Narrative Diversity and Sympathetic Abortion: What Online Storytelling Reveals About the Prescribed Norms of the Mainstream Movements

Abstract

Social movement scholarship demonstrates the importance of formula stories in raising awareness for social causes. The stories put forth by the opposing sides of the abortion rights issue in the United States utilize sympathetic narratives in furthering their arguments for and against abortion rights respectively, but differences in each side's narrative strategies are instructive in understanding current reproductive debate discourse. This article is a qualitative examination of abortion narratives published on two websites, one pro‐life and one pro‐choice. Chief among my findings are that narratives for each cause support opposed views of women's appropriate contemporary social roles and that authors' reported approaches to pregnancy and abortion are instrumental in constructing these broader understandings. Narratives posted by pro‐choice authors are confined by circumstantial norms surrounding unintended pregnancy (such as young age, student status, and first‐time pregnancy) as well as by a requirement to attribute empowering outcomes to the abortion decision. Pro‐life authors discuss a broader array of circumstances surrounding their pregnancies with narratives ultimately unified by themes of intense regret followed by atonement.