1987)
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.
Neither side now talked about social conditions that led so
many American women to seek abortions. In April 1973, just three months after
the Roe decision, Ms. magazine ran the stark and bloody photo of an unidentified
woman, dead on a motel room floor after a botched abortion
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(Gratz, 1973)
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. (More than 20 years later, in a television documentary
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(Gillooly, 1995)
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the woman's sister would complain of feeling exploited when she came across the
magazine photo, taken from police records and used without the family's
permission.) The victim's story was unknown. The picture was used as that of a
generic victim and served to illustrate that the abortion debate had been
nothing but a power struggle for the control of women (p. 45).[5]
The article continued the tradition of abortion narratives, but
they were now buried near the end of the story and were diminished to a series
of one-paragraph tales. They made the narrative claim that a woman was entitled
to choose abortion because, for example, the normal growth of her mildly
retarded toddler would be jeopardized by the entry of a second child into the
family. The social conditions that allowed a woman to feel trapped into such a
choice now remained unexamined. These stories no longer served to illustrate
how social policies adversely affected the common good. Now the personal tale
wagged the argument, and the stories became evidence of how individual need
should take precedence.
The pro-life side answered by saying that such situations
failed to justify taking the life of the unborn. Their arguments were also
narrowly drawn, lacking the sweeping social criticism Shriver (1967) had
offered. Abortion discussion had now been reduced to two simplified choices,
Life vs. Choice, and American discourse was caught in a vise between them. "The
heat of the conflict has, for all useful purposes, reduced a great many probing
and subtle thoughts on the subject of abortion to just two antithetical
positions," Maloy and Patterson (1992a, p. 1) write.
Abortion became the paradigmatic issue to illustrate the "Hard
Society" of acute divisions and rampant individualism that Shriver had warned
against. Others told the story under different names. Lasch, for example, has
written about The Culture of Narcissism (1979), The Minimal Self (1984), and The
Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). Hunter (1991) has
reported on America's Culture Wars, and Glendon (1991) on Rights Talk.
Glendon (1987) sees laws and public policies as the ongoing
story that a nation tells about its citizens, their values, and progress. "One
thing seems clear," she says. "No one set out deliberately to tell the kind of
story that is currently being told in American abortion and divorce law. . . but
it is recognizably related to other stories that we like very much, stories we
tell ourselves, each other, and our children over and over againDabout
self-reliance, individual liberty, and tolerance for diversity" (p. 114).
1990s: Seeking Common Ground
Abortion took its shape as a public issue during the late
1960s, while individualism was having a growth spurt within American culture.
Once abortion became framed as a dialectic between pro-choice and pro-life, all
public discussion was squeezed into this mold for the next three decades. In
recent years, however, new common ground rhetoric has begun to acknowledge that
other rhetorical frameworks may better fit the issue.
Kettering Foundation president David Mathews (1994) has written
in Politics for People that "in a rush to solutions, it is easy to overlook the
way an issue is framed. But the way a problem is framed almost predetermines
the kind of solution we will find and whether there will be any shared sense of
purpose"
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Charity, 1995, p. 66-67)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
. In any civic discussion, Matthews points out, what choices people grapple
with are determined by how an issue is framed and even what it is named. The
Kettering Foundation has suggested "that the most useful framing for an issue is
the one that takes the views of every segment of the community into account,"
with choices that encompass all favored solutions
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Charity, 1995,
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
p. 67).
