ABSTRACT
First in this chapter I draw on previous research on the history of legislation on abortion in Norway by Merethe Flatseth and Ole Jacob Madsen, which unravels how mental health issues came into being as legitimate grounds for seeking selective abortion in Norway from the 1960s and continues to figure in discussions about central amendments in 1996 and 2003. Flatseth and Madsen demonstrate how psy and a therapeutic ethos now serves as a framework of meaning for every political party in Norway when it comes to abortion, interestingly enough also the Christian Democratic Party despite its religious motifs for opposition. Second, this chapter offers an insight into the trial of the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik who committed what was then the single most lethal act of solo terrorism in modern history – killing seventy-seven innocent people, most of them children, on July 22, 2011. The following public hearing and sentencing brought out a suppressed tension between a moral-legal discourse and psychiatric-therapeutic discourse in the Norwegian court system, but the tension may not be as obvious as many critics claimed; that it is only the psychiatric-therapeutic discourse that represents the therapeutic ethos.
