Abortion, moral maturity and civic journalism

Abstract

Public rhetoric on abortion and the journalistic coverage of it has matured in tone and content over the years since women's magazines first broke a long public silence on the issue in the 1940s. Since the 1970s, extremist views on abortion have dominated the press. But new common ground arguments represent an emergence of the feminine ethical response of care and responsibility into the foreground of public discourse where it is tempering the long‐dominant language of individual rights with relational concern for others. This article proceeds from a women's voice/experience perspective on feminism and applies a narrative method of rhetorical analysis to the coverage of abortion in American popular media from the 1940s to the 1990s. This analysis is used: (1) to establish that the feminine means of moral reasoning, i.e., the ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982) that is generally relegated to the private sphere, has emerged gradually into the foreground of American public discourse on abortion; (2) to trace a gradual maturation of public discourse on abortion along the path of ethical and epistemological development established by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986), and other scholars in the feminist voice tradition; and (3) to compare the recent emergence of common‐ground rhetoric on abortion with a similar impulse driving the civic (or public) journalism movement, in terms of the ethical and epistemological orientations they both instantiate.