In American society today, no clear ethical narrativeDor set of
transcendent public virtuesDunites public discussion. Rather, many diverse
narratives emerging from individual concerns are competing for public voice, and
reinforcing the individualism that generated them. Individualism provides
little incentive for re-framing issues with respect to the common good, but new
and more encompassing rhetoric emerging on abortion indicates that the feminine
ethic of care and responsibility may give new shape to this issue that has
divided Americans most deeply. Examples come from the courts, television, the
popular press, and activists themselves.
y With rare exception (
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
Maloy & Patterson, 1992b
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
), the
popular press ignored the Supreme Court's breakthrough in the
majority
opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Reporters called upon
the same
commonly used pro-choice and pro-life spokespeople, although
the fact
that both sides disparaged the decision should have alerted
them that
the abortion story was taking a new turn. Sullivan and
Goldzwig (1995)
in a study of Sandra Day O'Connor's language demonstrate that
the
decision "carved out a 'middle ground,' one based on a
relational
approach to moral decision-making that honored
interrelationships among
the parties and positions involved, recognized the importance
of
context, and revealed the humility of the Justices" (p. 175).
y The November 1995 public television broadcast of
Leona's Sister Gerri, a pro-choice documentary by Jane Gillooly
(1995),
was followed by a program called A New Dialogue: Americans on
Abortion
(Stoia & Weiss, 1995), which presented reactions from people
across the
country who had taken part in pre-screenings and discussion
groups about
the documentary. The program showed real people expressing
their
complex thoughts about abortion and listening with respect to
one
another's differing points of view. Someone suggested that one
point on
which pro-life and pro-choice advocates can agree is that no
one is in
favor of unwanted pregnancyDthe implication being that the
opposing
factions might find common ground in their attitudes toward
particular
causes of the high abortion rate.
y An Atlantic Monthly article by George McKenna (1995),
entitled "How Lincoln Might Have Dealt with Abortion: A
Pro-Choice
Anti-Abortion Approach," and Naomi Wolf's (1995) New Republic
article,
called "Re-thinking Pro-Choice Rhetoric: Our Bodies, Our
Souls," show
the two sides in the abortion debate reaching toward the
center.
McKenna draws a philosophical and rhetorical parallel between
the
contemporary abortion debate and the argument over slavery in
the years
leading up to the Civil War, suggesting Lincoln's anti-slavery
rhetoric
might be a good model for pro-life politicians to adopt because
it would
combine strenuous efforts to limit the use of abortion, with
recognition
of the woman's right to choose. Wolf exhorts her fellow
pro-choice
advocates to "contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights
within a
moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real
death;
that there are degrees of culpability, judgment and
responsibility
involved in the decision to abort a pregnancy" (p. 26). Wolf
sees the
search for common ground on abortion as paradigmatic of the
nation's
quest for a new narrative, observing that "American society is
struggling to find its way forward to a discourse of right and
wrong
that binds together a common ethic for the secular and the
religious"
(p. 34).
y Among a handful of groups that have sprung up in the
last few years is the Common Ground Network for Life and
Choice, which
identifies itself in a Project Overview (1994) as "the first
full-scale
project of Search for Common Ground aimed at a domestic
conflict."
Although the group is a response to increasing bitterness and
polarization in the abortion debate, their larger significance
is in the
model they offer for cooperative communication about social and
political conflicts involving diverse values and world views,
as well as
their attention to the underlying social problems, such as
"teen
pregnancy and lack of social support for women, children and
families. .
. that urgently need the combined effort of both pro-choice and
pro-life
advocates" (p. 1).
The list is not complete. These works build on others done
earlier by
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Callahan, 1990; Ginsburg, 1989; Glendon, 1987; Hunter, 1992; Maloy & Patterson,
1992; Mensch & Freeman, 1993; Rosenblatt, 1992b)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
Each of these cases demonstrates an acknowledgment of the complexities,
particulars, and relational concerns embedded in abstract issuesDconsiderations
which are key to reconciling seemingly incommensurable points of view. Each
case embodies elements of care, responsibility, rights, and justice with mercy.
And in each case, struggling with the dialectical quandaries related to abortion
generates questions and possibilities from which a new ethical narrative may
begin to emerge. With the identification of narrative guideposts comes the
possibility of higher levels of moral maturity for both individuals and society.
