Recognize me: Embodied recognition and the dilemma of abortion

Because abortion was justified primarily as an issue of privacy contingent upon the trimester framework of pregnancy in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, it has been left vulnerable to radical revision, which has put the right itself in question. Though the privacy rationale has a place in the abortion argument, it is insufficient to justify the right to abortion in multiple ways. First, it does not acknowledge prior inequality in the private, nor the social factors that limit the right to privacy. Second, as articulated to Roe, only the right to decide is protected, not the right to access. Third, because it is still grounded in the individualism of liberal theory, and not in women's autonomy, women's authority to make that choice knowingly is delegitimized. And finally, the private context of the decision is not sufficiently differentiated from the interest of the state. In the context of the 1978 by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, I further argue that denial of the right to abortion potentially functions in a similar fashion. To the extent that women are denied control of decisions regarding their pregnancies, and hence of their futures, in a way that men are not, denial of the right to abortion constitutes discrimination.;To more completely address these weaknesses of the privacy argument in the context of abortion, I will first argue in this paper that as a normative framework for justice, recognition has the capacity to address problems that arise from the confluence of identity, power, and the role of capital; it thus provides a much stronger theoretical and practical basis for the right to abortion than the right to privacy, and draws attention to the ways lack of a right to abortion detrimentally affects women and their chances for social, economic, and political equality. Next I will introduce the concept of embodiment as a way to reposition women, their experiences, and their agency as the foci of the dilemma, and recognizing the way social support mechanisms impact women's potential choices and their outcomes, we can move toward recognition of the abortion right as part of a broader reproductive rights and justice framework that supports a similarly strong understanding of equality. I will also use this framework to interrogate whether the practice of recognition better challenges conventional treatments of the abortion conflict in a way that moves social and political struggles toward the broader goal of gender justice, and as a way to secure the abortion right as a permanent one.