The Medicalisation of Democratic Rights in the Debate about Abortion (MEDRA)

About the project

The goal of the project is to provide large-scale, corpus-based analyses of the co-constitutive relationship between democracy and medical knowledge in the debate about abortion as it unfolded since the early 1980s in three complementary case studies: US, Ireland and Argentina.

These are three representative democracies whose history of abortion legislation illustrates the complexity of different understandings of democracy, and the extent to which the concept of democracy itself is mobilised to support opposing positions.

Despite disagreements on the meaning of democracy and its relation to abortion in all three cases, all sides of the debate agree that the right to abortion is inseparable from the right to health, and is therefore a medical matter.

Constructing abortion as a scientific issue encourages both sides of the debate to mobilise medical knowledge as the ultimate authority in deciding who has more or less human rights and, by implication, who is more or less human (or, in legal terms, who has personhood). Precisely because medical knowledge is assumed to be ‘evidence-based’, ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, it lends itself readily to being exploited to support opposing and irreconcilable arguments in this debate.

Medical knowledge is key not only because of the physical and mental health risks involved but also because it is appealed to for definitions of when life begins and when it has a right to be protected by law. Even in the most liberal legislation of Argentina, which is couched in carefully inclusive language and explicitly mentions the rights of women and ‘persons with capacity to gestate’, the limitations to such rights are based on health concepts such as ‘viability’.

Methodology

The research team will combine large-scale, corpus-based, critical analysis of the medical, legal and grassroots discourses under study with narrative analysis, building on earlier work by members of the team. The SHE Corpus will be used in this methodology, a corpus developed by Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education and Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network.