What propels these attempts at common ground on the abortion
issue then is the same willingness to reach beyond the narrow focus of
individual interest that propels the civic journalism movement. "Once an issue
from the public agenda is framed as a set of choices," Arthur Charity (1995)
says, "the main task of the public journalist is to help people decide which
choice (or set of trade-offs among choices) they want" (p. 71). In civic
journalism, Charity suggests, the definition of news shifts from a focus on the
news of conflict to the news of solutions. For example, in the coverage of a
community dispute, quotes might be chosen, not because they represent the most
extreme ends of a conflict, but because they point toward common ground.[6]
Beyond Life and Choice
While Americans say on poll after poll that they believe
abortion should be safe and legal, they also indicate deep moral and emotional
misgivings. "[P]opular attitudes contain more common sense than the rigid
ideologies that dominate public debate. They are often ambivalent but not
necessarily contradictory or incoherent," notes Lasch (1995, p. 111),
referencing E. J. Dionne, Jr.'s (1991) analysis of Why Americans Hate Politics.
The ability to struggle with this kind of dialectical tensionDto strive for the
unity of contraries
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Buber, 1966)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
Dsignals both a level of maturity which is lacking in abstract, all-or-nothing
claims, and an openness to dialogue that acknowledges ambiguity and complexity
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Arnett, 1986)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
.
Luker (1984) contends that the pro-choice and pro-life extremes
have never been, and will never be, representative of how most Americans feel on
the abortion issue (p. 224). Luker describes a war between two opposing views
of motherhood, held by feminists and by traditionalists, representing two
different world views Thus, "the abortion debate is actually about the
meanings of women's lives" (p. 193).
Scholars have referenced several larger cultural issues in
connection with the abortion debate and with the question of why the public
rhetoric in this country divided itself so exclusively into the pro-choice and
pro-life camps, while in other countries comparable discussion always remained
more mixed and complicated. Lasch (1995), in The Revolt of the Elites and the
Betrayal of Democracy, observes that in the United States, abortion is part of a
larger concern about permissive moral relativism, the devaluation of authority,
and pervasive sex and violence. He sees privatization of moral issues, such as
abortion, as one more indication of the collapse of community (p. 108). Hunter
(1991) includes the abortion debate among the Culture Wars he sees ravaging our
society, arguing it is na ve to think a consensus of values and beliefs is
possible because the focus among sub-cultures in America's increasingly diverse
society is on differences, rather than commonalities.
Glendon (1987) notes that America is unusual in framing
abortion as an individual right. While European laws emphasize the common good,
American abortion law is rooted in what Glendon sees as "this country's undue
emphasis on individual autonomy to the exclusion of community responsibility"
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Patterson, Hill & Maloy, 1995,
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
p. 691)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
. Glendon (1987) and Elshtain (1995) also cite problems inherent in removing
cultural and moral issues from the light of popular scrutiny and citizen debate,
where compromise is possible, and handling them in the adversarial environment
of the courts. "All the cultural questions that now pit democratic citizens
against one anotherDin addition to abortion, I think of family values, drugs,
and post-civil rights race relationsDare guaranteed to continue to divide us,"
Elshtain predicts, "in large part because of the means government has often used
to put these issues on the table: judicial fiat" (p. 26).
Analysis of Ethical Growth
Over the past fifty years, abortion rhetoric in the United
States has changed in ways that loosely parallel the gender-based ethical
orientations and stages of epistemological development defined by Gilligan
(1982) and Belenky et al. (1986). Building on the work of Kohlberg
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(1958, 1981)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, Perry
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(1970)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, and Gilligan (1982) and broadening it to a wider socio-economic sample,
Belenky et al. devised a richly complex hierarchy, which the authors will use
to characterize the development of public discourse on abortion. Proceeding
from the assumption that abortion is the first issue in modern day America in
which the feminine ethic of care has emerged from private into public discourse,
the authors of this paper suggest that it is appropriate to try to trace the
evolution of this emergence by finding some correlation between the stages of
women's cognitive and communicative development and their pattern of public
abortion rhetoric.
