Emily Winderman

Mary E Fissell, The Lancet, Volume 407, Issue 10527
January 31, 2026

In June, 2022, the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization ended five decades of legal abortion access in the country. Now about half of the 50 US states severely limit or ban abortion. Tragically, those states have seen a spate of preventable deaths from pregnancy complications for which abortion is usually the standard of care. Scholars in a range of disciplines are looking again at the history of abortion, trying to understand past events and their legacies.

In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History, Emily Winderman examines the phrase back-alley abortion to denote the bad old days when almost all abortions in the USA were performed illegally. A researcher of the rhetoric of medicine and health, her book combines technical analyses of language and historical research, including a prehistory of purity dialogues; media treatments of specific abortion scandals; and legal cases. Analysis of this rhetoric is valuable as abortion debates continue to be sites of contest over language. Winderman argues that rhetoric about back-alley abortion connects “individual embodied experiences, history, and public memory”.

Continued: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00155-8/fulltext?rss=yes

How Anti-Abortion Groups Are Educating The Public — And Exhausting The Opposition

Anti-abortion advocates and lobbyists draft and distribute repetitive abortion-restricting legislation to “educate” or to “exhaust” the public, depending on who you ask.

Posted on July 02, 2017,
Ema O'Connor, BuzzFeed News Reporter

Nearly identical abortion laws are being considered or contested in state legislatures all over the country, and that is entirely by design.

It is one of the central strategies used by anti-abortion lobbying organizations who draft model laws and then distribute them to anti-abortion state lawmakers across the country, and even federally. Aside from being a fast and reliable way of putting new limits on abortion rights and familiarizing the public with their ideas, the repetitiveness and volume of these laws serves another purpose — exhausting their opposition.

Continued at source: Buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emaoconnor/how-anti-abortion-groups-are-educating-the-public-and

Rhetoric and abortion histories

U.S.: How Anti-Abortion Groups Are Educating The Public — And Exhausting The Opposition