The Street Politics of Abortion

Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars

Joshua C. Wilson

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English

Stanford University Press
04 September 2013

Ethical issues & debates; Human rights; Civil rights & citizenship; Constitutional & administrative law; Birth control, contraception, family planning

Series: The Cultural Lives of Law

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade stands as a historic victory for abortion-rights activists. But rather than serving as the coda to what had been a comparatively low-profile social conflict, the decision mobilized a wave of anti-abortion protests and ignited a heated struggle that continues to this day.

Picking up the story in the contentious decades that followed Roe, The Street Politics of Abortion is the first book to consider the rise and fall of clinic-front protests through the 1980s and 1990s, the most visible and contentious period in U.S. reproductive politics. Joshua Wilson considers how street level protests lead to three seminal Court decisions-Planned Parenthood v. Williams, Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y., and Hill v. Colorado. The eventual demise of street protests via these cases taught anti-abortion activists the value of incremental institutional strategies that could produce concrete policy gains without drawing the public's attention. Activists on both sides ultimately moved-often literally-from the streets to fight in state legislative halls and courtrooms.

At its core, the story of clinic-front protests is the story of the Christian Right's mercurial assent as a force in American politics. As the conflict moved from the street, to the courts, and eventually to legislative halls, the competing sides came to rely on a network of lawyers and professionals to champion their causes. New Christian Right institutions-including Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice and the Regent University Law School, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law-trained elite activists for their ""front line"" battles in government. Wilson demonstrates how the abortion-rights movement, despite its initial success with Roe, has since faced continuous challenges and difficulties, while the anti-abortion movement continues to gain strength in spite of its losses.

By: Joshua C. Wilson
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 358g
ISBN: 9780804785334
ISBN 10: 0804785333
Series: The Cultural Lives of Law
Pages: 260
Publication Date: 04 September 2013
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

Joshua C. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver. His work has been discussed in Time Magazine and NPR's The Morning Shift.

Reviews for The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars

Beautifully written and tremendously accessible, The Street Politics of Abortion offers new insight into how lawyers - especially those assigned to cases rather than taking them as part of their political commitments - understand their role as trial lawyers and social movement actors. This excellent book is analytically important, methodologically innovative, and breaks new ground in the study of social movements, legal consciousness, and the first amendment. - Laura Beth Nielsen, Northwestern University, American Bar Foundation, author of License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech On about as hot a subject as a scholar can take on, Joshua Wilson has sensitively and exhaustively shown how activists' 'stories' about the law shape the everyday politics of abortion. Blending political science and sociology, this is modern legal scholarship at its very best. - Steven Teles, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement Joshua Wilson shows how the interactions of protesters at abortion clinics and their legal defeats actually helped to institutionalize the anti-abortion movement. This important new work on abortion politics greatly advances our understanding of movement/countermovement dynamics and the power of law. - Suzanne Staggenborg, University of Pittsburgh