I have never had an abortion. Through a combination of dumb luck, (mostly) good efforts and respectful partners, I managed to avoid getting pregnant until the time when I wanted to have babies. But if it hadn’t worked out that way, and I had my share of pregnancy scares over the years, I would have had an abortion. And now that I’ve finished having babies, if I get pregnant again I would almost definitely have an abortion. So, absolutely, abortion is a motherhood issue and I not only fully support reproductive choice but I fully support those women who have chosen abortion.
Having children reinforced my pro-choice beliefs rather than weakening them. But there is something noticeably confronting about being happily pregnant and calling your own little clump of cells a ‘baby’ (and grieving it accordingly when one is lost to miscarriage), after spending years as a pro-choice activist working with the language of the abortion debate. This article, “So what if abortion ends life?” from Mary Elizabeth Williams (whose writing I am really starting to love) in Salon is about moving the abortion rights campaign away from arguing the semantics around early life and highlighting that the real issue always has been and always will be that a woman’s life is worth more.
It seems absurd to suggest that the only thing that makes us fully human is the short ride out of some lady’s vagina. That distinction may apply neatly legally, but philosophically, surely we can do better. Instead, we let right-wingers perpetuate the sentimental fiction that no one with a heart — and certainly no one who’s experienced the wondrous miracle of family life — can possibly resist tiny fingers and tiny toes growing inside a woman’s body. We give a platform to the notion that, as Christina Locke opined in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “motherhood had slyly changed us. We went from basking in the rights that feminism had afforded us to silently pledging never to exercise them. Nice mommies don’t talk about abortion.”
Don’t they? The majority of women who have abortions – and one in three American women will – are already mothers. And I can say anecdotally that I’m a mom who loved the lives she incubated from the moment she peed on those sticks, and is also now well over 40 and in an experimental drug trial. If by some random fluke I learned today I was pregnant, you bet your ass I’d have an abortion. I’d have the World’s Greatest Abortion.
My belief that life begins at conception is mine to cling to. And if you believe that it begins at birth, or somewhere around the second trimester, or when the kid finally goes to college, that’s a conversation we can have, one that I hope would be respectful and empathetic and fearless. We can’t have it if those of us who believe that human life exists in utero are afraid we’re somehow going to flub it for the cause. In an Op-Ed on “Why I’m Pro-Choice” in the Michigan Daily this week, Emma Maniere stated, quite perfectly, that “Some argue that abortion takes lives, but I know that abortion saves lives, too.” She understands that it saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.
My belief is that when men teach their sons, and they to assume their share of the responsibility to prevent pregnancy, we will not be having the abortion discussion. Inadvertant pregnancy for the most part is unwanted pregnancy, Unwanted children translates pretty well to abused kids, maybe not physicially, but certainly emotional distance, results in failure to thrive as fully functioning emotionally stable kids/adults; let alone the kids who are abused, killed, sold into the sex trade, starved, ignored and fail to achieve their potential as human beings.
Unfortunately, my experience is that anti-abortion folks have no care for the health of mothers. I had a much-wanted pregnancy that nearly killed me; I have been told by pro-life relatives and acquaintances that I was never in that much danger and shouldn’t listen to my OB who recommended not having another baby, because pregnancy is never really THAT bad and doctors are just biased against motherhood.
Preventing unwanted pregnancies is a huge and admirable goal that would prevent a lot of danger and misery. But it’s not the only reason for abortion. Pregnancy is always a risk, and giving birth is generally more dangerous than abortion, so there will always be situations where a woman feels like the risk isn’t worth it and an anti-abortion person disagrees.
well said. I always cringe when I hear “it’s before 2 1/2 ( 3 or 4) months” or “it’s to save the woman’s life” why are we making excuses for our right to choose?? We should be saying “I support women”.
I also found myself becoming much more “pro-choice” since experiencing pregnancy and becoming a mother, which I was surprised at. I thought it would be the opposite. But experiencing the profound changes that pregnancy has on your body, the near death experiences of child birth, and the incredible amount of work that motherhood (and indeed pregnancy) entails, I cannot imagine being otherwise.
