Item Detail
-
27752
-
0
-
0
-
English
-
Making Babies : Social Conservatism and Abortion Politics in the Four Corners States, 1967-2000
-
Madison, Wisconsin
-
University of Wisconsin
-
372
-
Ph.D. Dissertation
-
Focusing on the pro-life movements in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, "Making Babies" asserts that, starting in the late 1960s, the movement's everyday politics created a broad anti-abortion public in the Four Corners states specifically and the U.S. more broadly. I argue that activists developed this public using a very particular worldview, "the political imaginary of life." In this imaginary, activists contended that legal abortion was evidence of the perversion of modern science, a genocide akin to the Jewish Holocaust, and a product of eugenic, racist, or hierarchical thinking that privileged some lives over others. Activists ultimately claimed that only through the protection of the fetus--the racially unmarked and de-gendered subject--could Americans successfully combat racism, sexism, and social injustice. This imaginary was expressed and maintained through essential visual and physical ephemera. In these western states, pro-life coalitions were almost entirely made up of white religious westerners: Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons and mainstream Protestants. In crisis pregnancy centers, schools, churches, homes, and public streets, activists of various faiths successfully integrated pro-life politics into the heart of American conservatism and, by extension, American politics. Employing gory photos, fetus dolls, and symbolic funerals, pro-life activists built a conservative movement that both remade people's voting habits as well as their senses of self. Activists ultimately made fetal "personhood" central to how many a conservative, and many an American, thought of being a woman, a child, a Christian, and a member of a family.