Life VS Choice: Abortion as Framed in Media Communications - Research Paper Example

Prof Life VS Choice: Abortion as Framed in Media Communications Introduction: Framing the Debate Among the many things people choose to debate about with a lot of passion, abortion is close to the top of the list. In part this is due to its contentious nature, and the fact that people on both sides have strong, and emotionally-caused beliefs in the issue which are hard to change. Setting aside the issues involved in abortion itself as the cause for debate, however, there are also ethical concerns with how the debate is carried out. In the case of abortion specifically, where so much of the debate centers on emotional arguments rather than logical ones, how each side articulates its points is open to manipulation and out of context argument. By examining several specific cases of public relations campaigns centered on abortion, we can see that persuasion is easily made unethical by how an issue is talked about, and in what context the issue is presented, and so on. With any issue, of course, there are several different ways that debate can be carried out. Common types of media forms used involve pamphlets and booklets, pickets and other real life events, and advertising centering on votes over laws or sympathetic politician elections. As Rohlinger notes, regardless of method, there is “the potential for great rewards” for organizations who can do so effectively (479). This potential, and the passionate belief people have with abortion in particular, leads groups communicating about abortion to frequently distort facts and frame issues within a context that benefits them. Framing in this sense is similar to framing in the news media, where reporters and other people go through a process of “selecting and emphasizing certain aspects of experience or ideas over others” (Andsager, 579). Rohlinger lists the two main frames used in the abortion debate in particular as a “rights” frame used on the pro-abortion side, which “argues that women have the civil and constitutional right to control their bodies” and a “morals” frame used on the anti-abortion side, which “posits that sanctity of human life is the most important value” (485). The frames Rohlinger presents are one of the key ways that abortion debate media twist arguments to make their own side look morally and ethically correct. Hayden argues that, in fact, the two sides of the debate are inherently focused on what she calls the “ideographs,” or words used to express commitment to a specific, political goal, of “life” and “choice” (112). According to this view, the debate is not even really over the actual act of abortion, so much as it is over two mutually exclusive worldviews. Understanding this is essential to understanding how the abortion debate is framed, and why it runs into such ethical issues. The first of the two ideographs, “life,” implies that “a fetus is a person and therefore abortion is murder” (Hayden 113), while the second, “choice,” argues that “a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy had a right to choose” (Hayden 116). These two ideographs are repeated again and again in all sorts of media about the abortion debate, and are central to the ethical issues faced in public relations media relating to it. One other common media strategy, regardless of format used, is what Merola and McGlone label adversarial infrahumanization. Although this word looks daunting, really all it means is “the denial of essential human characteristics to members” of groups they disagree with (Merola & McGlone, 323). In the abortion debate in particular, this practice involves which kind of emotions are proscribed to the opposing side in publications, commercials, and other types of public relations media. Specifically, activists on both sides of the debate deny the possibility of “secondary emotions” like shame, pride, or indignation to their opponents in order to show them as “less than human and thus inferior to one’s own group” (Merola & McGlone, 326), which is damaging to the other side in a debate. This paper will now examine three specific cases of media campaigns by pro- and anti-abortion groups in order to show how all debates on the issue use the issues mentioned above in their arguments. Case One: The Dayton Right to Life Brochures The Dayton Right to Life Brochures are a public relations campaign put out by a group called the Life Resource Center. On their website, they describe themselves as a group striving “to protect the rights of the unborn and the elderly, the mentally handicapped, the disabled and the terminally ill” (“Right to Life”). The brochures in question are a pair of anti-abortion brochures aimed specifically at African Americans, and which argues that by choosing to abort their fetuses, African Americans are “killing themselves” and losing out to other ethnicities such as whites or Hispanics (Swift, 46). It is obvious from this short description that the brochures aim to convince its target audience, African American women, that they should choose not to abort their fetuses, and that the group is an anti-abortion, or pro-life group. As Swift points out, much of the argumentation used in the brochures does not hold up to close examination. At some points, the brochure titled “questions” repeats common myths held by including