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Last spring, the innocuously named "Center for Bio-Ethical Reform" set up a demonstration in downtown Portland, Oregon, in the middle of my university. Although it picketed and wielded enormous, graphic murals of fetuses representing what it calls the "American holocaust," this organization received little response, or even notice, on this urban, liberal campus. The media and local analysts largely described the event as an isolated instance of antiabortion activism. It seemed at the time that the intellectual community simply did not have the proper framework for understanding this form of political behavior. Alesha E. Doan's book provides us with that framework, and reminds us that far from isolated, innocuous events, such direct actions are rather a deliberate and political form of harassment designed to create an environment of fear in which fewer individuals will be willing to perform or receive abortions.
Doan has contributed a very timely and valuable work to our understanding--both practically and theoretically--of contemporary abortion-protest strategies. She places current strategies within a framework of social movement theory, both reviewing that voluminous literature and expanding it as she explains the ways in which contemporary antiabortion tactics sit uncomfortably within our academic understanding of political protest.
Much of contemporary antiabortion protest is generally understood by academics, activists, and casual observers alike as individual and isolated behavior, devoid of political intent....