Chapter 3: Understanding Anti-Abortion Activism as Lived Religion

This chapter will outline the conceptual framework of the book, which combines understandings from the sociology of religion and reproductive health. The activities of anti-abortion activists take place in a cultural context in which motherhood is sacralised. It is expected that women will make sacrifices for the benefit of actual or future children. As we will show, Christianity also has specific understandings about motherhood being natural for women and this shapes the worldview of anti-abortion activists. Yet anti-abortion activists configure motherhood in slightly different ways, going much further in the sacrificial demands that they place on women. Firstly, this chapter explains the lived religion approach that we have taken to explore the everyday practices of anti-abortion activism. Given that anti-abortion activists make particular distinctions between the sacred and profane, we will explain how conceptual understandings of the sacred and profane help us to explain the everyday faith practices of United Kingdom (UK) anti-abortion activism. Using Lynch's (2012a, 2012b) notion of sacred forms, we will articulate how ultra-sacrificial motherhood becomes the sacred commitment of anti-abortion activists, whilst also highlighting the contrasting sacred commitments of pro-choice counterdemonstrators. The chapter will then move on to consider materiality and spatiality as important concepts in understanding anti-abortion activism.