suggestions like the idea that “African Americans die early [from] AIDS and cancer” (Swift, 47). This myth, not actually true, is intended to make the target audience relate to the brochure on an emotional, instead of intellectual, level, and works to make the audience accept what the Dayton group is saying without looking for solid proof. In this brochure, the focus is then on something like the opposite of infrahumanization, in that it encourages the reader to identify itself with the secondary emotions held as essential to true humanity instead of primary ones. The second brochure, titled “answers,” shows very well the idea that the ideographs choice and life are the keystones of the debate. This brochure is framed as answers to questions about abortion from women who have had one. Crucially, the brochure pairs these answers with “graphic pictures of aborted babies” and focuses on negative answers about how abortion was painful or otherwise an unpleasant experience (Swift 48). The photos of the fetuses clearly makes the Dayton brochures not “anti-abortion” but “pro-life.” This sort of rhetoric, which forces the reader not to choose about a value-neutral word like abortion but one laden with values like “life,” is typical of anti-abortion campaigns, and shows a clear attempt to manipulate the target audience’s emotions to influence their decisions. On top of this, the use of framing the answers as real answers from people may be an attempt to give what seems to be “a legitimate form of proof” that the experience is bad, as in many pro-choice advertisements and films (Pickering, 21). Case Two: March for Women’s Lives The March for Women’s Lives was an event in 2004 which took place in Washington, DC. It featured “More than one million pro-choice activists” in a march on the Capitol in protest of the way that legal decisions over abortion “chip[ped] away at women’s reproductive and health rights” (Stevens). This event, while described as a march, was in fact a collaborative public relations event organized by several women’s rights groups, including “Black Women’s Health Imperative (BLHI,) the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH), The National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)” (Hayden 121). The purpose of the march focused very much on what Hayden describes as the ideograph of choice. According to Hayden, the purpose of the march was to lend “new vitality to the demand for choice while at the same time they challenged the fixed status, and the veracity, of claims of life” (112). It did this through redefining what exactly choice meant, in an attempt to get around the standard debates on the issue. While re-defining “choice” as a larger, more detailed option, the March also “complicated abortion-rights opponents’ articulations of life” by drawing attention to the fact that women are just as alive as fetuses, if not more so, and so that any attempt to define “pro-life” as meaning just “pro-fetus life” is not a good argument (Hayden 129). In its system of operating which clearly upholds choice as the more human option, the March for Women’s Rights also indirectly plays into something like Merola and McGlone’s idea of infrahumanization. Like the Dayton brochures, it does this not through explicitly casting doubt on the humanity of its opponents, but through framing the argument so that its side shows more detail, more compassion, and more breadth. For example, the “re-articulation” of choice, worked by a detailed explanation of how all of the March’s missions connected with “reality” (Hayden 122). By framing what opponents of pro-abortion movements want to do as negative, instead of positive, the campaign subtly cast them as the bad guys in the argument, winning women over to their cause even if the claims themselves are not one hundred percent accurate or neutrally presented. The clearest example of this is the fact that the presenters did not say they were just fighting abortion, but that reproductive justice fought against “sexism, poverty, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia” as well (Hayden 122). Case Three: South Dakota Abortion Ban Advertisements The third case, advertisements for the proposed abortion ban in South Dakota in 2006, features elements of both types of persuasion methods as well. In this case, since the vote was put to the entire state, made up of both pro-abortion and anti-abortion voters, there are two types of advertisements to analyze: so-called pro-life and so-called pro-choice advertisements. As Price says, what makes the advertisements used in this election particularly interesting from a communications point of view is the way they used images to underscore the arguments they were actually making. As Price notes, and as should be clear from the other cases studied in this paper, “perception is affected by … emotion,” among other things (19). One way pro- and anti-abortion groups can manipulate their targets, then, is by showing them images as well as text which manipulates their emotions. The advertisements from the election period are split by Price into the “Yes” and “No” side, and since the proposed bill was not passed, it is useful to look more in detail at the “No,” or pro-abortion, side of the debate as presented. Ads on this side tried to frame the debate not as one about the life of aborted fetuses, as