Part IV - The Quality of Abortion Discourse

Summary

In the previous three chapters we looked at various outcomes in media discourse and addressed which actors were competing and with what success in shaping these outcomes. We showed how their discursive strategies were themselves influenced by the contours of the complicated playing field on which they competed – the discursive opportunity structure – as well as by strategic choices that they made to position themselves in this field. Part of the problem faced by all of these actors was discursively to construct a constituency for themselves – women, the religious, the left – as well as to address this constructed public in ways that would advance the policy positions that they favored. In both Germany and the United States, the abortion debate has changed in character over time as different groups have achieved more standing and certain ideas have come to be more or less favored than others.

Using the concept of a discursive opportunity structure, we suggested that the chances for different groups and points of views to be heard were structured differently in each country. The institutionalized position of the parties and the churches, the state-centered coverage of news events, the language of the high court's constitutional decision, and the formal organizations and cultural traditions associated with class and gender politics all combine to give systematic advantages to certain speakers and ways of framing abortion in Germany. Similarly, we found that the suspicion of the state, the dominance of interest group politics over formal parties, traditions of religious pluralism, and the privacy centered language of the Supreme Court provided advantages to a very different constellation of voices in the United States.