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CHAPTER 4. ABORTION DISCOURSE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE 66
discretion on the part of doctors. All were squarely aimed at professional audiences
in the legal, medical, educational and religious professions. In 1954, the
Planned Parenthood Federation of America organized a conference focused only
on induced abortion, concluding that revised laws that “recognize the mounting
approval of psychiatric, humanitarian, and eugenic indications for the legal termination
of pregnancy” (Calderone 1958, 182) were necessary. To that end, organizations
such as the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State
Laws, the American Law Institute, and the Council of State Governments, are
called upon to develop model laws legalizing abortion, and to educate both citizens
and professionals about the issue. The American Law Institute heeded the
call in 1959, drafting a model abortion statute that legalized abortion in cases of
rape, incest, danger to the health of the mother, and indications of fetal abnormality
(Institute 1959). Therapeutic Abortion, edited by Harold Rosen and published
in 1954, emerged from a panel at the 1952 meetings of the American Psychiatric
Association. The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, written by Glanville
Williams and published in 1957 , focused on the legal aspects of abortion; while
Alfred Kinsley’s Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion (1958) examined medical issues
(Krason 1984, Olasky 1988b, Staggenborg 1991).
Abortion discourse during the latter stages of the criminalization period moved
from the protected and gentile confines of the professional associations onto the
public stage. The impetus for this movement includes two “critical discourse
moments” (Gamson & Modigliani 1989), the Finkbine case and the associated
thalidomide scare in 1962, and the Rubella epidemic in California in 1964. The
roots of the Finkbine case are in Europe in the early 1960s, when a sharp increase
in the birth of babies with deformed or underdeveloped limbs was associated with
exposure by the mother to the tranquilizer thalidomide during the early stages of
pregnancy. In the summer of 1962, Sherri Finkbine, a Phoenix, Arizona woman
in her fourth month of pregnancy, discovered that a tranquilizer she had taken
contained high doses of thalidomide. When her dilemma was publicized in a local
newspaper, her scheduled abortion at a local hospital was postponed, and then
canceled, when the Courts in Arizona refused to clarify the legality of the procedure.
Finkbine’s case became the subject of numerous magazine and newspaper
stories, and for the first time, introduced discussion about the morality of abortion
into the public sphere occupied by ordinary people (Luker 1984, Krason 1984).
Two years after the Finkbine case, popular attention again focused on abortion
during the Rubella epidemic in the United States. Newspaper and magazine articles
explored the link between the disease and fetal deformity, and drew further