Shaping Abortion Discourse

DEMO CRACY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN

G E R M A N Y A N D T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S

Myra Marx Ferree William Anthony Gamson

University of Wisconsin, Madison Boston College

Jürgen Gerhards Dieter Rucht

Universität Leipzig Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

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© Myra Marx Feree, William Anthony Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, Dieter Rucht 2004

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 Contents

Tables and Figures page ix

Foreword by Friedhelm Neidhardt xi
Preface xv
Glossary xix
Part I: Introduction
1 Two Related Stories 3
2 Historical Context 24
3 Methods 45
Part II: Major Outcomes
4 The Discursive Opportunity Structure 61
5 Standing 86
6 Framing 105
Part III: Representing Different Constituencies
7 Representing Women’s Claims 131
8 Representing Religious Claims 154
9 Representing the Tradition of the Left 179
Part IV: The Quality of Abortion Discourse
10 Normative Criteria for the Public Sphere 205
11 Measuring the Quality of Discourse 232

vii
 C

12 Metatalk 255
13 Lessons for Democracy and the Public Sphere 286
Methodological Appendix 305
References 325
Index 339

viii
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lessons for Democracy and the Public Sphere

U nderstanding the complexities of discourse about abortion policy

in Germany and the United States has been a challenge. We
leave it to the reader to judge how well we have met it. Ultimately, we
are interested in using this study of abortion as a tool for addressing a
broader set of questions about democracy and the public sphere. These
questions focus on the processes by which the practices of newspapers
and the activities of groups and individuals, in and out of political
institutions, interact to provide a public discourse about policy issues
and the quality of the outcome that they produce, evaluated by several
competing standards in normative democratic theory. In this conclud-
ing chapter, we review what we learned about the dynamics that gener-
ate a discourse about abortion and the nature of this discourse in
both countries, focusing on the implications for political discourse
more generally.
In our model, media discourse on any issue is shaped by more or less
organized collective actors of different types who sponsor certain pre-
ferred frames. Their resources, connections, skills, and choices about
framing strategy influence their standing and the relative prominence
of their frames in the media. Organizational and strategic decisions can
make a difference in the career of the frame that they sponsor in ways
that are reflected in changing its prominence in the mass media forum.
The actors do not contest frames on a neutral or level arena, but on
a complicated terrain. The playing field is uneven and littered with
obstacles, some of which may impede certain actors more than others,
and it changes over time as decisions are reached and policies put in
place. Because the arena is different in each country, the availability and
cost of any particular route to influence are not the same in both, even
for actors that appear to be quite similar in each country (such as the

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Catholic Church). To be effective, the strategic choices that actors make

must take into account the features of this complicated landscape. We
use the concept of a discursive opportunity structure, discussed in
Chapter Four, as our label for this playing field.
One cannot really begin to compare the language and ideas that
appear in the German and U.S. mass media forums without under-
standing the differences between arenas in the two countries. At an
extreme, the field is wide open to some actors and some ideas in one
country that are blocked or loaded with traps in the other country.
Take one example of this context – cultural norms about the welfare
state. The idea that the state can be and should be a force for good in
social life – that the state is a welfare state – is a consensual and taken-
for-granted assumption in German political culture. Opponents of
abortion more or less uniformly support a variety of state subsidies for
raising children and special benefits targeted to the poor. In the United
States, the welfare state is a politically contested idea with its support-
ers on the defensive; it is very far from being taken-for-granted. More
importantly, many conservatives combine opposition to abortion with
opposition to state support for raising children, especially for the poor.
This leaves them vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy about their concern
for unborn children and their lack of concern about those born into
unpromising circumstances.
Only within this context can one decipher the quip by U.S. Con-
gressman Barney Frank that “Right-to-lifers believe that life begins at
conception and ends at birth.” In the United States, it is likely to draw
a wry smile from abortion rights supporters and a dirty look from
opponents, but both sides understand the point. It is more likely to draw
a puzzled look or blank stare from Europeans who tend to take for
granted the embrace of the welfare state by abortion opponents. More-
over, this context has concrete policy ramifications that also become
part of the discursive opportunity structure. In Germany, the Consti-
tutional Court affirmed that the poorest women deserve welfare state
support to guarantee them the same access to abortion that more afflu-
ent women can secure, while the U.S. Court specifically allowed access
to be limited to those financially able to pay for it.
Both diffuse ideas and specific policy decisions shape the national
arenas in different ways, tilting the ground toward different sides in
various specific places and changing over time as actors attempt to
restructure the very ground on which their contest takes place. In other
words, the differences that we find between the two countries are not

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just because the game is different in each – as if the Germans were

playing soccer and the Americans football. In both countries, the nature
of the field on which the contest is to be carried out is not fixed and
unchanging, and the rules of the games, as well as the points scored by
each side, are being negotiated while the plays are already going on.
Players enter and leave not by the call of some neutral referee who
stands outside the field, but by the decisions of journalists who are
themselves players with interests in the outcome. Although one would
expect that such complications could only generate chaos, there are in
fact understandable patterns in the outcomes that emerge.

