Pro-Life Professionals: How Anti-Abortion Medical Experts Cultivate Credibility in the United States

• In Event: 50667 - Challenging epistemic institutions: Unruly knowledge, outlaw technology, and fringe-mainstream relations

Abstract

How do anti-abortion groups in the United States work to generate credibility as experts—or what I call expert capital—in order to be taken seriously by courts and legislatures? What habits, networks, and resources to they use in order to match and compete with the expertise of their pro-abortion rivals? To answer these questions, this paper draws on ethnographic observation conducted at the annual Matthew Bulfin Educational Conference (MBEC), jointly organized by the American Association of pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Pediatricians. I find that anti-abortion medical professionals engage in a series of actions as an epistemic community meant to shore up the value of their contributions in the public debate. First, they distance themselves from activists by coordinating their activities in a seemingly ordinary setting where professional norms and codes are maintained. Second, they pool the resources of their wealthy sponsors, including the Heritage Foundation, in order to make it easier to produce expertise that looks scientific and can pass muster before decision-makers. Third, they attempt to create expert capital and shape scientific production through a series of workshops, one that trains attendees on how to be expert witnesses in court cases or testify before lawmakers, another that instructs them on conducting peer-review in their respective fields in ways that spread “pro-life” discourse. Finally, they provide a space in which senior and junior colleagues, almost all of whom work or train in mainstream hospitals and medical schools, can network and advance their agendas despite their relative marginalization in their respective fields where commitments to upholding comprehensive healthcare, which includes abortion, are still the norm.

Author

• Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès