Browsing by Subject "abortin debate"

This study aims to analyze the abortion debate in the United States by examining the Senate’s debate over ‘The Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act. 2022’ pursued to codify Roe v. Wade in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft planning to overrule the constitutional right to abortion. This study analyzes the values the Senators use in their arguments for and against abortion, and thus proceeds to identify the worldviews behind their abortion stances. The debate around the ‘Women’s Health Protection Act’ occurred in May 2022 and the focus is on the Republican and Democrat Senators’ rhetoric. This study answers two research question about the values and worldviews represented in the Senators’ speeches during the debate’s first day. New rhetoric, a theory on argumentation and a tool for its analysis serves as the study’s method in identifying the values used by the Senators. The study’s theoretical framework combines Lakoff’s framing theory with theories of political polarization. The theoretical framework allows for critical assessment of the values the analysis identifies. Lakoff’s framing theory pursues understanding of contemporary American politics through the concepts that constitute people’s thoughts and shape their worldviews. Political polarization aims to explain growing fundamentalist political positions and the lack of effective negotiations and compromise in the 21st century. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’ debate is the object of the analysis and 35 speeches from the two-day debate’s first day serve as this study’s data. The speeches vary in length from approximately 210 words to 2500 words. The speeches were analyzed according to Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s new rhetoric by coding the values with ATLAS.ti. The analysis identified 34 different values and the most used values per party were defined as the party’s core values within the debate’s context. For the Republican Senators these values were human life, the rights of healthcare practitioners, safety, legitimacy, the rights of the children and unborn, and science. The core values of the Democrat Senators were women’s rights, freedom, safety, legitimacy, and health. The study found the Senators’ most prominent values to resemble Lakoff’s theory on the Republicans and Democrats’ worldviews. The only contradiction was found in the Republican Senators demonstrating empathy towards women. The application of political polarization to the study’s findings showed signs of a polarized Senate and a polarized debate. The study was able to provide an account of what the Democrat’s rhetoric and frames in abortion debate may look like, as previous research mainly focuses on the Republicans. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the need to study the dynamic between the Senate and the electorate, as the findings suggest the Senate may enforce more extreme abortion legislation than the public wants.