SPLIT AT THE ROOT: NARRATIVE COLLAPSE IN ABORTION JURISPRUDENCE
A cultural rescripting of representational texts has produced new forms and practices of life, a new way of seeing and resultant shifts in the legal positions of the players in the abortion debate, in particular the pregnant woman and the foetus. The new representational imagery that arises has a rehabilitative effect on foetal rights narratives as well as a reframing effect on women's rights narratives, and, ultimately, on the ways those new sets of readings and relations have been constructed in the courts. This paper addresses the ability of technological and cultural constructions to re-enact a structure of reasoning as well as produce a way of seeing that authorizes certain foetal and women's rights narratives in the legal abortion debate. If, indeed, the Supreme Court acts as a 'space of reason' in which reasonings are enacted and recognitions become fixed to produce particular positions and forms of life, the law has been cast in the role of rhetorically managing what constructions shall be authorized and what disrupted as it compels into being what shall be stabilized as matters of fact. This paper's review of technological, cultural, and legal narrative constructions of abortion leads us to a world of narrative collapse in which the stories we have told ourselves can no longer sustain us, leaving us open to the noise of cataclysm that has lost a sense of the past as guide and is unable to attach itself to a meaningful future as direction. We are reminded of the need to tolerate what continues to be 'seen' as a dysfunctional dialogue but which may hold the promise of a narrative that might not protect difference within unity so much as it preserves unity within difference.
Keywords: ABORTION; FOETAL RIGHTS; NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION; REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY; SUPREME COURT
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 May 2002
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