INTERSECTING CONTEXT, DISCOURSE, AND SOCIAL ACTORS

Though abortion has historically been a contested issue, contemporary discourses and their respective social actors have emerged from the tensions of this transitional period. Current controversy over the matter is entrenched in a growing web of institutional vacuums that over the past four decades attest to mounting tensions between a new global model of production and consumption and institutions that correspond to a bygone era. As the social order of industrial modernity gradually dissipates, new lifestyles interrogate institutions that are no longer tailored to everyday needs. Novel notions of time and space spawned by profound structural and technological modifications that Castells calls “the second industrial revolution” ( ^{Castells, 2010, p. 23} ), give rise to increasingly unintelligible and dysfunctional institutions festering with conflict.

Some authors have referred to them as institutional shells, void of the economic, social, and cultural rationality and reciprocity of industrial times ( ^{Giddens, 2003, p. 18} ).³ Others have referred to this tendency of de-institutionalization as linked to expressions of de-socialization, thus highlighting the breakdown of established norms and accepted margins of resistance, negotiation, and institutional reorganization characteristic of industrial modernity ( ^{Touraine, 1997, pp. 33-35} ). The constantly changing conditions of what ^{Bauman (2006, p. 9)} calls liquid modernity hamper the consolidation of new daily habits, while discourses of fear, risk, and loss echo through the institutional cracks. As the economy is progressively freed of its social mores through deregulation, privatization, and other neoliberal strategies, corporate interests permeate the political process and citizenship is gauged through consumerism (^{Giroux, 2015, p. 2}). As such, the marketplace substitutes public space as the arena of citizenship, further weakening collective social ties (Lechner, 2006, in ^{Hoetmer, Vargas, & Daza, 2011, p. 109} ).

Beck refers to industrial society as a finely tuned arrangement of production, politics, and culture, “a life-style in which gender roles, the family unit, and social classes make up the same constellation”⁴ ( ^{Beck, 2000} ). In contrast, today’s neoliberal model of “industrial production without industrial society” ( ^{Beck, 2000} , p. 14) destabilizes that systemic integrity, driving individuals and their needs to trump internal institutional coherence. As individuals become more central to institutional functioning, lifestyles based on the politics of choice and reflective self-actualization inform post-traditional discourses that place identity, the body, and ethical issues of recognition, inclusivity, and justice at the core of new interpretations of rights and citizenship. However, these discourses are disparately filtered through race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, or the intersection of these and other factors, revealing another neoliberal tendency toward “rigid exclusions from national citizenship and civic participation” for certain sectors of society ( ^{Giroux, 2015, p. 11} ). Nonetheless, in the midst of today’s institutional commotion, progressive discourses of individual liberty, self-determination, and choice are gradually recalibrating institutions to fit the needs and rhythms of the postindustrial era (^{Bauman, 2011, p. 12}) .

This has been especially true of gender and family normativity. The advent of contraception, more equitable renegotiations of binary gender identities and power arrangements, the normalization of gender-equality entitlements, restructuring of the sexual division of labor, and recognition of new gender identities and citizenship claims have reconfigured the very notion of family. Within the framework of the present-day uncertain family, as Rousell dubs new fluid kinship reconfigurations ( ^{Touraine, 1997, p. 4} ), the definition of abortion has become a cornerstone of conflict, confronting women’s right to reproductive choice with zygote and fetal rights to personhood throughout gestation. A conflict of rights embodied in contested discourses that compete on the front lines of this struggle for cultural meaning bares disparate views of morality, values, national history, nationhood, and patriotism ( ^{Hunter, 1990} , p. 50).

