Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Abortion Figurations (Using Human Rights to Change Abortion Law: Involvement Patterns and Argumentative Architectures in the Global Figuration of Human Rights)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-10-01 bis 2025-03-31
Abortion Figurations studies abortion debates in three pairs of countries that represent three regional human rights systems: Mozambique and Senegal (the African Union), Poland and Ireland (the Council of Europe), and Argentina and Honduras (the Organization of American States). Our research shows the ambivalence of human rights that are being used successfully to argue both for more liberal and more restrictive abortion laws. To explain this ambivalence, we apply concepts of argumentative architecture and involvement patterns, developed by Marta Bucholc as part of her figurational theory of law. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative sociology, legal analysis, and corpus linguistics, we will offer a multi-dimensional model for a globally comparative, interdisciplinary socio-legal study of human rights. We will study the structure, composition, and embedding of arguments, along with group perspectives, emotions, and circles of identification of arguing actors so as to arrive at a heat map that will show the distribution of involvement in argumentative architectures. By constructing a global meta-typology of argumentative architectures and involvement patterns in abortion debates, we will explore the integrative potential of human rights and identify the centrifugal forces in human rights figuration that comprises the local, regional, and global levels.
Abortion remains a crucial issue today as it sits at the intersection of public health, political ideology, and human rights. Understanding how human rights are invoked in such debates offers tools to policymakers to navigate the many ambiguities that appear to be part of the social and cultural understandings of human rights. Different actors deploy the language of human rights, which leads to conflicting interpretations and applications of human rights principles in the abortion debate. Competing claims create legal and ethical tensions, influencing policy decisions, court rulings, and international human rights discussions. Examining how human rights are mobilised allows for a deeper understanding of the power dynamics at play and helps craft more informed, context-sensitive approaches to abortion laws and regulations. Our study will help policymakers navigate the polarised abortion debate by providing a nuanced understanding of how human rights arguments are mobilised in different contexts. We also expect that studying how human rights are invoked in abortion debates will help policymakers craft policies that enhance democratic legitimacy and social cohesion.
Abortion remains a crucial issue today as it sits at the intersection of public health, political ideology, and human rights. Understanding how human rights are invoked in such debates offers tools to policymakers to navigate the many ambiguities that appear to be part of the social and cultural understandings of human rights. Different actors deploy the language of human rights, which leads to conflicting interpretations and applications of human rights principles in the abortion debate. Competing claims create legal and ethical tensions, influencing policy decisions, court rulings, and international human rights discussions. Examining how human rights are mobilised allows for a deeper understanding of the power dynamics at play and helps craft more informed, context-sensitive approaches to abortion laws and regulations. Our study will help policymakers navigate the polarised abortion debate by providing a nuanced understanding of how human rights arguments are mobilised in different contexts. We also expect that studying how human rights are invoked in abortion debates will help policymakers craft policies that enhance democratic legitimacy and social cohesion.
The project work encompasses three types of research. First, legal analysis of laws, regulations, and secondary literature of international human rights law related to what we call "global governance of abortion". Second, sociological research, with fieldwork in six different countries involving expert interviews, individual interviews with active participants of abortion debates, and focus group interviews with members of advocacy organisations. Third, linguistic analysis of text corpora documenting abortion debates. Combining three distinct disciplinary methodologies and applying a common analytical grid to a set of comparative, context-sensitive data from diverse locations is the major achievement of the project, fuelled by the theoretical achievements of conceptualising argumentative architectures and involvement patterns as to inherently transdisciplinary contributions to empirical study of law. The project has also developed extensive knowledge about research ethics and methodology, including in particular disclosure policies and benefit-sharing arrangements in social-scientific research of vulnerable groups and sensitive topics in contexts characterised by cultural diversity, and economic inequality, and political instability.
The project collects comparative data on abortion and human rights debates in six countries which have never been studies in this configuration before, locating them in regional and global human rights systems. THe impact of the project is primarily in the field of human rights law and abortion regulation, with significant potential to expand on educational, training, and policy-related activities. Our publications and presentations so far advance the research field insofar as consistently shedding light on the ideological dimension of human rights, the context-specific embeddedness of human rights in connection to abortion, as well as proposing and elaborating on the figurational theory of law. In particular, we have been continuously expanding the field towards the issues of transgender and intersex persons relating to sexual and reproductive health, in particular, abortion. This direction goes beyond the state of the art insofar as it connects current debates on intersex and trans rights with human rights discussions that pivot around women’s reproductive rights and thus allow for an expansion of the issue of integrative and divisive potential produced by argumentative architectures of human rights in various historical and cultural contexts in which involvement patterns in human rights may differ significantly.