the pro-life ads did, but on the effect the lack of choice would have on women. “All of the ads featured a depressed woman or couple,” and half also showed a consultation with a doctor or other “medical representative,” implying together that when choice is removed from women’s hands by doctors or other authority figures, the result would be widespread depression (Price, 25). One particularly interesting thing about the ads is what kind of emotions they called upon in making their arguments. As Price shows in a chart, every single one of the “No” ads focused on strong, negative emotions like anger and fear, as well as on compassion, and also focused very strongly on emotional appeals instead of logical ones (26). This is particularly interesting, as it is usually pro-life groups who use emotional arguments, such as the images of dead fetuses mentioned above. As Kaposky says, though, this is a clear example of how those involved in abortion debates tend to ignore facts and “attempt to draw out intuitions that will serve their respective positions” (151). And, of course, the potential ethical problem with arguments based on intuitions is that these intuitions may have no real grounding in the facts of the matter, even if that is not the debater’s intent. Conclusion: Ethical Issues in Communications about Abortion Obviously, the debate about abortion is framed and carried out using various types of media. These types of media range from traditional forms like written brochures or books, to visually oriented media like posters and advertisements. In some cases, these public relations type communications may not even take on the form of an actual advertisement or brochure as usually understood. Instead, they may take on the form of an organized event like the 2004 March for Women's Lives. Regardless of the form the media communication takes, those carrying on the debate use ethical and philosophical frameworks of varying sophistication. The main ones of these, as described in this article, are the idea of classifying their opponents as less than human using infra-humanization, as explained by Merola and McGlone, to the use of emotional arguments focused on ideographs like “choice” and “life,” as has been explained by Hayden. The use of any of these strategies, and how the argument is framed in general through contexts and word choices, represent an ethical decision on the part of the debater. All too often, especially in a high-stakes debate like abortion rights, ethics can be set aside by those on both sides. Instead, groups will try to frame their arguments in ways that seem to prove that their argument is right, and that the argument of their opponents is not. The frame chosen on the anti-abortion side centers on the right of the fetus to have life, and anti-abortion media representations of the debate consequently always talk about the debate in terms which show that pro-abortion groups deny this right to the fetus. In doing so, they distort the argument by only showing one aspect of it. The media portrayals used on the pro-abortion side use similar tactics. The only real difference is that, instead of framing the debate around the fetus, they frame the debate around the woman's right to control what is done to her body, and what path her life will take. Because of this, even though they are arguing over the same legal issue of abortion, pro-abortion groups are actually making a completely different set of ethical assumptions and distort the debate in media to fit their own agenda. This, ultimately, is what drives the essentially unethical arguments in the abortion debate. The problem is a result of the deep feelings and opinions people have about the underlying issue, and this is represented in the non-holds-barred way both sides frame and carry out the argument, regardless of media. Works Cited Andsager, Julie L. "How Interest Groups Attempt to Shape Public Opinion with Competing News Frames." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77.3 (2000): 577-592. Print. Hayden, Sara. "Revitalizing The Debate Between And : The 2004 March for Women's Lives." Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 6.2 (2009): 111-131. Print. Kaposky, Chris. "Proof and Persuasion In The Philosophical Debate About Abortion." Philosophy & Rhetoric 43.2 (2010): 139-162. Print. Merola, Nicholas A., and Matthew S. McGlone. "Adversarial Infrahumanization in the Abortion Debate." Western Journal of Communication 75.3 (2011): 323-340. Print. Pickering, Barbara A. "Women's Voices as Evidence: Personal Testimony is Pro-Choice Films." Argumentation & Advocacy 40.1 (2003): 1-22. Print. Price, Cindy J. "Using Visual Theories to Analyze Advertising." Visual Communication Quarterly 18.1 (2011): 18-30. Print. "Right to Life." Dayton Life Resource Centre. n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. Rohlinger, Deana A. "Framing the Abortion Debate: Organizational Resources, Media Strategies, and Movement-Countermovement Dynamics." The Sociological Quarterly, 43.4 (2002): 479-507. Print. Stevens, Allison. "Pro-Choice March Largest in History." Womens eNews. 25 Apr. 2004. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. Swift, Crystal Lane. "Abortion as African American Cultural Amnesia: An Examination of the Dayton Right to Life Brochures." Women & Language 32.1 (2009): 44-50. Print. Read More