This chapter explores how rhetorics of crisis have reshaped contemporary reproductive politics. First, it examines the significance of crisis teen pregnancy narratives in popular media (e.g., Juno, 16 and Pregnant, Glee, and Teen Mom) and how these narratives manage collective anxieties over abortion, adoption, and teen motherhood. It traces these trends alongside the colonization of comprehensive women’s health clinics by the evangelical crisis pregnancy center movement. The logic of homeland security culture, present in this case study through rhetorics of “crisis,” fuels the differential protection of domestic bodies and works to produce and reproduce national identity through the bodies of particular women and families.
This chapter traces how crisis pregnancy center volunteers popularized medically inaccurate information about the health risks of abortion beginning in the 1970s. Anonymous tracts purportedly written by women who had abortions and regretted them circulated in prolife circles. By the 1980s, women who called themselves “abortion survivors” traveled the nation, speaking to church and prolife groups about their regret over having had abortions. Prolife physicians legitimized these anecdotes by writing articles that falsely claimed that abortion caused breast cancer and psychological trauma. By the twenty-first century, prolife physicians and women “abortion survivors” had convinced jurists—incorrectly—that the medical community was divided over the question of whether abortion harmed women. This constructed debate framed the Supreme Court’s 2003 majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart
Location Decisions of Abortion Clinics and Crisis Pregnancy Centers in California