Monday, June 04, 2012

Academic Paper Addresses "New Rhetoric" of Anti-Abortion Movement in Canada

ProWomanProLife frequently cited.

Way to go, ladies!

I still get the feeling that the authors of this paper don`t really "get" the pro-life movement. I think they're trying to make pro-life discourse "fit" into theoretical framework.

I think rather than divide the pro-life discourse into Canadian/American I think the more useful division is between "professional" (for lack of a better word) pro-lifers, that is, people who are heavily involved in the movement, and are the face of the movement, and those who are not.

I would also say that it that there is a division between those are who are over forty and those who are under.

When you divide pro-lifers this way, you will find a lot more similarities between Canadians and Americans.


Updated

Just wanted to add: One of the reasons why I didn't think that the researchers didn't get the pro-life movement is the way they chose the websites.

All the websites mentioned do very good work.

But Campaign Life Coalition and LifeSiteNews are far more representative of the pro-life movement. Not everyone has read Signal Hill or Alliance for Life Ontario.

But just about every active pro-lifer reads LSN and a lot of them consult Campaign Life for elections. Far more pro-lifers take their cue from them than any other source.

The fact they didn't pick those two websites to analyze as a source of Canadian pro-life rhetoric gives the message that the opposition is still tone-deaf about us.

But we didn't need a paper to tell us that.