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Reproductive politics in the age of trump and brexit

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Ginsburg, F 

Abstract

For feminists and feminist scholars who have been active in reproductive rights since the 1980s, Donald Trump’s policies concerning national autonomy, religious freedom, increased police and military spending, racial profiling, and border control rearticulate a tragically familiar grammar grounded in a distinctly American legacy of white Christian nationalism and its highly racialized reproductive politics. Above all, this grammar feels familiar from decades of American conflict over the practice of abortion, a political struggle in which, as Faye Ginsburg (1998) documented in her pathbreaking study of the abortion debate in Fargo, North Dakota in the 1980s, issues of race, class, gender, generation, religion, sexuality, and reproduction emerge as the fault lines of mainstream political division and struggle—far more than party politics. In the name of promoting and celebrating a “culture of life,” U.S. right-to-life groups have for more than three decades maintained a campaigning strategy that powerfully links traditional gender roles and family values, opposition to gay marriage, the right to gun ownership, and opposition to abortion within an overar¬ching white settler narrative of lost American greatness. This is the same grammar articulated by Randall Terry, the evangelical Protestant founder of Operation Res¬cue, which from the late 1980s onward advocated increasingly extreme and violent forms of antiabortion activism to putatively save the nation. For Terry and his fol¬lowers, prolife politics linked fetal salvation to rescuing America’s future. Making America great again, white again, and right again became a culture war in which militarization was not only an idiom but an explicit code of practice. “Justifiable homicide” was Operation Rescue’s answer to six fatal shootings of abortion clinic staff between 1988 and 1994.

Description

Keywords

4406 Human Geography, 4401 Anthropology, 44 Human Society

Journal Title

Cultural Anthropology

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0886-7356
1548-1360

Volume Title

34

Publisher

American Anthropological Association