Second-wave feminist claims that the deconstruction of gender oppression was contingent on access to birth control, legal abortion, and reproductive sovereignty profiled new domains of rights and citizenship anchored in the private and intimate realms. Equally, they exposed “the power of culture (as) the power to name things, to define reality, to create and shape worlds of meaning” ( ^{Hunter & Wolfe, 2006, p. 33} ). Feminist discourses of women’s corporal sovereignty, reorganization of the sexual division of labor, and gender equality in all realms of society undoubtedly informed new worlds of meaning. Discourses, however, are always contested fields. They compete for the cultural hegemony of a specific historical moment and structural context, while also speaking to the social positioning of their emissaries. As such, every discourse is a situated message, reflecting complex networks of knowledge production and innate truths that are sustained and promoted by strategies of power ( ^{Gutiérrez, 2005, pp. 26-27} ; ^{Foucault, 1999} ).

Conservative rejection of feminist discourse and family reconfiguration coveted the stability, security, and apparent solidity of industrial institutionalism. Religious doctrine historically has accompanied conservative currents, crafting narratives of primordial truths and perceptions of existential permanence in the midst of the disruptive, anti-paradigmatic atmosphere of contemporary liquid society. Belief in human life in its most incipient form as the gauge of personhood; defense of a prenatal pre-citizenship founded on the idea of comparative vulnerability; vindication of a natural family based on ahistorical gender identities and roles; and faith in the sanctified intentionality of an omnipotent divinity all contest feminist discourses of gender equality, reproductive and sexual autonomy, sexual liberation, the reign of science and human rights, and the right to free will and individual choice as seen from a gender perspective. Two antagonistic biopolitical standards, embracing dissimilar philosophical mores, compete for the hegemony of cultural meaning in this postindustrial nation ( ^{Maier, 2016} ).

BIOPOLITICAL DISPUTES AND GEOPOLITICAL SCHISMS IN THE POSTINDUSTRIAL NATION

Foucault defines biopolitics as a strategic, modern dispositive of institutional power that focuses on regulating the body-species. Fused with the concept of population that surfaced in the late 18th century, this technique of modern power shapes sociobiological experiences into population policy through “a series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population” ( ^{Foucault, 1977, pp. 35-36} ). Complementing the other stellar, industrial-era power technology, the microphysics of power that relentlessly and meticulously disciplines the individual body to enhance personal docility and utility, biopolitics molds the collective body-species into a political economy of population that secures the efficiency and submissiveness of a mass society.

From a feminist perspective, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Roe v. Wade undermined collective power dynamics that until then had constrained women’s bodies through strict, reproductive regulatory controls. Based on the tenet of individual privacy, safeguarded in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the court’s decision rested on three fundamental premises: 1) supremacy of the nation-state’s interest in protecting women’s health over that of the fetus until viability, which placed new emphasis on women’s reproductive rights; 2) prevalence of the nation-state’s concern for the fetus after viability, which suggested recognition of personhood only after birth; 3) acknowledgement of science, medicine, and doctors as decisive factors in determining viability over religious and moral considerations ( ^{Rose, 2007, p. 67} ), which spoke to the secular stance of the high court’s majority at that time.

While biopolitics are never unmoored from historical, structural and discursive contexts, the court’s decision in this case was especially influenced by the sociopolitical and medical issues of the day. Immersed in an environment of cultural upheaval that started in the sixties and signaled the beginning of the end of the industrial era, the 1973 federal ruling on abortion reflected a number of societal concerns. Perhaps most noteworthy was the influence of second-wave feminist discourse of the late sixties and early seventies, and its claims that women’s liberation was contingent on the unbridling of the female body from patriarchal values and policies. Another significant factor that informed the ruling was the measles epidemic at the end of the fifties that resulted in the malformation of thousands of babies, influencing the medical community’s opinion on legalizing abortion ( ^{Rose, 2007} , p. 6). Equally, the extended use of the drug Depo-Provera in the sixties also resulted in severe birth defects that were of concern to the medical establishment. And certainly, the aforementioned progressive lean of the majority of justices on the bench was key in the Roe verdict. These motives speak to the three types of interests that ^{Stopler (2015, p. 7) 5} suggests are legitimate reasons for governments to fix fertility policies, and as such, engage in biopolitics.

