Maggie Jones Patterson

To the Other

During the 1960s, abortion went from being barely mentionable to the hot topic of the new decade. While the issue itself sizzled with controversy, it also borrowed some heat from the general friction between men and women. Attitudes were shifting dramatically. A new generation was growing up which had radically different expectations about sex and sexuality. Domestic bliss had soured. Women began to resist the idea that they should be totally fulfilled by family life. The strength of their reactions moved the pendulum of many lives far away from the post-war extreme—the cult of domesticity—toward a new one in the other direction.

Abortion in America: A Consumer-Behavior Perspective

Abortion is the most frequently performed surgical procedure in this country, yet its provision to consumers remains one of the most contentious issues within our society. The purpose of this article is to broaden our understanding of this problem by examining abortion from a consumer-behavior perspective. The phenomenological study described in this article revealed that (1) a wide gap exists between the language of the public debate and that of private decision making, (2) the language of private decision making reflects a moral standard used frequently by women yet virtually ignored in the public debate, and (3) women who take charge of their own decisions cope better with the emotional aftermath, whether their decision is for birth or for abortion. The article closes with a discussion of policy implications that arise from this feminist look at the abortion dilemma as well as broader implications for consumer behavior. Copyright 1995 by the University of Chicago.

Abortion, moral maturity and civic journalism

Public rhetoric on abortion and the journalistic coverage of it has matured in tone and content over the years since womens magazines first broke a long public silence on the issue in the 1940s. Since the 1970s, extremist views on abortion have dominated the press. But new common ground arguments represent an emergence of the feminine ethical response of care and responsibility into the foreground of public discourse where it is tempering the long‐dominant language of individual rights with relational concern for others. This article proceeds from a womens voice/experience perspective on feminism and applies a narrative method of rhetorical analysis to the coverage of abortion in American popular media from the 1940s to the 1990s. This analysis is used: (1) to establish that the feminine means of moral reasoning, i.e., the ethic of care (Gilligan, 1982) that is generally relegated to the private sphere, has emerged gradually into the foreground of American public discourse on abortion; (2) to trace a gr...

Murder in Our Midst: Expanding Coverage to Include Care and Responsibility

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in the crime. However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the publics understanding of the individual crime and widen the communitys dialogue about its significance.

'Killing' the true story of first nations: The ethics of constructing a culture apart

Cases taken from the coverage of Canadian/Ipperwash and American/Makah disputes over tribal land and sea claims point up that subtle but entrenched racist assumptions, conclusions, and myths of native culture persist despite attempts by newsrooms to be more culturally sensitive. Traditional journalism standards of practice and ethical approaches must be expanded to consider more of the subtleties of medias problematic representations of aboriginal peoples—as a culture, a culture apart, and a cultural construct. The ethics of continental philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the ritual model of communication, and frameworks and methodologies used by feminist and cultural studies scholars are applied to show that journalisms current standards, which are rooted in Enlightenment ethics and embrace a transmission view of communication, are inadequate to the challenge of reporting on diversity in an ethnically complex world.

Challenging the Odds

Today, sonography allows a pregnant woman to peer into a video screen and see the fuzzy contours of her unborn child’s fingers and toes—as well as its kidney, bladder, brain, spine, and the chambers of its tiny, beating heart. Even before a mother can feel her baby’s first soft flutterings, she can watch it kick, wiggle, and somersault deep within her. Levels of serum alphafetoprotein (AFP) in the mother’s blood can indicate whether her fetus might have a neural tube defect such as spina bifida. Amniocentesis and a newer prenatal test called chorionic villus sampling (CVS) can analyze the fetus’s chromosomal makeup, revealing or ruling out many genetic birth defects. Thus, months before delivery a woman can, if she so chooses, call upon modern medical technology to learn much about her unborn child’s health and even to discover its gender.

At a Crossroads or Caught in the Crossfire

This study of crime reporting shows that keeping crime records secret hurts democratic consolidation. While many reporters and journalism experts interviewed claimed to value the presumption of innocence, at the same time, many skirted legal restrictions and ethical codes. Police and prosecutors supplied leaks, and reporters sought further information from witnesses. This porous secrecy leads to publication of rumors and unreliable eye-witness accounts. Four exacerbating factors affect this reporting method: widespread “clientelism,” a partisan news media, an alternative definition of “public interest,” and weak professionalism.

Victims and Survivors

Women and girls live their whole lives knowing they are vulnerable to sexual attack, abuse, or harassment. Some learn it early and directly, “at the hands of their own father,” brother, uncle, teacher, clergyman, cousin, or baby-sitter. Yet most who are victimized, whether as children or as adults, do not report the crimes against them, and many of those who do meet with disbelief, contempt, or attacks upon their character and motives. Even those who become pregnant as a result of a degrading, violent act are not exempt from suspicion.

Teenagers and Pregnancy

The reasons any individual develops an authentic sense of his or her own worth, or fails to, are always complex. But some patterns common to many women may be traceable to childhood—especially to an important turning point at childhood’s twilight when a girl first finds she is becoming a woman.

The More They Remain the Same

The lack of compassionate listening that characterizes the abortion debate has many old and new sources. The hostile political division created or ex-acerbated by Roe v. Wade is only the most recent. A much older source of deafness is the persistent view that women are inherently inferior to men, their concerns less substantial than masculine ones. This view is at the bottom of the schism between the home and workplace, women and men, private life and public life. It has changed little, despite the fact that, as we discussed in the last chapter, women have made deeper inroads into the professions, public affairs, and politics than ever before.