Suchergebnisse

In the years since the Supreme Court handed down its ruling inRoe v. Wade(1973), the abortion controversy has raged across America with increasing vigor. Since Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appointment solidified the Rehnquist Court's moderate bloc, holding the line onRoe'sbasic principle but inviting more state regulation, the conflict over abortion is likely to expand and intensify in most of the fifty states. The increased and bitter activity since the Supreme Court decidedWebster v. Reproductive Health Services(1989), which gave state legislatures more latitude to respond to pro-life pressures, provides only a small indication of what the future may hold. Almost twenty years afterRoelegalized abortion in the United States, an end to the "clash of absolutes," as Laurence Tribe has recently called the American abortion conflict, seems nowhere in sight.

Explores the reasons for the ferocity & longevity of the public debate over abortion in the US. Comparisons are made to Europe, where compromises & the presence of national health care have settled the question in a fairly stable manner. Explanations for this are reviewed, including the fundamental moral conflict that has ruled out compromise, the role of the courts in bypassing legislative action & establishing abortion as a constitutional right, & the weak political parties & strong interest groups in the legislative process. While each approach has its merits, none provides a complete explanation. An alternative approach that takes a historical perspective & focuses on the role of the US government in health policy is proposed. The fragmentation of the political system & the role of private health care plans, it is argued, forced abortion to become an individual right to be established by the courts. The availability of health facilities, not the law, determines access to abortion services in the US. It is concluded that, by tying abortion to the judiciary, a US woman's right to abortion has been made less secure than that of her European counterparts. T. Arnold

This collection of essays provides the first systematic and multidisciplinary analysis of the role of gender in the formation and dissemination of the American social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other books have traced the history of academic social science without paying attention to gender, or have described women's social activism while ignoring its relation to the production of new social knowledge. In contrast, this volume draws long overdue attention to the ways in which changing gender relations shaped the development and organization of the new social knowledge. And it challenges the privileged position that academic--and mostly male--social science has been granted in traditional histories by showing how women produced and popularized new forms of social knowledge in such places as settlement houses and the Russell Sage Foundation. The book's varied perspectives, building on recent work in history and feminist theory, break from the traditional view of the social sciences as objective bodies of expert knowledge. Contributors examine new forms of social knowledge, rather, as discourses about gender relations and as methods of cultural critique. The book will create a new framework for understanding the development of both social science and the history of gender relations in the United States. The contributors are: Guy Alchon, Nancy Berlage, Desley Deacon, Mary Dietz, James Farr, Nancy Folbre, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Dorothy Ross, Helene Silverberg, and Kamala Visweswaran