“Many commentators and pundits…want abortion to be legal, at least in the early weeks, but they want to make clear it’s a bad thing and there’s way too much of it.”
BOOK EXCERPT
I want to help reframe the way we think about abortion. There are definitely short-term advantages to stressing the anguish some women feel when facing the need to end a pregnancy, but in the long run, presenting that as a general truth will hurt the pro-choice cause: It comes close to demanding that women accept grief, shame and stigma as the price of ending a pregnancy.
I want us to start thinking of abortion as a positive social good and saying this out loud. The anti-abortion movement has been far too successful at painting abortion as bad for women. I want to argue, to the contrary, that it is an essential option for women—not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women—and thus benefits society as a whole.
I don’t expect to convince many abortion opponents to see my point of view. But I do want to speak to the so-called “muddled middle,” those millions of Americans—more than half—who don’t want to ban abortion, exactly, but don’t want it to be widely available either (Pew Research, 7/13).
This is the view that is echoed and reinforced endlessly in the mainstream media. Many commentators and pundits take a position of “permit but discourage,” or maybe a better way to put it in their own case is “permit but deplore.” They want abortion to be legal, at least in the early weeks, but they want to make clear it’s a bad thing and there’s way too much of it—not because our high rates of abortion indicate that women aren’t getting good sexual information and good birth control, or lack power in their relationships with men, or because poverty and lack of support are making women terminate wanted pregnancies, but because abortion, in and of itself, is morally troubling.
It’s a seductive position for people who make their living by staking out intellectual positions that resist, or appear to resist, tired pieties. Defying both camps lets one feel sensitive and judicious and mature, alert to moral complexities, above the vulgar slogan war—a plague on both your houses!
“Here’s an uninhibited insult that the professional ‘life’ and ‘choice’ agitators can listen to for free,” wrote Washington Post (1/17/12) columnist Dana Milbank in 2012:
If these groups cared as much about the issue as they claim, and didn’t have such strong financial incentives to avoid consensus and compromise, they’d cancel the carnivals and get to work on the one thing everybody agrees would be worthwhile—reducing unwanted pregnancies.
Right, Planned Parenthood, stop keeping contraception away from people.
In a much-reprinted 1995 essay, Naomi Wolf (New Republic, 10/16/95) chalked abortion up to lazy sluttishness (“It was such good Chardonnay”) and urged women who ended their pregnancies to feel guilt and to mourn their fetuses; she even claimed that emergency contraception is a form of abortion. (It’s not.)
Andrew Sullivan (New Republic, 2/7/05), another reluctant semi-pro-choicer, thinks “abortion is always and everywhere a moral tragedy.” Always? Everywhere?
The safest position for a member of the commentariat seems to be: You can have your abortion as long as you feel really, really bad about it.
I’m not going to take that route here.
Terminating a pregnancy is always a woman’s right and often a deeply moral decision. It is not evil, even a necessary evil. You might make a different decision from a particular woman who chooses not to continue a pregnancy, and you might think your decision is morally superior—but beside the fact that you don’t actually know what you would do faced with those exact same circumstances (how many people have said abortion should be legal but they would never have one, and who then end up having one?), your judgment about a woman’s decision is not relevant to the legal status of abortion as a whole, any more than someone giving a speech you consider foolish reflects on the First Amendment, or someone voting for a corrupt candidate raises questions about suffrage. A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.
Your judgment of that woman is not even an interesting fact about yourself. There are many things other people do that you think you would never do (especially if there is, in fact, no possibility that you will ever be called upon to decide, as is the case with men and abortion). That tells us you have a certain idea about yourself, that’s all.
Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society, and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed.
Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it’s good for everyone if women have only the children they want and can raise well. Society benefits when women can commit to education and work and dreams without having at the back of their mind a concern that maybe it’s all provisional, because at any moment an accidental pregnancy could derail them for life. It’s good for people to be able to have sexual experiences and know that birth-control failure need not be the last word.
It would not make us a better country if more girls and women were nudged and bullied and cajoled and humiliated and frightened into bearing children they are ill-equipped to raise, even if more men could somehow be lassoed into marrying or supporting them. It would simply mean more lost hope, more bad marriages and family misery, more poverty and struggle for women, their partners and their kids. Don’t we have way too much of all that already?
I realize that my perspective is going to sound insufficiently nuanced to those who pride themselves on being judicious and balanced and above the fray. In American political discourse, the safest place to be is in the middle, lamenting “extremes on both sides.” The woman, the fetus—can’t they just get along? Isn’t there a combination of rules and regulations and birth control and women not being drunken tramps that will just make this whole tedious business go away? And while we wait for that to happen, let’s wring our hands to show how moral and thoughtful we are, not forgetting to mention “new” developments like ultrasound that supposedly have changed everything.
That attitude is definitely the one to take if you want to be seen as ethically serious for decades after Roe. But what does that approach do, really, but let us feel superior, up on Pundit Mountain, to all those messy women down there in the steamy valley, trying to make a reasonable life for themselves as best they can? We talk about respecting life. But what if we tried respecting them?
Katha Pollitt is an essayist, critic and poet whose column appears biweekly in The Nation. This is an excerpt from her book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador).