I have also adjusted my views to be more about women’s bodily autonomy than “life” as such also. I have a problem with the viability jurisprudence of the American abortion case law because, for me, it is much more about women’s autonomy than it is about the life of the foetus – when it begins etc. So because of this, I now support abortion right up to term for whatever reason the mother decides. My former self would be quite shocked that I now hold this position but I found that my initial reasons for supporting abortion logically lead to this conclusion and I need to stop fudging it by trying to reconcile these views with scientific arguments about foetus viability etc.
I just realised I used the word “mother” rather than “woman” in my second paragraph. Just goes to show how insidious the “pro-life” arguments are that I still, subconsciously it would appear, see someone who is going for an abortion as the mother of the foetus.
I also think there is a distinction between something being “alive” – noone is arguing that foetuses aren’t somehow alive even the pro-choice side – and “personhood.”
What am incredibly interesting article. I admit prior to having a child i did say that after an early m/c i definitely believed that it started the moment it was created. But it is right it is not when life begins but rather our ability to have a right to our bodies.
Yes, you can count me among those who are more pro-choice since having a baby or even being pregnant. I didn’t have a difficult pregnancy — just standard issue bad morning sickness and lots of third trimester complaints — but I thought countless times during pregnancy that no one should be going through this unless they really want it. And, interestingly, during my last two months of pregnancy, I was doing interviews with African American girls who are graduates of a Boston nonprofit for my dissertation. Every single one of them was a child of a teenage, single mom, and now — looking back at the transcripts — I see that they “got” pregnancy and raising a baby better than I did at the time. They had been raised by moms who had driven them to succeed BECAUSE of their example of how pregnancy had limited their options. I thought it was brave of them to talk to me about how much they didn’t want children in the near future and why when I was so visibly pregnant.
I became pro choice when I was 16. My sister was 1 and I was able to take her in public alone. People treated me like dirt. I was shocked. I thought the pro lifers actually wanted you to keep your babies but I realized they just don’t want you having babies in any situation that doesn’t meet their approval. It is a much bigger issue than to have a baby or not. I believe it is fundamentally an agenda to control women.
This is incredibly topical to me – I was discussing it the other day, and finding it difficult to explain how “yes, I believe that ‘life’ begins at conception” and “I am absolutely pro-choice” are not actually self-contradicting statements. We value some lives over others every single day. It is a harsh reality of living in an imperfect world.
I think you can also think something is alive while also not thinking it is a person. That is the distinction I draw (see my post above).
That’s true, sure, but that’s not how I think of it – I do think of them as persons, albeit it’s harder to do so when they look more like jellybeans. But if you asked me whether that jellybean had a soul, I’d say that yes, it does. And I still think the mother’s life has to come first.
ok, so if an embryo is a person, then who would you choose to save from a burning building – a two-year old child or a container of 6 embryos? I find it hard to accept that if both are “persons” as you say, we can then rank them in terms of which persons are worth saving and which are not. It would be hard not to then follow that line of reasoning to support eugenics – some persons lives are worthwhile and some are not.
And, if both embryos and born children are persons, would your logic then follow to allowing a mother to kill her two-year old child? I think if we say that abortion can be justified on the basis that we value some persons over others then this must logically extend to mothers being able to kill their own born children. Or the state being able to kill disabled people where they are taking resources away from other more able-bodied persons and not contributing to the economy.
That is why I feel more comfortable accepting that embryos/foetuses are alive but not necessarily persons as such.
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The prerogative to define something as either a baby or a fetus must rest with the mother/woman. That is what “pro-choice” means. “Pro-choice” shouldn’t mean “the prerogative to kill or not kill a baby/fetus.” It must mean the ability of the mother/woman to be the primary decision-maker when it comes to her reproductive life. (Of course this has its limitations – after the baby is born, laws must apply, etc.)
Someone else on this blog recently mentioned Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work, and I highly recommend her book Mother Nature which redefines just what that is and challenges what it means to be a nurturing, life-affirming mother/woman from an anthropological perspective.
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