Abortion Is Still Genocide

Today I ran across an article in the journal, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, published by Oxford University Press. Titled, “Perspectives: Abortion and Genocide: the Unbridgeable Gap”, it is written by Jessica Woolford and Andrew Woolford, and appears in the Spring 2007 issue that came out first on March 23.

From the article: “Jessica Woolford recently completed her M.A. in English at the University of Manitoba. Andrew Woolford is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.”

The abstract follows:

“This article examines The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's claim that abortion is genocide, assessing it against legal, trait-based and "dynamic process" definitions of genocide. The purpose of this exercise is not to give credence to what many consider an outrageous claim, nor is it to merely refute this claim based upon a close reading of existing definitions of genocide; instead, by subjecting The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's claim to an ethical and performative evaluation, our goal is to illustrate how the term genocide can be "misused." In the end, we argue that The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform uses the term genocide for its own totalizing and essentializing purposes, and in doing so engages in practices that share an affinity with the exclusionary discourses that help make genocide thinkable.”

The entire article can be found at the following web address. Access to the article requires registration and a $23.00 payment.

http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/14/1/126

I will be writing a response to the article when time allows, but for now I will say that its arguments are fairly easy to answer. In discourse with professors and students on university campuses throughout the United States [and in Canada] we have encountered them in many varied forms, expressed at various levels of sophistication.