Regulating Abortion and Controlling Women in the Shadow of the Carceral State

• In Event: Bias and Discrimination in the Criminal Legal System and Beyond

Abstract

This research explores the sociopolitical foundations of abortion legislation and the oblique but significant ways in which it punishes women. I employ a critical discourse analysis of bills proposed in the Texas legislature between 2020 and 2023 to identify discursive elements that illuminate how lawmakers used abortion legislation to expand the state’s coercive control over women with special attention to the use of civil and administrative sanctions. These provisions are nominally outside of penal law and its concomitant due process guarantees but they nonetheless are coercive and represent an undercurrent of carceral power as they are backed by the state and its violent enforcement apparatus. Moreover, abortion providers and seekers need not violate the law for women to be penalized. The state punishes women when its threats of monetary, professional, or penal sanctions render essential actors impotent to provide them with crucial healthcare. I argue that without control over their bodies and life chances and only a meager welfare state to rely on, women are confined by the state outside its prison walls. More broadly, my analysis reveals how language constructs carceral power and in doing so reflects and reinforces patriarchal forces and their connection to American criminal justice.

Author

• Aubrey Jackson Soller, University of Maryland, Baltimore County