Abstract

Chapter 15: "'What you do hurts all of us!' When women confront women through pro-life rhetoric." In this chapter, I articulate a specific problem in the way the rhetoric and ideology of pro-life politics operates as a form of confrontation between women. This is a dilemma that emerges when women engage in the appearance of concern and solicitude while passively coercing other women as they may be ambivalent and vulnerable in forcing anti-abortion outcomes. This in a reinvestment in the problem I raise in my prior work, The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (2017), a dilemma that I think is essential to grapple with if not also to urgently reconcile: where is the solidarity among women as they are pregnant, independent of the outcomes or expectations of childbearing? Alongside of the testimony of my own personal experience, I analyze the substance of the confrontation narrated in Maisie Crow’s documentary Jackson (2016), juxtaposing it with the fictional hypothesis of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1998) to outline the character of harm in the confrontations between women through pro-life discourse.