Before the Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the 21st-century anti-choice movement was focused on establishing informed consent statutes as a means to discourage or prevent abortions. Often titled “A Woman’s Right to Know,” these laws require that patients are warned of alleged risks of breast cancer, infertility, and psychological trauma following abortions. In some states, patients must undergo an ultrasound and wait at least 24-hours before receiving an abortion. These statutes have been shown to delay or hinder care.This dissertation is a genealogy of these informational requirements. I analyze how Roe v. Wade (1973) and ensuing abortion jurisprudence in the 1970s enshrined the abortion right in a medicalized framework of abortion access. This framing eschewed feminists’ requests that women be solely responsible for deciding when and why to undergo an abortion. Instead, the Court articulated a qualified first-trimester privacy right in which pregnant women were tasked with making a responsible abortion decision in consultation with their physician. Through historical and legislative analysis, this dissertation traces how the medicalized right to abortion enabled the later development of informed consent statutes. The informed consent doctrine ideally seeks to protect patient autonomy from medical paternalism. But the noun “patient” acts as a qualifier that configures someone’s autonomy and available choices according to their status as a patient. The doctrine was thus an ideal vehicle for anti-choice efforts to implement restrictions meant to protect abortion patients. It enabled statutes that nominally promoted pregnant women’s autonomy, while infusing informational requirements with religious views of well-being that confused motherhood with health. I argue that the discourse of “abortion regret”, which produced motherhood as the rational, retroactive, even if foregone choice, legitimized these informational requirements. From Roe onwards, pregnant people were tasked with making responsible abortion decisions in light of their health. Throughout the decades, however, 1) how “women’s health” was conceptualized and 2) whether physicians or the State were the rightful shepherds of the abortion decision became battlegrounds for pro- and anti-choice organizing.

The first two decades of the 21st century were marked by protracted wars fought by the United States. In addition to killing and displacing millions of Afghans and Iraqis, these wars called to question long-standing assumptions about the US military and its personnel. They challenged conceptions of patriotic obligations by relying on an “All-Volunteer Force,” a first for a prolonged conflict, and they challenged conceptions of military masculinity with the inclusion of women in combat roles. One response among some military veterans is seen in the rise of so-called “VetBros.” A VetBro is a stereotype, often used dismissively, to represent overbearing and aggressive veterans who interpret everything through their veteran identity and who express themselves with conspicuous displays of masculinity and patriotism which they see as linked to militarism and violence. VetBros show the effects of broader problems in the relationship between state, society, and military that emanate from tensions in military culture with the waging of, at the time, seemingly endless wars of occupation by a democratic society. In this dissertation I examine different ways VetBros have expressed their understandings of the military, patriotism, masculinity by looking at how they express their veteran identity in war memoirs, a streaming video comedy network, military-themed lifestyle branding, and political campaigns. Through these various media I show how VetBros construct an identity and image united by similar styles of fashion, communication, and their assertions that they represent an authentic veteran identity. Military veterans have traditionally received a great deal of cultural capital to define matters like patriotism and masculinity and, as my analysis shows, VetBros believe that they have a privileged place among veterans to define these matters. Importantly, they see masculinity and patriotism as inextricably linked to militaristic beliefs and the justification of violent action. Due to the culturally symbolic position of veterans in the US, the VetBro visions of aggressive patriotism and masculinity may give legitimacy to support greater militarization of US society, justify war crimes abroad, and encourage vigilante violence at home.