The focus on the body in feminist discourse highlights sexuality, procreation, and maternity as essential mechanisms in the construction of women’s subordination in modern patriarchal societies ( ^{Federici, 2010, p. 27} ; ^{Di Marco, 2011, p. 302} ). The discovery of a colonized procreative body pointed to the importance of re-appropriating reproductive autonomy. Women’s liberation, personal independence, and social equality were portrayed as contingent on reproductive choice, while the very notion of choice was rooted in a particular understanding of the body. Viewing corporality as a historical and culturally specific construct that responds to concrete political technologies demanded relocation from the ahistorical, biologically rigid view of traditionalist teachings to a new realm of cultural fluidity that exposes power dispositive behind normative inscriptions. As such, the quintessential female reproductive-body was transformed into a myriad of possibilities by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, radically shifting the biopolitical landscape of the nation. The ruling made all reproductive decisions contingent on a woman’s right to privacy, fixing the legal window for ending a pregnancy at the moment of fetus viability outside the womb, in most cases.⁶ The Roe finding underscored scientific criteria and medical expertise as benchmarks for access to abortion, basically leaving the decision on abortion to the woman and her doctor.

Resistance to the ruling by anti-abortion forces was swift in coming. Faithbased, politically conservative groups viewed the decision as federal encroachment on matters of moral and religious substance. Considered a secular threat to Christian values ( ^{Rose, 2007} , p. 7 ), it was seen as pitting federal authority against states’ rights. Initially, conservative state governments contested legal challenges that tested states’ rights to laws conditioning the Roe verdict.⁷ For over a decade, the high court maintained the preeminence of women’s choice and physicians’ authority as steppingstones to abortion access. With continued Supreme Court support for the ruling, Congress became the front line of the culture war against abortion. In 1976 it passed the Hyde Amendment, eliminating all federal subsidy of abortion. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980, the Hyde Amendment transformed the Roe standard of all women’s right to privacy in reproductive matters into a privileged right of the better off. Services offered at Planned Parenthood clinics and others offset the discriminatory effects of this amendment on low-income women.⁸

After failed attempts to question the constitutionality of the Roe verdict, anti-choice legislators opted for a revised strategy aimed at chipping away at the premises and scope of the law. The purpose was to make abortion increasingly inaccessible to growing segments of the female population, thus reducing what they consider to be infant assassination. Rather than reversing Roe, the goal now was to neuter it. The Hyde Amendment was the first blow of many to weaken the Roe ruling. Two more high court cases ultimately undermined the mainstays of the doctrine, subsequently supplanting expert medical opinion with the religious standards of state legislators. Similarly, the shift from Roe’s compelling state interest in the woman to the fetus and technology’s revision of the threshold of viability also significantly modified the Roe decision with these two rulings.

Until 1989, the Supreme Court maintained the Roe position that only an extremely compelling state interest in fetal life could limit a woman’s right to abortion. With the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services ruling in 1989, and a new conservative majority on the high court, basic principles of Roe began to be questioned. The time frame of compelling state interest in potential human life was extended throughout pregnancy. This interrogated a fundamental premise of the Roe ruling, the viability standard, and enabled some states to limit access even before that moment due to a preferential interest in the unborn. These legal interpretations and related questioning of the parameters of the trimester framework suggest, as Rose says, that the Webster decision was a “pivotal move away from the Roe standard.” Regarded by women’s rights proponents as a dispositive for curbing reproductive justice,⁹ the Webster verdict is charged with making abortion increasingly unavailable for low-income women ( ^{Rose, 2007} , pp. 74-75). However, it was the Supreme Court finding in the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey case (1992) that fully acknowledged preferential state interest in potential life, as long as it did not pose an undue burden for the woman. Though apparently a nod to women’s reproductive rights, the undue burden standard is considered by choice proponents as infringing on the right to interrupt pregnancy explicitly expressed in the Roe verdict. As such, the ambiguity of the undue burden principle invited a surge of anti-abortion rulings, restricting, conditioning, and delaying access to the procedure in many states. Over the past two decades states have progressively gnawed away at women’s right to choose, employing strategies legally permitted by the Casey ruling, such as mandated waiting periods, counseling, and other “persuasive measures that favor childbirth over abortion” (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 1992, in ^{Rose, 2007} , p. 76).¹⁰

