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Amid a volatile abortion landscape in the United States, Our Lives goes beyond polling and politics to uncover the raw messiness of everyday Americans' abortion attitudes. Drawing on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with a randomly selected, closely representative set of US residents in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, sociologist Tricia Colleen Bruce uncovers the ambivalence, loyalties, doubts, contradictions, personal ties, and quiet stories undergirding moral and legal views on abortion.
Listening to everyday Americans complicates straightforward pro-choice and pro-life talking points and reveals something more about contemporary judgments as to what makes a good life, a good person, a good government, and a good society. How Americans think about abortion, Bruce shows, turns out to say a lot about how Americans think about themselves, each other, and the society they imagine, create, and live in—together.
Tricia Colleen Bruce is a sociologist and past president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion whose books include Faithful Revolution, American Parishes, Polarization in the US Catholic Church, and the award-winning Parish and Place.
"Pro-lifers, especially given recent setbacks, should read this book carefully. Most people haven’t thought about abortion in a serious and informed way and significant hope remains for views that insist on justice for both human beings present in a pregnancy.”—Charles Camosy, author of Resisting Throwaway Culture
“This book does a phenomenal job bringing together the numerous considerations that come into play with people’s abortion attitudes, many of which I suspect people have subconsciously thought of but never really surfaced. Being careful not to add her opinion or too much interpretation to respondents’ views, Tricia Bruce weaves together a beautiful synthesis of Americans’ views: where they clash, how they overlap, and what seems to really be at stake. It’s very thoughtful, and at times has a sort of prophetic tone to it.”—Michael Rotolo, Pew Research Center
“Unlike most large-scale studies of abortion attitudes, this book is based not on a survey but rather on hundreds of in-depth interviews with a nationally representative sample of everyday Americans. The result is a staggeringly humane and complex portrait of people doing their best to grapple with an issue that has become only more central to our national politics.”—Ruth Braunstein, SNF Agora Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, host of the award-winning podcast When the Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, and author of My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America
“The book’s primary contribution is the extraordinary detail and nuance the author has achieved in the interviews. The polarization of thought on abortion leaves public discourse seeming very hackneyed and black-and-white, but in fact most people have complicated ways of thinking about, justifying, condemning, and classifying abortion. I don’t know of another book or study that does this for any major issue, and certainly not for abortion. That this appears so soon after the Dobbs decision makes it all the more important, since it reveals the messy world into which the decision was dropped.”—Andrew J. Perrin, SNF Agora Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
“Bruce amplifies the qualitative research to let the participants’ views present a convincing story about the murkiness of American opinions on abortion.”—Monique Moultrie, Professor of Religious Studies, Georgia State University
“Our Lives is simply brilliant, an indispensable field guide to the complexity of abortion attitudes in America. Bruce fundamentally recasts our understanding of this critical issue, inviting us to think in new ways about life, liberty, and the most intimate parts of American life.”—Mary Ziegler, author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession
“Bruce offers a rare, deeply grounded look at how everyday Americans make sense of abortion. In a field dominated by survey data, this book provides textured insight into lived moral reasoning—careful, empirically rich, and refreshingly free of political agenda. An important contribution to the sociology of abortion attitudes.”—Amy Adamczyk, author of Fetal Positions
“Our Lives will quickly become an invaluable addition to the study of abortion attitudes in the United States. In a discourse so often marked by loud voices on the polar ends of a manufactured spectrum, Bruce skillfully reveals the ambivalence and complexity of our shared abortion imaginary.”—Andrew Whitehead, sociologist, award-winning author of American Idolatry, and coauthor of Taking America Back for God