Silent Women, those on the bottom rung of the Women's Ways of
Knowing (1986) ladder, tend to see life in terms of polarities. "Silent women
have little awareness of their intellectual capabilities. They liveDselfless
and voicelessDat the behest of those around them. External authorities know the
truth and are all-powerful" (Belenky et al., 1986, p. 134).
Silence characterized abortion rhetoric up to the 1940s. Although
Kinsey's (1953) studies show one-fifth to one-fourth of pregnancies ended in
abortion in the 1930s and 40s, the very word was forbidden in polite company.
After a flurry of articles in women's magazines during and after the war, the
return to silence in the 1950s squelched the short-lived attempt to put abortion
on the public agenda and to apply the ethic of care to its analysis.
Received Knowledge/Listening to Others describes women who listen to
others as authorities for direction as well as for information. The women do
not see these authorities as being like themselves, but as separate beings who
hold power over them. These authorities define these issues as right and wrong,
without gray areas.
Physicians, clergymen, lawmakers, and law enforcers maintained
authority over abortion with scarcely any articulation of the moral ethic
underlying it. Women listened to experts without questioning their authority or
reasoning. Some of the 1940s articles fall into this level of moral reasoning.
As the abortion reform movement took hold in the late 1950s, it was led by
doctors and professional elites, from whom women received knowledge about
abortion, both as a medical procedure and as a social phenomenon.
Subjective Knowledge/Inner Voice thinkers are women who see truth as
subjective and personal. External authority is doubted; truth is intuitive.
"Occasionally women distinguish between truth as feelings that come from within
and ideas that come from without" (Belenky et al., 1986, p. 68).
Adopting the language of the civil rights movement of the 1950s
and 60s, these feminists began to claim abortion as a woman's right, using their
own feelings and experiences as justification. Reformers of the 1960s accepted
the existing political system and used existing tools of protest and argument to
seek legislative changes to combat discrimination toward women. Thus, while
their sense of the need for reform came from within (their own feelings and
experiences), their notions about how to obtain it came from without.
Subjective Knowledge/Quest for Self is a phase in which women walk
away from the past with a new sense of power in their intuitive processes. They
begin to assert authority and autonomy and forge new rules and boundaries for
relationships, often disregarding the claims of others. Some become anti-male.
The consciousness raising of 1960s feminism encouraged women,
especially the young, to give greater legitimacy to their private experiences.
But as these experiences were brought from women's gatherings and traditional
women's magazines into the public arena, the language grew harsh. Abortion
narratives lost their complexity. The late 1960s movement for repeal of abortion
laws further conflated abortion rhetoric with women's rights. Repeal advocates
countered the claim of a "right to life" with argument for a "right to choose,"
and women on both sides began to view the interests of women and those of
fetuses as mutually exclusive.
"It is important to keep in mind the broader cultural context in
assessing the meaning of such changes in women's priorities. During the 70s
there was a widespread cultural sanction of self-indulgence, self-actualization,
and opportunism" (Belenky et al., 1986, p. 78). Ethical arguments for equality
and the trend toward amoral self-interest are both rooted here.
Procedural Knowledge/Voice of Reason is more complex than the
received or subjectivist knower stages. Progress from the previous stage begins
with skepticism about the infallibility of reasoning from the gut. These women
realize that personal experience and intuitions can deceive. Knowledge is seen
as a process honed and developed by authorities; knowing requires careful
observation and analysis. The possibility of knowing things outside one's own
experience allows a new respect for expertise that can become exaggerated. Form
can come to dominate over content, and women in this stage run the danger of
engaging in methodolatry. 'Ways of looking' can become central, and a concern
for how people go about forming their opinions, feelings, and ideas can take
precedence over what people think.
Abortion rhetoric about women's rights reflected early liberal
feminists' adoption of the masculine language of power in service of their own
needs. In order to maximize arguments for equality, these feminists strove to
minimize gender distinctions.
Procedural Knowledge/Separate and Connected Knowing takes two forms.
Critical thinking and doubting the word of others are at heart of separate
knowing. At the heart of connected knowing is empathy. The first relies on
logic to seek generality, the second on historical and personal events to seek
uniqueness, complexity, and connections (Belenky et al., 1986, p. 113).