THE INTERPLAY OF STRATEGY AND OPPORTUNITY

We believe that the various findings reported in earlier chapters about

how two very different abortion discourses are generated in these two
countries are best explained by the deliberate efforts of social actors to
shape them. Actors choose the parts of the field in which they decide
to play as well as the specific moves that they make in that space. Their
efforts are limited by the opportunities and constraints of the arena in
which they compete, as well as shaped by the actors’ understanding of
and responses to these conditions. We will organize our review of these
findings around the components of the discursive opportunity struc-
ture discussed in Chapter Four.

L/J
The German Court, in accepting the status of the fetus as life as being
uncontroversial and emphasizing the state’s responsibility for the pro-
tection of life, gave a powerful advantage to those who framed the abor-
tion issue in such terms. The U.S. Court, in emphasizing the right to
privacy from state intrusion on individual rights and expanding the def-
inition of privacy to include women’s reproductive choices, gave a par-
allel advantage to this alternative frame. In making these decisions the
courts in both countries could draw on different discursive resources:
political suspicion of an active, interventionist state in the United States
and heightened concern with the protection of life in post–Nazi
Germany. In each case, the sponsors of a particular frame are able to
claim constitutional sanction for their demands; their competitors face
an uphill battle in promoting alternatives without such sanctions. This
is a fundamental cause for the broad differences in framing that we
identified in Chapter Five: the tilt toward Anti ideas, especially the Fetal

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Life frame, in Germany and the tilt toward Pro ideas, especially the Indi-
vidual Rights frame, in the United States. However, this aspect of the
arena can change during the course of a framing contest, requiring nim-
bleness in devising and revising framing strategies.
We used the device of a constitutional cluster of ideas about abortion
that had legal sanction – in this case, from court decisions – to measure
this component. We found that, as expected, the cluster of idea elements
used by the German Constitutional Court was more prominent in
German media than in the U.S. media even before the Constitutional
Court acted, but became even more prominent afterward. The U.S. con-
stitutional cluster was, as expected, higher in the United States than in
Germany throughout the sample period but, unexpectedly, did not gain
in prominence over time. This nonchange underlines the limits
of opportunity structure as an explanation. While the opportunity
for frame prominence may well have been enhanced, U.S. abortion
discourse became more strongly contested. The prominence of the
constitutional cluster actually declined to its lowest point during the
Reagan years.
The differences in the auras of the highest court in each country help
to make sense of this result. The less visible nature of the process of
appointment and the high confidence of Germans in their legal system
make the German Court decisions appear as ex cathedra, the ultimate
judgements of an abstract institution rather than the particular opin-
ions of a specific group of men and women. U.S. Court decisions are
more likely to appear as the contingent outcome of the group process
of nine individuals rather than any kind of ultimate judgment. A par-
allel to U.S. calls to “overturn Roe v. Wade” is inconceivable in Germany,
and a political strategy that would focus on shifting the composition of
the court is not an available option for German social movements.
We suspect that what we found for abortion – that the legal/judicial
component was more important in shaping media discourse in
Germany than in the United States – would hold for other issues in the
two countries as well. But this remains a hypothesis to be tested by
others.

P/S
We emphasized differences between Germany and the United States
in the role of the state and political parties. More specifically, the posi-
tive view of a welfare state in Germany – that the state can be and should
be a force for good in social life – contrasts with a contested and

