ABORTION, MORAL MATURITY AND CIVIC JOURNALISM

Public rhetoric on abortion and the journalistic coverage of it has ma tured in tone and content over the years since women's magazines first broke a long public silence on the issue in the 1940s. Since the 1970 s, extremist views on abortion have dominated the press. But new commo n ground arguments represent an emergence of the feminine ethical resp onse of care and responsibility into the foreground of public discours e where it is tempering the long-dominant language of individual right s with relational concern for others. This article proceeds from a wom en's voice/experience perspective on feminism and applies a narrative method of rhetorical analysis to the coverage of abortion in American popular media from the 1940s to the 1990s. This analysis is used: (1) To establish that the feminine means of moral reasoning, i.e., the eth ic of care (Gilligan, 1982) that is generally relegated to the private sphere, has emerged gradually into the foreground of American public discourse on abortion; (2) to trace a gradual maturation of public dis course on abortion along the Path of ethical and epistemological devel opment established by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986), and other scholars in the feminist voice tradition; and (3) to compar e the recent emergence of common-ground rhetoric on abortion with a si milar impulse driving the civic (or public) journalism movement, in te rms of the ethical and epistemological orientations they both instanti ate.