As a direct result of these prior decisions, late-term abortions were prohibited by Congress, in 2003, through the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. This law was disputed in the lower courts for many years on the grounds of the undue burden standard, given that it lacked an exclusionary clause for the health of the woman. Nonetheless, in 2007, a newly named, fully conservative majority in the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the original congressional law without any exception ( ^{Gonzales v. Carhart, 2007} ). Reproductive health champions point to this verdict as a preamble for re-criminalizing abortion in the United States.

Since the Roe ruling, regional differences tending toward religiosity or secularity have informed disparate biopolitical imperatives that ultimately attest to a geopolitically fractured country. Within the context of a reconfigured global order and a progressively consolidated neoliberal state, the issue of abortion has become emblematic of renewed tensions related to the separation of religion and state.¹¹ The next section examines the history and boundaries of U.S. separationism, in order to better understand its place in the present dispute over abortion.

THE UNSETTLED LIMITS OF SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE IN THE UNITED STATES

Safeguarding mutual autonomy of religion and state has been a foundational premise of modernity. As capitalism expanded, distinct interpretations of separation of church and state were adopted by different nations. In post-revolutionary France and Mexico, for example, the prescription of a lay or secular state, with rigorous divides between religion and governance, served as a methodology for deconstructing the enormous influence of an exclusive, historically entrenched Catholic Church whose vast economic holdings and political power was an essential component of the old regimen ( ^{Blancarte, 2008, p. 7} ).

The idea of a lay or secular state never took root in the United States. Nonetheless, distinct waves and tints of Protestant immigrants, who sought religious liberty as their prime motivation for colonization, inevitably transformed the principle of freedom of conscience into a dispositive of separation between church and state. Consolidation of the separationist principle, however, was complex and contradictory. Nonetheless, in spite of contrasting opinions on the issue, reflecting uniform or diversified spiritual lineages in each colony ( ^{Blancarte, 2008, p. 25} ; ^{Hunter, 1990, p. 68} ), the United States became the first country to assume separationism as a founding principle of nationhood. A bond of Protestant Reform theology and common belief in the sacred mission of the nation, as a beacon of divine intent, forged consensus to ensure freedom of conscience and worship for all denominations ( ^{Hunter, 1990} ).

Since recognition of mutual autonomy between church and state was rooted in the resolve to guarantee religious freedom from government intrusion and secure equality among denominations, the very notion of separation between religion and polity has historically revealed an ambiguous nature. Foundational belief in American exceptionalism juxtaposes the conviction of a sacred calling to spread national values globally with the secular implications of contemporary separationism and the modern premise of popular sovereignty. This unique faith-based form of disjointing religion and governance has been termed “civil religion” by Bellah, referring to the “subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it and in terms of which it should be judged” (Bellah, 1970, p. 168, cited in ^{Johnson, 2010, pp. 33-34} ).

Thus separation of religion and state has traditionally been a complicated affair in the United States. Interpretation and application have been contingent on historical context and the scope of religious diversity. Immigration, economic crisis, ideological disputes, and war have all triggered reconsideration of the margins and meanings of the separationist yardstick. Religious entitlements were deemed Protestant-based until well into the 19th century, with the uptick of Catholic and Jewish immigration ( ^{Hunter, 1990, p. 69} ). While Protestant diversity led to greater tolerance during the colonial era, the arrival and expansion of other religions in the 18th and 19th centuries provoked the opposite effect. Catholic immigration, in particular, reignited separationist fervor that led to a number of decisive Supreme Court rulings limiting religious influence.¹²

Ideological contentions during the Cold War also set the stage for revisiting U.S. civil religiosity. Fear of an atheistic, communist adversary reconfigured the goalposts of separationism by formally inserting religious references into public discourse and national symbols. In 1954, Congress approved an amendment to include the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, adding divinity to the original “one nation, indivisible, for liberty and justice for all” ( ^{Greenberg, 2002} ). Two years later, still in the throes of the Cold War, Congress approved In God We Trust as the national motto. Since then, the phrase has permeated the collective imaginary as a symbol of the very essence of nationhood: a mantra of the imagined exceptional community.