Increasing polarization of public abortion rhetoric following Roe
v. Wade can be discussed with respect to this distinction. To some extent,
pro-choice language favors separation and pro-life connectedness, but the
comparison should not be overextended. In some ways, both sides in the public
debate favor the language of separation in their enthusiasm for argumentation
and winning, over dialogue and tolerance. Private decision making includes
connectedness for thinkers who apply the morality of care (Maloy & Patterson,
1992a) and separation for the amoral women Naomi Wolf (1995) describes.
Constructed Knowledge/Integrating Voices is the reasoning used by
women at the highest stage of development. Belenky et al. found that for the
women they studied, the climb to this stage "began as an effort to reclaim the
self by attempting to integrate knowledge that they felt intuitively was
personally important with knowledge they had learned from others. . . weaving
together the strands of rational and emotive thought and
. . . integrating objective and subjective knowing" (p. 134).
In recent years, the re-emergence of common ground rhetoric on
abortion may indicate that a societal equivalent of this phenomenon is beginning
to take place.
The above attempt to compare individual women's private
epistemological orientations and priorities with those expressed collectively in
public rhetoric is risky. At the same time, it demonstrates the disadvantage
women encounter in bringing their modes of private discourse into public
dialogue. Cheris Kramarae (1981) argues that women's communication is "muted"
within the dominant culture. And anthropologist Shirley Ardener (1975) notes,
"appropriate language" in public discourse is often "encoded" by males, putting
women at a disadvantage in expressing their own ideas (p. 167). Some
perceptions are not easily expressed in the idiom of the dominant language
structure because discourse has been defined in masculine terms (p. ix).
Like Belenky and her colleagues, others have examined gendered
epistemological and ethical orientations, such as the morality of care, in ways
that attempt to validate and integrate women's interests into the public
discourse (see as examples Elshtain, 1981; Lyons, 1983; Meyeroff, 1971;
Noddings, 1984; Ruddick, 1980; Tronto, 1989; Wood, 1986). Scholars have come at
the material from a variety of legitimate directions, demonstrating that the
interrelated complexities of these issues are difficult to articulate. Tronto
(1989) speculates that
perhaps the impoverishment of our vocabulary for
discussing caring is a result of the way caring is privatized,
thus
beneath our social vision in this society. The need to rethink
appropriate forms for caring also raises the broadest questions
about
the shape of social and political institutions in our society.
(p. 185)
Matrix of Self in Domain
The masculine/feminine, rights/care and public/private
distinctionsDcharacteristics of the abortion debateDare the central themes in
the larger narrative this paper attempts to construct. They are also central to
the role civic journalism proposes to play in reconciling the community to
solutions rather than reveling in its disputes. These distinctions can best be
illustrated and understood through a graphic representation of public and
private Self in Domain, with an overlay of the gender-based moral orientations.
This matrix provides a tool for thinking about a complicated set of interrelated
variables, but it is not intended to be a rigid or literal formula for the
conduct of human affairs, which are fluctuating and often overlapping.
[1]
private self in private domain
care
[2]
private self in public domain
rights
public self in private domain
responsibility
[3]
public self in public domain
justice
[4]
Each quadrant represents a different set of roles, contexts and
activities that influence the ways people behave and communicate. The first
quadrant represents the Private Self in Private Domain in which individuals
alone, as families and personal friends, commonly use care to settle disputes.
In the second, Private Self in Public Domain, individuals are in society and in
the professional arena. Here rights is usually the appropriate criteria for
solving ethical dilemmas. In the third quadrant, Public Self in the Private
Domain, individuals operate as a member of a community and often apply
individual responsibility to disputed areas. In the fourth area, Public Self in
Public Domain, citizens are in the world of politics, where civic justice
prevails.