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distrustful discourse on the role of the state in the United States. App-
lied to the abortion issue, this helps to account for the prominence
in German discourse of the idea that the government should “help
rather than punish” women with an unwanted pregnancy and the
virtual absence of this idea in U.S. discourse. The shared assumption in
the United States that all state action is suspect allows Pro forces an
advantage in blocking state regulations on abortion and Anti forces a
comparable advantage in blocking state funding for the poor.
In addition to this difference on the role of the state, there is an
equally clear difference in the legitimacy and quasi-state role of politi-
cal parties. German political parties have a constitutionally recognized
role in the formation of a government, with defined responsibilities and
rights that even include the granting of state subsidies. U.S. political
parties were viewed with suspicion by the framers of the U.S. Consti-
tution and are weakly institutionalized; party discipline is weak, and the
desire to maintain unity often leads to the avoidance of statements on
issues that might provoke internal divisions. One result of this differ-
ence is the much higher standing of party and state actors on the issue
of abortion in Germany compared to the United States that we identi-
fied in Chapter Five.
While these differences may distinguish Germany from the United
States, they do not distinguish Germany from most other parliamen-
tary democracies in the western hemisphere. Germany appears to be
typical in both the cultural acceptance of the welfare state and the quasi-
official role of political parties; the United States is the exception.
Hence, this state and party component should be highly relevant for
comparisons between the United States and a wide variety of other
countries.
Additionally, we have seen how the norms that the media employ to
decide who should have standing are different in the United States and
in Germany. The more institutionally oriented rules for who should be
sought out as sources by journalists further advantage state and party
speakers and tilt the playing field away from social movement speakers
of all stripes, who have to struggle much harder to be heard at all.
These differences are likely to shape many if not most other issues
as well. We should expect state speakers – and especially legislative
speakers – along with party spokespersons to dominate standing on
most issues in Germany and to be less prominent on most issues in the
United States. Very few issues offer sharper differences on party lines
than does abortion policy, and yet party spokespersons in the United

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States are reluctant to speak “for the party.” Two-party competition in

this context produces rhetorical strategies in which both parties claim
to seek the same things, often blurring real party differences in policy
preferences. As we discuss later, this party dynamic affects the nature of
the public sphere.
There is every reason, then, to expect that what we found for abor-
tion will hold more generally – that the standing of civil society actors,
especially social movement speakers, will be substantially higher in the
United States than in Germany. In sum, the party/state component of
the discursive opportunity structure facilitates standing for speakers
from these sectors in Germany and retards it in the United States
generally, and not just on the abortion issue.

G
As we saw in Chapter Seven, abortion is much more explicitly defined
as a “women’s issue” in Germany than in the United States. Germany
has a long political history of contention around §218. German femi-
nists took advantage of this discursive opportunity and mobilized
strongly around abortion as an issue. They have largely succeeded in
having abortion defined as an issue on which women in politics “natu-
rally” have a special competence to speak.
In contrast, abortion emerged as a political issue much later and in
more medical terms in the United States, and reproductive rights were
granted to a non-gender-specific individual, the “pregnant person” in
the words of the Supreme Court.101 This does not mean that gender rela-
tions are not at issue or gendered perspectives not in play in the United
States, but that women and women’s rights are not named as being at
stake. In Germany they are, and have been for a century. This explicit-
ness conveys some advantages to women in Germany, for example,
in the gender of spokespersons for the political parties, who are now
predominantly women, with a dramatic increase since the first wave of
discourse in the mid-1970s (see Franz 1999). While women speakers
have increased their share somewhat in the United States, there is
greater gender balance among Pro advocates.
However, the close connection between abortion rights and women’s
rights in Germany has mixed consequences overall. It gives German
women and women’s organizations, not just feminist movement

101
This was in the employment discrimination case, Gilbert v. General Electric in 1976,
that spurred the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.

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groups, a particular claim on the discourse, as distinctively entitled to

speak about abortion by virtue of their gender. But it takes abortion off
the agenda for men who might otherwise speak out in support of abor-
tion rights and therefore tends to keep the discourse polarized along
gender lines, with German differences between men and women who
are visible players on abortion policy much greater than in the United
States. This deprives German women of conspicuous support from
male allies.
In the United States, framing of the abortion issue as a privacy right
has also offered both opportunities and obstacles to the mobilization of
women on this issue. A gender-specific claim of women’s special enti-
tlement to speak on abortion carries little weight in U.S. discourse. This
is not merely a matter of lesser opportunity. Women themselves rely
heavily on a nongendered Individual Rights frame in advocating for
abortion rights; they haven’t failed in making an explicitly gender claim
but have not tried very hard to do so. By not framing abortion as some-
thing that is especially about gender, U.S. discourse separates it, for both
better and worse, from the women’s movement. Thus broad coalitions
are evident between feminists and mixed-sex abortion rights groups,
but not between feminists and other sorts of women’s groups on the
abortion issue.
German abortion discourse is not only more explicitly gendered than
U.S. discourse but gendered in a different way, interacting with the
welfare state differences discussed previously. German discourse is
much more likely to focus on women with unwanted pregnancies as
clients to be served by state and private human service agencies – to
help, not punish. U.S. discourse is more likely to frame women as
autonomous moral agents endowed with rights and responsibilities.102
Operating from this starting point, German women have been able to
shift the overall discourse in that country toward greater acknowledge-
ment of women’s self-determination, but U.S. women have not been
able to achieve a comparable recognition of the social situations in
which women are driven to seek abortions as being needs that the state
should help to meet.
Finally, the gendered component requires that we attend to subtext
as well as text – that is, to implicitly (and often unconsciously) gendered
aspects of the discursive opportunity structure. The clearest example,

