Abortion care as moral work: Ethical considerations of maternal and fetal bodies By JohannaSchoen (ed)., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2022. 202 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abortion Care as Moral Work, a volume edited by historian of reproduction Johanna Schoen, is a timely exploration of the moral implications of abortion access, abortion care, and the institutions and individuals that provide it.Organized across four parts, the book explores providers, clinics, "conscience," and "the fetus" as key moral actors.Schoen's introduction to the book provides a historical overview of the provision of abortion care in the United States.This historicization continues through each of the four sections where Schoen introduces the medical, legal, and social advancements that shaped the moral work of abortion provision through the latter half of the 20th century.She traces what "providing abortions" looked like across changes in the legal and medical landscapes from the pre-Roe to post-Roe era, highlighting the antiabortion violence that irrevocably shaped the work.This historical setup provides a frame for beginning to think about why, given such physical and emotional demands, someone would volunteer to provide abortions.This question is at the heart of much scholarship about the moral and ethical work of being an abortion provider.The first section, "Providers," describes the "factors that led medical professionals to become involved in the provision of abortion care and of their experiences providing services in an increasingly politicized field" (13).This included how the traumatic experiences of helping people who experienced injury from illegal abortion pre-Roe led many physicians to enter the field of abortion care.The search for new abortion techniques-for example, the use of laminaria to induce abortion-was driven by a desire to expand access to different gestational ages and make the process more accessible.This links the development of medical technologies-a "scientific" endeavor-to the moral work involved in reproduction (i.e., Rapp, 1987).The chapters in the first two sections are all first-person accounts and reflections of the experience of providers and clinic directors: intimate looks into the moral motivations that drive people to provide abortions.Their sentiments can often be summed up by this quote from Lisa Harris, who said: "…accused of having no conscience, I realized that my crisis of conscience would come if I didn't do abortion work, if I abandoned women who needed care.In other words, I was a 'conscientious provider'" (79).Turning the concept of "conscientious objection" on its head, abortion providers who lead with their ethical convictions borrow the idea of conscience from religious, antiabortion advocates and use it to frame the provision of abortion as the moral choice.This idea has been important in pushing back on
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".