ABSTRACT
This chapter examines epistemic rights, such as the right to know, within the context of polarized public debate. In order to examine and highlight the role that epistemic rights play in this context, I focus on the highly polarized pro-life versus pro-choice debate surrounding abortion in the United Kingdom and the United States, where the concept of the ‘right to know’ is already embedded in the debate rhetoric. As actors on both sides of this debate attest, a woman’s access to accurate information and her ability to trust the information that she is given underwrite her ability to make an informed decision about having an abortion. For this reason, epistemic rights feature both implicitly and explicitly in the abortion debate. I argue that the proper characterization of epistemic rights allows us to identify a range of epistemic harms perpetrated by key actors in the debate amounting to epistemic rights violations. Using two case studies, I highlight where epistemic rights arise and are violated in the abortion debate and examine the consequences of these violations for individuals and epistemic communities. I conclude that epistemic rights violations in the abortion debate harm individuals, diminish the quality of the debate and lead to increased polarization. This offers insights into the role of epistemic rights in other similarly polarized debates.