102
See Ferree and Gamson (2002) for a fuller development and presentation of this
argument.

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in the case of abortion, is the ongoing contest over what are considered
“public” and “private” matters. Public and private, as Fraser (1995) and
others have argued, have a gendered subtext in which the “public” realm
has traditionally been a male sphere, and its norms and practices reflect
this.
Norms about appropriate public discourse may discount personal
narratives, for example. Since the experience of an unwanted pregnancy
is gender-specific, the discounting falls unequally on men and women.
In the United States, the more fluid boundaries between public and
private create discursive opportunities for women that do not exist in
Germany, where the boundaries are sharper (Kalberg 1987a, 1987b). In
sum, the gender component shapes opportunities through assumptions
that, although not explicitly gendered, affect male and female speakers
in different ways.

M/R
In comparing Germany and the United States on abortion, we were
forced to confront a paradox. Institutionally, religion and politics are
less separated in Germany than in the United States, but culturally they
are more separated. This creates two quite complicated and contrasting
playing fields for sponsors of sacred canopies.
These differences on the moral/religious component help to account
for certain results. In Germany, churches give the Fetal Life frame a
sacred canopy while their political partners in the Christian parties
promote the same frame with less explicitly religious appeals to shared
values on the sanctity of life. The Catholic Church enjoys a high pro-
portion of the standing given to all civil society speakers. Protestant
speakers come to echo Catholics in accepting the Fetal Life frame as the
single standard of morality, a standard that the Constitutional Court
institutionally affirmed.
In the United States, with its contrasting normative climate on the
institutional separation of religion and politics, the diversity of moral
judgments is a more central theme and religious organizations are more
likely both to disagree among themselves and to defer to other, non-
denominational actors in civil society to invoke a sacred canopy. Hence,
we find the Catholic Church encouraging the National Right-to-Life
Committee to speak for a broader religious constituency including both
Catholics and Protestant evangelicals, while it withdraws to a somewhat
less prominent role in an effort to de-Catholicize the opposition to
abortion. The U.S. opportunity structure is friendlier to a religious

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framing, but only if it is ecumenical and interdenominational, not if it

is associated with any particular religion or points to only one possible
moral conclusion. It is also less friendly to church groups as the vehicle
for public sponsorship of such frames.
One final aspect of the moral/religious component plays a special
role in Germany – the image of Nazi Germany as a negative moral stan-
dard. Although Holocaust imagery also appears in the United States as
a type of inflammatory speech (along with parallels to slavery), appeals
to the sanctity of life have a special cultural and constitutional reso-
nance in Germany less because of the sacred canopy of organized reli-
gion and the influence of the church on politics, and more because of
the Nazi repudiation of this moral principle.

S J
We need to underline the fact that there are differences in access
to legal abortion among women of different social locations in both
countries. Whether these differences are trivial or significant enough to
need to be addressed is a matter of framing. Hence, we need to explain
the low overall use and general decline of social justice framing in both
Germany and the United States.
While similar on the surface, we argue that the explanation reflects
different underlying dynamics in the two countries. In Germany, the
decline reflects a victory for this framing. Poor women are seen as
having a special claim on the welfare state, but the state’s power to grant
or withhold a certification of neediness is increasingly viewed by abor-
tion rights advocates as an infringement on women’s autonomy.
In the United States, the decline of social justice framing reflects
defeat and strategic withdrawal from a losing fight. The lack of support
for welfare programs in general and the danger that arguments for sup-
porting abortion for poor women might be appropriated to control and
limit their childbearing have made it a discouraging discursive strategy.
Given the generally more favorable arena for claims about individual
privacy rights and the successes that the movement has had, plus
the overall unfavorable terrain for raising class claims, why push this
frame? This underlines again that the characteristics of the arena help
to explain the choices of the players, but that only both together can
explain the outcome.
We have defined the primary constituency for social justice claims as
an imagined community called the “tradition of the left.” But where this
community stands on abortion is neither simple nor unidimensional.

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Autonomy and need, as well as social justice themes, have an important

place in this discourse. Those who make claims on behalf of this con-
stituency can frame abortion variously as a matter of the inalienable
rights of citizens to control their most private lives, the state’s respon-
sibility to care for and protect the needy, and social justice for those who
face structural inequalities. In practice, each of these themes has shifted
over time in both countries, but for different reasons and with differ-
ing results. In both countries, themes of structural inequality in access
to legal abortion have become relatively less significant, but only in
Germany has access for the poor been institutionalized through state
subsidies for the neediest.