The private domain (quadrants 1 and 3) has traditionally been
seen as the province of women, while the public domain (quadrants 2 and 4) has
been dominated by men. For the private self (quadrants 1 and 2), individual
concerns are paramount, while for the public self (quadrants 3 and 4), the
primary concern is for the common good. Thus for the purposes of this argument,
the feminine ethical orientation appears in the quadrants representing the
private domain, with Care corresponding to the individual concerns of the
private self, and Responsibility corresponding to the public self's concern for
the common good. The masculine version of morality appears in the quadrants of
the public domain, with the private self's individual concerns expressed as
Rights, and the public self's concern for the common good expressed as
Justice.[7]
In the United States today, the debate over abortion takes
place almost exclusively in quadrant 2, with pro-life and pro-choice factions
publicly arguing over the competing rights of women and fetuses. Much of the
private discussion is in quadrant 1, whether in the moral language of
relationship and care or the amoral language of self-interest. Both are
immature, according to the scales developed by Gilligan, Belenky et al.,
Kohlberg, and Perry, because they are limited to the individual concerns of the
private self.
In order for moral reasoning to grow and become more mature,
both men and women need to question the rhetorical structures that have become
familiar to them and then relocate themselves by a leap of faith. Both the
questioning and the leap of faith must be fueled by a guiding narrative which
includes all four quadrants, without blurring their boundaries, and pushes the
individual toward maturity. But no clear narrative prevails in late 20th
century America, where the ethical climate Dvariously described as rampant
individualism
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Elshtain, 1995; Glendon, 1987; Sennett, 1977)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, cultural narcissism
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Lasch, 1979)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, emotivism[8]
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(MacIntyre, 1981),
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
and the therapeutic culture[9]
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Rieff, 1966)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
Dencourages a focus on Self which blurs the boundaries between public and
private, and confounds the moral maturation process.
The habit of Self-focus, which on all scales characterizes the
lower levels of ethical development, makes it unlikely that individuals will ask
questions about social welfare that produce ethical maturity and the ability to
formulate rhetoric appropriate for the two higher order quadrants of the public
self. In American culture today, individualism and therapeutic communication are
so deeply ingrained that active citizenship and public concern for others have
become quaint, if not risible relics of a bygone age. Instead we have what
Elshtain (1995) dubs the "politics of displacement" (pp. 37-63), which she
depicts as involving two trajectories: "In the first, everything private. . .
becomes grist for the public mill. In the second, everything public. . . is
privatized and played out in a psychodrama on a grand scale" (p. 38). By
extension, on one hand, members of sub-cultures demand explicit public sanction
for their private choices, and on the other, private identities become
inextricable from political convictions. Both of these dynamics can be seen in
the public abortion debate, especially at the extreme fringes.
The abortion debate has been conducted by women and men alike in
the public domain, using the vocabulary of rights, at a time when the politics
of displacement have made it difficult to distinguish public issues from
private. At the same time, the private discourse on abortion decisions has
fallen into two categories. Maloy and Patterson (1992) documented cases in
which women and couples focused almost exclusively on issues of relationship and
care. The issues at stake in the public rhetoric had little significance in
their private conversations. Wolf (1995) argues that the depersonalization of
the fetus accomplished by public pro-choice rhetoric has created an environment
conducive to private decisions lacking moral deliberation or responsibility.
All of these perspectives are immature in that they fail to
consider both rights and care, and they value the concerns of the individual
over concerns for the common good. Gilligan and Attanucci (1988) articulate an
important dialectic: "Analysis of care and justice as distinct moral
orientations that address different moral concerns leads to a consideration of
both perspectives as constitutive of mature moral thinking" (p. 232-233).
A guiding ethical narrative is the integrative component that
allows individuals and society to embrace private concerns for both care and
rights, and public concerns for both responsibility and justiceDto consider the
four quadrants of the matrix both separately and as connected parts of the
wholeDwith regard for both the abstract and the particulars.
