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Activists make strategic decisions about how to pursue their claims, but strategy is hard to study and the topic is underdeveloped theoretically. Here, we contribute to the developing academic literature on social movement strategy by offering a theoretical framework that emphasizes three distinct, albeit interrelated, movement choices: arenas of action, advocacy tactics, and demands. This framework allows us to infer strategy at the movement level through the analysis of events data. Using events data from the New York Times from 1959 to 1996, in conjunction with historical accounts of abortion politics in the United States, we analyze the development of the strategies of the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements. We demonstrate the utility of this framework, and show how movement strategies are affected by both political opportunities and the actions of countermovements, whose activists respond to the same political opportunities. We conclude with a discussion of the complications of assessing movement strategy and call for more research on the topic.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

Taking both an event-centered and a process approach to cause lawyering, the chapter asks: (1) if, when, and how working with movements can lead to one being functionally seen as a cause lawyer and (2) whether researchers should include “hired gun” and state attorneys in the cause lawyering conversation. These questions are addressed by seeing how various cause lawyer qualities are exhibited by a range of attorneys involved in anti-abortion protest regulation cases. The research suggests that reasons exist to view previously excluded attorneys through the cause lawyering lens, and to continue pursuing the cause lawyer qualities discussed here.

Purpose – Scholars of social movements have tended to focus on the social movement organization (SMO) as the primary unit of analysis, documenting a trend toward its professionalization. This trend, typified in the abortion rights movement, has facilitated the survival of movements, but is associated with a reduction in tactical and strategic innovation. Innovation is associated with movement entrepreneurs, like the body of lone activists that characterizes the antiabortion movement. However, work on online activism offers evidence that SMOs are not the dominant organizing structures in online mobilization, leading to general questions about innovation and the role of SMOs online.

Methodology – I analyze quantitatively content-coded data for the role of organizations and for innovative uses of the web for protest in the online abortion rights and antiabortion movements.

Findings – The two movements have different online footprints, with organizations dominating the former but not the latter, and an overall larger volume of antiabortion claims-making. Unlike in offline activism, organizationally affiliated sites are not less likely than those without an organizational affiliation to leverage innovative uses of the web for claims-making. Organizational composition may matter in other ways, though: the greater representation of antiabortion claims online, especially by individual activists, may be a lingering effect of the abortion rights movement's offline professionalization.

Research implications – These findings point to the importance of attending to variation across movements when they migrate online in investigations of new media for protest and for rethinking the role of SMOs in social movements.

To explore the politics of gender, health, medicine, and citizenship in high-income countries, medical sociologists have focused primarily on the practice of legal abortion. In middle- and low-income countries with restrictive abortion laws, however, medical sociologists must examine what happens when women have already experienced spontaneous or induced abortion. Post-abortion care (PAC), a global reproductive health intervention that treats complications of abortion and has been implemented in nearly 50 countries worldwide, offers important theoretical insights into transnational politics of abortion and reproduction in countries with restrictive abortion laws. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnography of Senegal’s PAC program to examine the professional, clinical, and technological politics and practices of obstetric care for abortions that have already occurred. I use the sociological concepts of professional boundary work and boundary objects to demonstrate how Senegalese health professionals have established the political and clinical legitimacy of PAC. I demonstrate the professional precariousness of practicing PAC for physicians, midwives, and nurses. I show how the dual capacity of PAC technologies to terminate pregnancy and treat abortion complications has limited their circulation within the health system, thereby reducing quality of care. Given the contradictory and complex global landscape of twenty-first-century abortion governance, in which pharmaceutical forms of abortion such as Misoprostol are increasingly available in developing countries, and as abortion restrictions are increasingly enforced across the developed world, PAC offers important theoretical opportunities to advance medical sociology research on abortion politics and practices in the global North and South.

Although research on reproductive technologies such as IVF and egg freezing has traditionally been rather separated from the work on contraceptives and abortion, analysing reproductive and nonreproductive technologies together, as this volume proposes, can provide the basis for a broader contemporary politics of reproductive control. This chapter analyses this politics of integrating reproductive and nonreproductive technologies by focusing specifically on IVF-based fertility (preservation) treatments and (medical) abortion. More specifically, it explores both technologies' interrelated research trajectories and the financial and platformised dimensions of their clinical implementation. With a dual focus on egg freezing and medical abortion, this project seeks to explore how processes of platformisation and financialisation shape the clinical and commercial infrastructures that govern twenty-first-century reproduction. The chapter's broadened analytic scope that incorporates both reproductive and nonreproductive technologies highlights how a contemporary biopolitics of reproductive control may be expressed through these technologies' interrelated regulatory practices, shared politicised reference points (e.g. the embryo), opposite investment practices and mutually reinforcing social effects.

As biomedicine becomes increasingly enmeshed in modern life, biomedicalization processes have implications for reproductive policy, including abortion policy. Informed consent provisions have been a prominent trend in state-level abortion lawmaking in the United States in recent years. Modeled on the practice of securing informed consent for medical procedures, informed consent provisions stipulate the information a person must receive before they can consent to an abortion. Informed consent provisions purportedly require that this information be objective, scientifically accurate, and non-judgmental. Through an analysis of informed consent provisions in Texas abortion legislation from 1993 to 2015, this chapter explores how such provisions employ medical and biomedical tropes to frame regulations that restrict access to abortion care as ostensibly protecting women’s health and safety. I find that informed consent legislation in Texas selectively borrows from medical and biomedical lexicons, cites strategic empirical evidence, and co-opts medical techniques and experts in ways that encumber abortion access.