M M
German journalists take for granted a public sphere dominated by
political parties and the organizations closely associated with them such
as churches and trade unions. In such a situation, the journalist does
not need to play a very active role as an interpreter of meaning. The
choice of sources, for example, is obvious and established by long-
standing political convention.
In the United States, in contrast, these actors are weaker. Political
parties are loose coalitions organized to compete for public office, not
for expressing unified frames. As a result of this relative vacuum, the
mass media become, Hallin and Mancini (1984) argue, the primary
actor of the U.S. public sphere in providing political interpretation.
Because of this enhanced role, certain journalistic conventions have
developed in the United States that are unusual in Europe. These
include a greater tendency to frame and interpret, and to use narrative
structures and images.
On the abortion issue, we found mixed support for this hypothesis. We
did find some tendency for U.S. coverage to include more personal nar-
ratives. However, we found negligible differences in the role of journalists
in framing the issue. Journalists were 29% of the U.S. nonstate speakers,
versus 28% of the German nonstate speakers who offered framing ideas.
If we find no solid support for this part of the Hallin and Mancini
hypothesis, we find very strong support for a second journalistic con-
vention that flows from these differences in the nature of the public
sphere. Journalists face a very different situation in choosing sources.
The vacuum left by the unwillingness of U.S. political parties to speak
on the abortion issue led journalists to either fill the gap themselves or
seek other interpreters, including a variety of civil society actors.

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On the abortion issue, this greater opportunity clearly converted into

higher standing for these civil society actors. Advocates for anti-
abortion- or pro-abortion-rights movement organizations accounted
for about a quarter of the speakers in the United States, compared to
only 2% in Germany.
Whether this hypothesis – that advocacy organizations in the civil
society occupy a niche in the U.S. public sphere that is filled by politi-
cal parties in the German public sphere – is supported on other issues
as well remains an empirical question. On the nuclear power issue, for
example, anti-nuclear movement organizations in Germany played a
major role (see Joppke 1993; Rucht 1994) but also chose to seek polit-
ical representation in the form of a new political party, the Greens.
Other political interests, such as environmentalism, consumer rights,
feminism, and democratic reform, also invested in this party to a greater
or lesser degree. To the extent that they do so, they are strategically
choosing the party-centered route at the cost of building national advo-
cacy organizations like those that throng to Washington, DC. This seems
quite obviously true in contrasting the party-centered and advocacy-
organization routes taken by feminists who wish to influence a wider
range of policy outcomes, not just abortion policy, in the two countries
and would suggest that the pattern we found on the abortion issue
would also characterize other issues. However, because many contem-
porary issues, such as environmentalism, have less historical association
with particular political parties than abortion does, the extent of party
dominance may also be lesser for these issues as well.
Nonetheless, the sharp differences that we find between Germany
and the United States in how parties and movements address the public
on the abortion issue suggest that, both in terms of establishing politi-
cal control over attention paid to other particular policy issues and in
regard to meeting normative criteria of inclusiveness in public dis-
course, the relative roles of parties and movements in taking leadership
roles in framing issues in the media is an important and understudied
aspect of political representation in democracies.

QUALITY OF THE DISCOURSE FOR A

DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPHERE

Different strands of democratic theory offer different images of an ideal

public sphere or set of spheres. Many of these differences in norms
about who should participate and what the process and outcome should

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look like stem from basic differences about the role of the democratic
citizen. Schudson (1998), in looking at the historical evolution of the
model citizen in the United States, contrasts the ideals of republican
virtue, the citizen as loyal party member, the informed citizen, and the
rights-regarding citizen.
We have emphasized the contrast between the relatively passive
citizen of representative liberal theory and the more engaged and active
citizen of other traditions. Representative liberal theory embraces what
we have called elite dominance. Citizens need to be minimally informed
to make sure that policy-makers are ultimately accountable to them and
party loyalty will help their representatives to be more effective. But they
do not need to participate in public discourse on issues.
In fact, they not only do not need to, but public life may be better
off if they don’t. This is the tradition of “democratic realism” – the belief
that ordinary citizens are poorly informed about public affairs, have no
serious interest in it, and are generally ill-equipped for political partic-
ipation. Dissenting voices should not be excluded from the public
sphere a priori, but their inclusion depends on their having a legitimate
representative to articulate their views in public forums. Those who
want to be represented have the political obligation to use the repre-
sentative process. Without their own representatives at the table, their
preferred frames will, appropriately, be ignored. This is normatively
desirable, since outsiders’ frames are, at best, irrelevant in practice and,
at worst, potentially dangerous.
The other three traditions – participatory, discursive, and construc-
tionist models – all emphasize what we have called popular inclusive-
ness. In contrast to democratic realism, public discourse can and
should empower citizens, give them voice and agency, build commu-
nity, and help them to act on behalf of their interests and values. The
normative standard here is one of engaging citizens in the democratic
process by encouraging their active participation in the public sphere.
This standard is better met in U.S. discourse, where social movements
do not merely enjoy greater standing but have grown in visibility and
influence among all actors of civil society. Moreover, the individuals
affected by decisions – not only women but their partners, parents,
doctors, and friends – are sought out by journalists and included in their
own words.
If the citizens in the participatory liberal tradition seem especially
“rights regarding,” “republican virtue” is still very much present in the
discursive tradition. To convince others, one must appeal to common