Common Ground and Civic Journalism
As we have shown earlier, journalism has frequently provided
the bridge between public and private discourse. Historically, it has, at
times, allowed a public articulation of the ethic of care on the abortion issue
and at other times has filtered out all but the harshest claims to individual
rights. Of course, this disparity represents more than just the choices of
journalists. Traditional journalism, grounded in Enlightenment thinking, has
often limited itself to the job of informing the public and presenting
prevailing attitudes.
The emergence of a new definition of journalism's mission in
civic journalism, however, redefines that role in society. That redefinition,
in turn, offers hope that journalists will play a key role in helping define the
guiding narrative and then applying it to the abortion issue to find common
ground.[10].
In his 1995 paper "The Common Good in a Global Setting,"
Clifford G. Christians asserts that civic journalism is based on an assumption
that common good is prior to individuals, and it aims to create a public that is
politically and morally literate (p. 2). In turning away from individual rights
to the common good, Christians argues, civic journalism will become an agent of
community formation. Contrary to egoistic rationalism, which says individuals
make up their minds on the basis of objective data, civic journalism assumes the
job of using information in a way that helps to form community.
Even though the civic journalism movement is in its infant
stages, it cannot avoid for long an obligation to define the common good it
claims to serve. This definition must help guide and motivate the desire for
common good. Otherwise, civic journalism runs the risk of being dismissed as a
pipe dream. According to Christians, the common good has to be stated in
universalist terms in order to prevent communitarianism from devolving into a
parochialism that unleashes "a wave of tribalism" (p. 3) that can take the form
of ethnic cleansing, racism, or the kind of cultural identity wars that
characterize the abortion debate.
The common good, therefore, must be recognized not as merely a
communal good but "common in the richest universal sense of the word,"
Christians argues (p. 4). He suggests that common human solidarity become the
universalist principle that guides civic journalism. Under this banner, the
criteria for public argument becomes not to eliminate differences within the
community but to weigh
whether a community's values affirm the human good
or not. As our ideologies, philosophies of life, and beliefs
are
lobbied within the public sphere, some agreements will emerge
that
form a common good. Since we hold our world views not as
isolated
individuals but socially, we thereby have a responsibility to
make
public the course we favor and to demonstrate in what manner it
advances our common citizenship (p. 12, emphasis added).
Common citizenship, we might argue, would see Life and Choice as
the penultimate, not the ultimate arguments to be raised on the abortion issue.
Mistaking the penultimate values for ultimate ones leads to immoral behavior,
Christians argues, citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(1955)
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
. "Universal values are a way of keeping our common human solidarity as
ultimate," Christians says. With common human solidarity as the ultimate and
guiding end, both the goals of preserving fetal life and allowing free choice
for women become clearly penultimate because neither one alone can reach its
goal without destroying life and violating other obligations in the process.
The goal then cannot be the fetus or the woman; it must be both. The common
ground rhetoric emerging in the 1990s recognizes and endorses this possibility,
despite the prevailing cynicism working against it.
Moving the values of journalism and the tone of public
discussion toward a more communitarian and universalist end is compatible with
more mature levels of intellectual and ethical maturity. It embraces both the
masculine concerns for justice and the feminine ones for responsibility by
moving up from the emphasis on the individual matters of care and rights and
toward larger, more universal commitments, involving responsibility and justice.
In today's historical moment, when egoism, rampant
individualism and like-minded interest groups threaten to implode and take the
American social contract with them, communitarianism and civic journalism
rightfully arise to counter today's excesses. This is not to say that
individual rights no longer form the cornerstone of American values. They are,
and will remain, a fundamental protection against encroachments by the state.
But our times are marked by a tendency to cry for individual rights as a way to
dodge too many vital and inevitable struggles over competing social goods.
Civic journalism is a reaction against journalistic habits that
are sometimes mistaken principles, according to Ed Fouhy
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Anonymous, 1995
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, p. 6), executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. One of
these habits, Fouhy said, is for journalists to focus on conflict as a way of
dramatizing the news. Another is to assume that stories have only two sides.
