Normally, I shy away from talking about reproductive rights in the rhetoric classroom, even though I study reproductive rights discourse in my research. The reasons are several: first and foremost, I want to guard students’ privacy; second, it’s a topic I have fairly strong feelings about myself and I don’t want to get myself in an uncomfortable situation with students who feel differently; and third, I just don’t see many opportunities for stasis in the values-based, divisive discourse surrounding abortion.

This semester, though, I allowed students in my RHE 309S class to study any political controversy, as long as they could find an organization on campus that was intervening in that controversy to work with. I did not expect to have two students with interest in reproductive rights rhetoric—-one pro-life, one pro-choice. As these students worked on their research summaries, I was impressed with the range of opinions and research each was doing, so I did not worry too much about the potentially volatile nature of their topics. However, when we started talking in class about students’ controversies, I noticed a lot of under-the-breath comments when my abortion rights students spoke. I asked people to speak out loud after I heard whispered conversations, but no one seemed to want to actually confront the students that believed differently than they did.

I figured I was going to have to bring the topic into the open, so it wouldn’t continue to shut down or derail class discussion. I chose a day when I had not assigned any reading and instead brought into class excerpts from Naomi Wolf’s “Our Bodies, Our Souls: Re-thinking Pro-Choice Rhetoric” (1995). Wolf argues in the article that pro-life rhetoric has co-opted the language of ethics and moral choice from pro-choice activists, who (she says) fail to acknowledge the emotional and moral pain of women who have abortions. She argues for a new pro-choice language that “call[s] upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning,” using terminology and arguments from religious traditions and from her own experiences with feminism and with abortion.

Two drawbacks to using the article: first, Wolf’s rhetoric here is emotionally laden, personal (to the point of being oddly apolitical), and sometimes judgmental of women’s choices. The piece was first published in The New Republic, and Wolf’s indictment of feminists as elitist and “callous” certainly appeals to her audience there. Second, it is very long. If I assigned it again, I would have students read it at home; as it was, I butchered it to a semi-manageable six pages, noting where I had cut paragraphs.

Overall, I found “Our Bodies, Our Souls” a good solution to the dilemma I was facing of needing to address reproductive rights issues within a class I knew was divided on the debate itself. Most helpfully, Wolf actively seeks stasis between pro-life and pro-choice positions in passages like this one: “Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of the lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go.” Though my students did not all agree with Wolf’s positions, her reach to pro-life and pro-choice camps was universally appealing to them. They appreciated her using her personal experience as well as critiquing others' decisions regarding abortion (they noticed that it helped her ethos!), and they got on board with her vision of a feminist future: “imagine … a world that is accepting and responsible about human sexuality; in which there is no coerced sex without serious jailtime: in which there are affordable, safe contraceptives available for the taking in every public health building; in which there is economic parity for women.” In fact, Wolf models here the reproductive rights rhetoric Barack Obama (mostly) successfully used in his campaign, tapping into the widely shared value of planned pregnancies and rape prevention.

In addition, Wolf’s own focus on rhetoric made this a good text to substitute into my curriculum. She analyzes as well as models pathos, ethos-building, analogy, and appeals to religious and secular, feminist and social conservative authority. My students were especially interested in discussing Wolf’s claim that Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, who is now a pro-life advocate) is an “American Everywoman” and her analogy of abortion rights to Catholic Just War theology. Ultimately, we had a good discussion on the rhetoric of reproductive rights discourse, which allowed them to get out in the open the opinions they’d been expressing to their allies in the class but also allowed me to keep the conversation relatively impersonal and related to course goals. Under-the-breath comments on other students’ views on abortion ceased.

I probably would not assign this text in a course on feminism or women’s studies, or at least I would not assign it without contextualizing Wolf’s very moderate position with other texts on reproductive rights issues. However, as a text that discusses a difficult issue in a rhetorically effective and non-volatile way, “Our Bodies, Our Souls” is very successful, and I could see myself introducing it again in lower-division rhetoric classes. If you have ideas for other texts that have worked or would work well for discussing issues we don't usually plan on discussing, please leave them in the comments!