ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how organizations fighting for and against legal access to abortion in the United States use expertise that is—or appears to be—scientific to support their positions. The appeal to the “technical” dimensions of abortion, such as biological definitions of fetal development and viability thresholds, has been a central feature of U.S. debates. Lawmakers, judges, and the media have created high demand for scientific and medical expertise that can address those issues. In turn, that demand has both constrained and enabled experts within think tanks, institutes, professional organizations, universities, and other institutions to produce information in response. This chapter argues that these appeals to expertise are the result, in part, of legal frames. Once the Supreme Court based its reasoning in Roe v. Wade (1973) on the trimester framework, the justices imposed a medicalized legal frame that would shape abortion debates for generations. Combining insights from morality politics scholarship and the sociology of politicized science, this chapter explores how these medicalized frames have had a lasting impact both on abortion debates in the U.S. and on expert knowledge production more generally.