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interests and values. The process itself tends to produce citizens who
think in terms of the public good rather than merely their private inter-
ests. The deliberative process helps citizens to engage in politics as a
community of action and not merely as individuals.
On the abortion issue, German discourse meets quite well the stan-
dard of elite dominance. U.S. discourse, with its broader inclusion of
civil society actors, is much closer to meeting the standard of popular
inclusiveness. With respect to the style and content of the discourse in
the two countries, we find more modest differences. Speakers in both
countries respect the norm of civility with a few notable exceptions.
Differences in the overall proportion of statements oriented toward
dialogue are relatively small.
Differences exist mainly in the greater structure of dialogue in U.S.
articles and the extent to which the lifeworld of the ordinary citizen
enters the public discussion. U.S. articles include speakers from both
core and periphery together; construct articles to include both Pro and
Anti speakers in the same space; give more standing to speakers who
are not representing any institution or organization but themselves; and
include more personal narratives drawing on the experiences of the
people affected. Discourse that treats women with unwanted pregnan-
cies as clients rather than as agents is more common in German dis-
course. In all of these respects, U.S. discourse is closer than German
discourse to the normative model emphasized by discursive and femi-
nist/constructionist traditions.
Finally, if we look at the extent to which abortion discourse in both
countries has moved toward closure, there is a much sharper decline in
total media coverage of the issue following legislative and judicial deci-
sions in Germany than in the United States. This outcome is embraced
by the representative liberal theory but treated more equivocally by
other traditions. For the discursive theory, closure should follow the
development of a genuine consensus or rapprochement among the con-
testing actors that arises from the discourse. In the absence of consen-
sus, the disappearance of discourse may reflect satisfaction with the
outcome, whatever it might be, but it may also reflect resignation and
bowing to the inevitable among those who are unhappy with the result-
ing policies. Participatory liberal and constructionist traditions are even
more suspicious of closure because it can so easily promote a silencing
of losers in a still unresolved conflict. For better or worse, then, German
discourse better reflects this representative liberal standard than does
U.S. discourse.

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One can also learn a lot about normative standards in any forum
from the metatalk of participants and journalists when they make
comments on the quality of discourse. On the abortion issue, we found
both convergent and divergent standards in the two countries. The con-
vergent standards involve concerns about accuracy and competence,
civility, mutual respect, dialogue, and weariness about how long the
topic has been a subject of public discourse with a general call for
closure.
Even on these convergent standards, however, there are subtle but
important differences. On civility, for example, German observers
sometimes see breaches in remarks that would be considered standard
in U.S. discourse (see Chapter Twelve). In both countries, the sources
quoted should be credible, but this involves a judgment about what cre-
dentials make one qualified for standing. This is made differently in
Germany and the United States; in Germany institutional roles and
expertise are central, while U.S. journalists use a wider array of criteria.
Furthermore, the frequent claim in both countries that the debate
has gone on too long may hide a subtle difference. Calls for ending a
discussion are never politically neutral. Silence favors the status quo.
Calls for ending discussion can be an indirect way of expressing the
belief that we really shouldn’t be spending so much time talking about
this issue because it is trivial or inappropriate for public discussion
altogether. This is suggested by how early, especially in Germany, such
complaints are heard.
Rather than considering “rights talk” to be the source of the
intractability of the U.S. debate to come to any end, our analysis sug-
gests that use of the language of rights is even more frequent in
Germany than in the United States but is more evenly balanced between
the two sides in the United States than in Germany. The hegemony of
the Fetal Life frame that we found in Germany, however, is not a con-
sensus that allows a decision with which everyone is satisfied, but a tilted
field on which social movements that disagree can find little traction to
move their agenda. The differences that we found between Germany
and the United States do not suggest that the 1976 Constitutional Court
decision in Germany was less dramatic or effective an intervention than
the U.S. Roe v. Wade decision was, but quite the contrary. The court in
Germany remains less contested and more convincing in part because
the elite-dominated model of media coverage allows journalists to with-
draw attention from the issue once it has been made a law, leaving ques-
tions of implementation and impact on individuals out of the picture.

