Ethics and political judgment in feminist abortion politics

The relationship between ethics and political thought, especially in the context of democratic judgment, has been of perennial concern in contemporary political theory. Despite this attention, little work has been done to ground the potential and drawbacks of ethical thought in lived examples of democratic politics. This dissertation intervenes in these debates about the relationship of ethics to lived political experience by investigating the work of ethical judgment contra feminist political judgment in the history and current terrain of abortion politics in the United States. Broadly, the dissertation argues that both the form and content of liberal ethical judgment undermine the possibility of transformational political engagement on the part of women in the context of reproductive rights claims.;The subject of abortion brings together intersectional concerns, including gender, disability, race, and class, under wider considerations of the meaning of embodied democratic citizenship and the meaning of health. Because bioethics is one of the most developed fields of applied ethics, examining the interplay between politics, identity, and ethics in the case of abortion provides a grounded understanding of what is at stake in the ethical turn in democratic theory. Furthermore, as questions of health and reproduction continue to dominate the domestic political terrain, grounding a critique of ethical judgment in these fields adds empirical nuance to a debate that has remained, for the most part, theoretical.;In the Introduction, the dissertation draws the distinction between scientific, moral, and political judgment to highlight the difference not in subject matter, but of the form of judgment at stake in each. The second chapter, "Medicalized Citizenship and Abortion Rights in the United States," engages in a genealogical tracing of the abortion debate in the United States from the 1860s to 1973. Through highlighting the stakes involved in the early history of abortion politics, namely, the desire on the part of medical professionals to secure their authority as scientific and moral decisionmakers about women's health, the chapter develops a concept of medicalized citizenship. This concept reveals how, in the domain of reproductive rights claims, women's political membership is mediated by the continued authority of physicians, as evinced in both popular discussions of abortion and in Supreme Court jurisprudence.;Chapter 3, "The Ethical Turn in Women's Health and Abortion Politics: Bioethics and the Ethics of Care," highlights the development of two schools of ethical thought that developed in the late-20th century as a response to various political and intellectual crises: professional bioethics and feminist ethics of care. While the early abortion debates through decriminalization concerned medical authority to decide what was best for women's health, such authority was challenged by the emergence of explicitly feminist and political justifications for reproductive rights. The chapter argues that the emergence of professional bioethics with its premium on autonomy was part and parcel of an ethical edifice that ironically allowed for the reassertion of medical authority under the guise of subordinating epistemic control to ethical guidelines.;The fourth chapter, "Informed Consent or Informed Coercion? Ultrasounds and Abortion Politics," analyzes a contemporary case of the erosion of reproductive rights: requiring women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound as a part of their "informed consent." Informed consent is the centerpiece of bioethics' concern for autonomy, resting on the assumption that if provided with all medically necessary information, a person can make a truly autonomous medical decision. The chapter argues that both the construction of ultrasound images as necessary for medical consent and the interplay of informed consent with another bioethical imperative, health, undermines the place of women as legitimate moral and political agents.;The final chapter, "Genetic Selective Abortion and the Incommensurability of Disability Ethics and Feminist Abortion Politics," examines an argument made by some disability scholars that genetic selective abortion is unethical. While making strenuous cases against selective abortion, these scholars simultaneously proclaim their dedication to pro-choice politics. I argue that an ethical case against selective abortion and a dedication to a feminist case for abortion rights are incommensurable.;The conclusion considers the ramifications of an articulated feminist political judgment for understanding and critiquing current debates in feminism over the question of choice as well as what a feminist politics could contribute to thinking about continued political disputes and demands over health care. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).