Jennie Buckner, editor of the Charlotte Observer, says: "[P]ublic journalism is
about . . . putting a wider lens on what we do. . . so we can begin to see
something more than what we've been seeing"
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
(Anonymous, 1995
[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
, p. 7).
Such a widening and deepening of thinking, in journalism and in
public debate, seems nearly impossible to most social critics, but the rise of a
new common ground rhetoric on the abortion issue gives hope. It appears to
demonstrate the tempering and maturing influence that the ethic of care and
responsibility can have on the polarization brought about by an over reliance on
the language of individual rights.
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[--- Pict Graphic Goes Here ---]
[1] Ideograph is "A word or short phrase that sums up key
social commitments and thereby constitutes a society," according to Celeste
Condit (1990, p. 227).
[2] Narrative is used here to mean a set of principles,
sometimes told as a story or parable, against which a society weighs its moral
choices. Later, narrative refers to simple story telling. The authors trust
that the two uses of the term will be clear within the context.
[3] In the hypothetical case used by both Kohlberg in his study
of men and Gilligan's of women, a poor man named Heinz wonders if he should
steal a drug he cannot afford in order to save his wife's life. While the men
in Kohlberg's study accepted the example as it was presented and puzzled it
through, the women Gilligan worked with asked questions about Heinz's particular
circumstances. They wanted to know, for example, whether Heinz and his wife had
children and if the family would have a means of support if he were jailed. The
women tried to locate the morality of Heinz's choice within his particular set
of relational obligations.
[4] Guttmacher cited a National Opinion Research Center poll
that showed 71 percent of Americans favored legal abortion if the woman's health
is endangered, 56 percent in rape cases, and 55 percent for serious birth
defects. Similarly, a 1967 Modern Medicine poll found 87 percent of doctors
favored liberalizing abortion laws (p. 130). Neither the public nor the police
wanted to roust out the "good" or "safe" abortionist whom they viewed with the
same winking tolerance as the bootlegger during prohibition.
[5] Pro-life advocates had launched a battle of the persuasive
images with their pictures of baby-like or bloody fetuses [Condit, 1990 #82].
[6] Charity (1995) gives as an example a dispute over the
closing of Freedom Park in Charlotte, North Carolina, after white residents who
lived near the park objected to the black youths who cruised through it in their
cars. The Charlotte Observer printed about a dozen verbatim statements from
interested parties, including the residents, the cruisers and community leaders.
In a deliberate attempt to practice civic journalism, former editor Richard
Oppel wrote, the paper sought quotes that drew out good ideas, that helped to
define problems and to determine what should be done. The paper looked for
strategic facts and ideas. Accusations, which were not strategic facts, were
left out; ideas for concrete action were used instead (Charity, pp. 72 and 113).
[7] Gilligan is best known for the distinctions she identified
between masculine and feminine voices, but she does not claim that
responsibility and care issues are limited to women, nor that rights and justice
issues are exclusive to men. In fact, Gilligan and Attanucci (1988) found that
"there is an association between moral orientation and gender such that both men
and women use both orientations, but Care Focus dilemmas are more likely to be
presented by women and Justice Focus dilemmas by men" (p. 223). "That the focus
phenomenon was demonstrated by two thirds of both men and women in the present
study suggests that this liability is shared by both sexes" (p. 233).
[8] Emotivism is a form of privatized truth in which behavior
is based on feelings, decisions on personal preference and judgments on private
standards. Fruitful public dialogue is impossible when emotivism prevails
because argument based on private conviction not evidence or public
narrative recognizes only one's personal opinion as legitimate.
[9] 'Therapeutic culture' refers here to the over extension of
therapeutic methods such as focus on Self, empathy, congruence, unconditional
positive regard and unrestrained expression of feelings outside the private
psychoanalytic setting and into the public vocabulary. Widespread acceptance of
such habits has exacerbated individualism and emotivism. Arnett (1995) has
called the misuse of therapeutic communication a "moral cul de sac."
[10] The process could happen in reverse. By finding common
ground on abortion, Americans may discover agreement on a guiding narrative.
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