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In the United States, the greater inclusion of social movements as well

as other voices from the periphery, the variety of legislative and judicial
venues into which policy struggles can be brought, and the media prac-
tice of combining institutional speakers and their critics from civil
society in the same articles all contribute to sustaining a contentious
discourse in the United States even after an institutional decision has
been reached. The sharp declines in coverage after a legislative decision
in Germany are not only possible because there is a single central polit-
ical institution responsible for drawing a law that applies to all the
federal states, but also because the German media does not focus on the
implementation of the laws or seek out the individual voices of those
who are affected by them to comment on what they mean.
U.S. and German metatalk also sends different messages about how
people should express themselves. In Germany, there are many objec-
tions to a style that emphasizes emotions and passion rather than
detachment and rational argumentation. For some players, especially
those who are more marginalized from the core of political decision
making in both countries, passionate protest is the best means open to
them to make their concerns known. Both symbolic expression and
emotional speech are ways of drawing attention to what might
otherwise be ignored. Thus the greater openness of U.S. discourse to
diverse styles of speech is not only a reflection of the more prominent
roles that movement speakers play but a facilitating condition for such
involvement.
Finally, the theme of fairness that is so prominent in U.S. metatalk
is much less important in German metatalk on abortion. The differ-
ence, we have argued, reflects differences in the nature of the public
sphere and should hold for metatalk on other issues as well. German
journalists have an institutional and procedural solution to the problem
of fairness that does not depend on an assessment of content. Since the
political parties can be arrayed on a left–right dimension with their
strength determined by a popular vote, all that the media need do to
insure fairness is to provide the parties with a voice proportional to their
electoral share. Then, one adds to this mix other major institutional
actors that historically have been spokespersons for recognized issue
constituencies.
For the United States, the institutional solution is not really available
on most issues, especially abortion. Lacking a procedural resolution,
journalists and advocates look for a standard of fairness that balances
different views rather than different kinds of actors. But since any

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content-based definition is frame-dependent, this solution can work

only when there is a hegemonic frame. In the case of abortion, there are
multiple frames, each embodying its own standard of fairness. For
advocates, fairness ultimately reduces to whether or not one’s own
frame is consistently present and accurately portrayed.
U.S. journalists, then, are doomed to an endless quest for the holy
grail of a frame-free standard of fairness that is unattainable. The quest
itself, however, is conducive to meeting the normative criterion of
including grassroots actors in the process. The lack of metatalk about
fairness in Germany means that the consequence of journalistic prac-
tice for the exclusion of less institutionalized, grassroots actors goes
unnoticed. This exclusion is reinforced by defining civility in a way that
often excludes the characteristic rhetorical style of these actors.
In the United States, there is a broad enough boundary of civility to
accommodate this rhetorical style and a sensitivity by journalists to
accusations of unfairness. This sensitivity is kept alive by the quest for
a frame-free standard. Journalistic uncertainty creates greater opportu-
nities for the voices of grassroots actors to be heard, notwithstanding
the advocate’s own sense of being shut out or misrepresented.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Claims are sometimes made that “globalization has made it increasingly

necessary to break with the nation-state centered analysis. . . . Social
structure is becoming transnationalized and . . . studies should be pred-
icated on a paradigmatic shift in the focus of the nation-state as the
basic unit of analysis to the global system as the appropriate unit”
(Robinson 1998, p. 561). Like a number of scholars who have criticized
the view of globalization as a uniform and all-encompassing process
(for example, Held et al. 1999; Garrett 1997; Soskice 1999), we believe
that our study of abortion discourse should give one pause about pre-
maturely discarding nation-state–centered analyses.
Abortion discourse would seem to be a prime candidate for an issue
on which global discourse exists. In particular, the existence of a
transnational pro-life lobby and a transnational women’s movement
with a rich infrastructure would appear to provide strong carriers for
such a discourse. As for the women’s movement, however, we found that
their transnational discourse is focused primarily on reproductive rights
issues in the countries of the South, not those at the center of discus-
sion in Germany and the United States (Ferree and Gamson 1999). For

