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Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society Advance Access originally published online on March 23, 2007
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 2007 14(1):126-153; doi:10.1093/sp/jxm004
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Perspectives: Abortion and Genocide: The Unbridgeable Gap1

Woolford Jessica1 and Woolford Andrew2,

1 Jessica Woolford recently completed her M.A. in English at the University of Manitoba
2 Andrew Woolford is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba

Correspondence: Please direct all correspondence to: Andrew Woolford, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB., Canada, R3T-2N2, andrew_woolford{at}umanitoba.ca

This article examines The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's claim that abortion is genocide, assessing it against legal, trait-based and "dynamic process" definitions of genocide. The purpose of this exercise is not to give credence to what many consider an outrageous claim, nor is it to merely refute this claim based upon a close reading of existing definitions of genocide; instead, by subjecting The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's claim to an ethical and performative evaluation, our goal is to illustrate how the term genocide can be "misused." In the end, we argue that The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform uses the term genocide for its own totalizing and essentializing purposes, and in doing so engages in practices that share an affinity with the exclusionary discourses that help make genocide thinkable.

1 We would like to thank Adam Muller and our two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.


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