New Study of the Rhetoric of Abortion in Supreme Court Amicus Briefs

Congrats to my co-blogger, Prof. Jamie Abrams on the coverage of her research on abortion amicus briefs in the New York Times.

NYT, In Abortion Cases, Legions of "Friends" Seek to Persuade the Supreme Court

*** In the decision that overturned Roe in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court was flooded with more than 140 amicus briefs. The footnote had metastasized, spanning seven pages.

Those 50 years of amicus briefs tell a cumulative story, one explored in a new study published in The Missouri Law Review, “The Rhetoric of Abortion in Amicus Briefs.” Using corpus linguistics, a social-science tool that analyzes patterns of words in large databases, the study found that the briefs “serve as a barometer revealing how various constituencies talk about abortion, women, fetuses, physicians, rights and harms over time.”

The study, conducted by Jamie R. Abrams, a law professor at American University, and Amanda Potts, who teaches at Cardiff University, concluded that opponents of abortion had in some ways been more effective, remaining “resolutely intent on advancing fetal personhood.” The anti-abortion briefs were nimble, they wrote, and were “able to adapt and evolve in response to doctrinal shifts of the court.”

Overall, the authors wrote, abortion opponents had pressed “a more relentlessly human, emotional, personal attack to pursue its political agenda.”

The authors, self-described feminist scholars, wrote that supporters of abortion rights “simply could not counter these arguments within conventional advocacy strategies.”

I have also noticed as well that particular in the abortion amicus briefs allegedly revealing the "history" of abortion, that the history is merely partisan advocacy and junk science. And that the amicus of the historians, like the American Historical Association in Dobbs, are disregarded.