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understanding discourse in the countries studied here, this transna-

tional discourse was of little relevance.
While there is more transnational influence between Germany and
the United States on the anti-abortion side, including the import of U.S.
materials such as the film The Silent Scream and through organizations
such as the Catholic Church that are institutionally represented in both
countries, there are still remarkable differences in what is contested and
what resonates in each country. The Silent Scream drew considerable
attention in the United States, where a discourse of individual rights
and a focus on the costs of implementation of a law on those affected
by it made this film a particularly effective way of focusing attention on
the fetus as a person who could have rights and be harmed.
But since the idea of the fetus as a person deserving the protection
of the state is already the hegemonic frame for the German debate, there
was neither a strong effect on mobilizing anti-abortion forces, nor a
shift in terms of discourse, nor an uproar from advocates of abortion
rights. The social movement organization that sponsored this film in
Germany remains small and all but invisible in the media. The Catholic
Church in Germany, as an institutional player with legitimacy from
the Constitutional Court for its central claims, sees no such need to
“de-Catholicize” anti-abortion claims as the U.S. Catholic Church
does. Nor does it face rivals, such as Catholics for a Free Choice in the
United States, that challenge its claim to speak for all Catholics on this
issue.
Our concept of a discursive opportunity structure suggests that what
is true for abortion is likely to be true on many issues. We are struck by
how many of the components are rooted in the specific history, insti-
tutions, and culture of each country. There are so many basic national
differences shaping the arena in different ways that they overwhelm the
influence of globalization. It is difficult to see how the latter adds much
to our understanding of the discursive opportunity structure or of the
choices of the relevant players. A globalization argument suggests that
the abortion discourse in Germany and the United States should have
converged in the last few decades, but we see no evidence of this. Deeply
rooted national cultures and institutions continue to shape the
discourse on abortion and other issues.
In the end, the German discourse produced an uneasy compromise
that is accepted, in some cases grudgingly, by most people, while in the
United States the abortion debate goes on and is even marred by vio-
lence. One might be tempted to conclude that greater elite dominance

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and lesser popular inclusion in German discourse was responsible for

this outcome by excluding “extremists” from the debate.
Much of our evidence contradicts this interpretation. The broader
inclusion of grassroots and movement actors in U.S. discourse did not
produce more “inflammatory” or “absolute” frames in the material that
we analyzed, nor did incivility increase over time as violence did. The
U.S. discourse did not produce calls to take up arms against one’s oppo-
nents or to use other extrainstitutional means for bringing about
change. Indeed, in interviews we heard how participation in the public
sphere often put anti-abortion speakers in the position of moderating
their rhetoric to reach a wider audience, and we saw evidence of speak-
ers turning to more rather than less pragmatic frames. Social movement
organizations in the United States took up incremental strategies and
abandoned claims for changes that they thought desirable but un-
obtainable, whether a consitutional amendment barring all abortions,
on the one side, or a national policy that supported financially women’s
choices to have children or not, on the other.
Anti-abortion violence was deplored and repudiated by almost all
opponents of abortion as they attempted, not always successfully, to dis-
associate themselves from such acts.103 It increased in the United States
even as anti-abortion movement organizations moved toward incre-
mental and pragmatic solutions, such as focusing on late-term abor-
tions and consent rules for teenagers seeking abortions. In the end,
anti-abortion violence in the United States seems to depend less on the
nature and quality of discourse and more on the easy availability of guns
to an angry handful who have no interest in participating in a truly
public debate, civil or otherwise.
But the stories that are produced about public issues and the nor-
mative value of the ways in which such debate is carried out have impli-
cations for democracies that extend beyond calculating if they might
contribute to violence in some way, whether we have been able to
measure any such effects or not. Narrowing concern with public dis-
course to the issue of violence alone is seriously misleading. The mass
103
This repudiation of violence appears to be virtually a precondition for inclusion in
the array of actors who may be legitimately accorded voice in the mass media as a
public arena. Although there are some individuals and groups on the anti-abortion
side of the debate who do advocate violence (e.g., Michael Bray, convicted of con-
spiracy in the bombings of ten abortion clinics and the author of a book justifying
killing providers that was published by Advocates for Life Ministries, and other
groups such as Lambs of Christ and Life Enterprise Unlimited) these radical fringe
groups do not receive standing in the mainstream newspapers that we studied.

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media as a public arena may – or may not – offer a terrain on which

ordinary people have an opportunity to participate as citizens in
shaping public discourse about matters that concern them. Whether
this is what we believe that democracy is and ought to be about is some-
thing that examining democratic theories should empower us all to
decide for ourselves. When and how and to whom these two countries
offer such opportunities is something that we hope we have been able
to demonstrate.

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