Emily Winderman, Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History

In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History, Emily Winderman examines the origins and uses of the phrase ‘back-alley abortion’. Winderman argues that this phrase ‘is a rhetoric whose meaning is often distorted with respect to historical reality’ (p. 4). Specifically, Winderman shows how the term ‘back-alley abortion’ has managed to absorb and represent a host of emotions and values into such a small package, and that its meaning has been used for a variety of political motivations—both pro and anti-abortion. Though the phrase was not used until the 1960s, Winderman begins chapter one by establishing its origins in the Progressive era United States and London. As reformers surveyed their cities, they began to link certain spaces in the city (like alleyways) to vice, crime, filth, and disease. Over time, these reformers’ published works, newspapers articles, advertisements, and popular culture amalgamated to a point where the physical space of the back-alley connoted filth, personal failings, people of bad character, poverty, and the like. These social meanings remained and lingered as ‘affective residue’. According to Winderman, ‘affective residue presumes that the repeated circulation of sensory appeals in association with terms like ‘back-alley’ can imbue physical places and imagined spaces with residue that cements spatial-power associations’ (p. 39).