God Bless America is another sacred reference that has been differentially present in political speech since colonial times. As with all civil religiosity, historical periods of uncertainty, instability, transformation, and conflict tend to amplify religious speech in the political sphere. The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 triggered a cascade of religious references in political discourse. Over the past 15 years of conflict in the Middle East and the war on terrorism, conservative governors with fundamentalist Christian credentials have reconfigured the separationist goalposts, using faith-based discourse in public and in governmental spaces to pray for solutions to climatic or political challenges. Equally, members of Congress have defended legislative actions against same-sex marriage or abortion and abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, based on religious values and biblical references.

Two quintessential Supreme Court cases confirm a present-day tip of the balance of separationism toward acceptance of religious attributions in public speech and corporative affairs. In one case, the legality of prayers led exclusively by Christian ministers at the beginning of town board meetings, in Greece, New York ( ^{Town of Greece v. Galloway, 2014} ), was reviewed. The conservative majority of the court determined that the establishment clause of the First Amendment had not been violated,¹³ arguing that the United States has had a historical practice of public prayer, the township was preponderantly Christian, and nonbelievers were not coerced into participating. As such, the court sanctioned practices of religious exclusivity in government affairs, thus embracing a new revisionist relativism of the notion of separation of church and state.

The Hobby Lobby case is another example of present-day conflict over the fault lines between religious freedom and state responsibility for public welfare. The decision to recognize the right to religious objection by owners of closely held, for-profit corporations ( ^{Davidoff, 2014} )¹⁴ exempted the Hobby Lobby Corporation from the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which covers the cost of birth-control through company-sponsored medical insurance. The finding sparked disputes over whether corporations are people and have the rights of citizens, since until then religious protection was only applied to autonomous individuals lacking the influence of corporate power. As such, this ruling marks a true turning point in how religious liberty is understood in the United States, questioning the very premise of separationism. Additionally, the class implications of validating religious preferences of employers over the devotional practices or secular beliefs of their employees ( ^{Maier, 2016, p. 45} ) recalibrate the walls of civil religiosity within the confines of the asymmetrical nature of capitalist labor relations, thus interrogating the principle of equality of belief systems.

Considering The Notion Of Post-Secular

In recent decades many scholars have pondered the idea of a post-secular era linked to neoliberal socioeconomic conditions and an emerging neoliberal state. Habermas coined the term (2008), contemplating contemporary socioeconomic transformations that challenge modern European secularity. ^{Beckford (2012, p. 1)} highlights the resurgence of religion in the public arena in the United States, and the expunging of the public/private division between religion and politics. Some religious scholars believe that the blurring of the public/private divide has assisted a “phenomenal resurgence of religion in culture, politics, and thought” (Crockett, 2010, cited in ^{Beckford, 2012, p. 6} ). Others point to the opening provided for faith-based organizations by the neoliberal shrinkage of state welfare policies, and the resulting familiarity and comfort with public religion. Neoliberalism has also been credited with galvanizing fundamentalist religious passion in the mobilization of a participatory devotional citizenry, and consequently injecting faith-based claims into the political arena (Bretherton, 2011, in ^{Beckford, 2012, p. 7} ). Today’s postindustrial society in the United States also harbors an intensification of the conflictive coexistence between growing secularity and consolidated stripes of militant religious orthodoxy. Cohabitation between secular, religiously liberal, and religiously orthodox values is again being tested as these visions of society frontally compete over notions of truth, matters of rights, and narratives of nationhood. The dispute over abortion exemplifies that clash of societal perspectives. As described above, legislative and judicial actions in recent years speak to that tension.