Owning Up to Abortion
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: July 22, 2004
The New York Times
Abortion is legal - it's just not supposed to be mentioned or
acknowledged as an acceptable option. An article in The Times on Sunday,
Television's Most Persistent
Taboo, reported that a Viacom-owned channel is refusing
to run the episodes of a soap opera in which the teenage heroine chooses
to abort. Even Six Feet Under, which is fearless in its
treatment of sexual diversity, burdens abortion with terrible guilt.
Where are those liberal media when you need them?
You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose
our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging
their own abortions who really irk me. Increasingly, for example, the
possibility of abortion is built right into the process of prenatal care.
Testing for fetal defects can now detect over 450 conditions, many
potentially fatal or debilitating. Doctors may advise the screening
tests, insurance companies often pay for them, and many couples (no hard
numbers exist) are deciding to abort their imperfect fetuses.
The trouble is, not all of the women who are exercising their right to
choose in these cases are willing to admit that that's what they are
doing. Kate Hoffman, for example, who aborted a fetus with Down syndrome,
was quoted in The Times on June 20 as
saying: I don't look at it as though I had an abortion, even though
that is technically what it is. There's a difference. I wanted this
baby.
Or go to the Web site for A Heartbreaking
Choice, a group that provides support for women whose fetuses
are deemed defective, and you find Mom complaining of having
to have her abortion in an ordinary abortion clinic: I resented the
fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their
babies.
Kate and Mom: You've been through a hellish experience, but unless I'm
missing something, you didn't want your babies either. A baby, yes, but
not the particular baby you happened to be carrying.
The prejudice is widespread that a termination for medical reasons is
somehow on a higher moral plane than a run-of-the-mill abortion. In a
1999 survey of Floridians, for example, 82 percent supported legal
abortion in the case of birth defects, compared with about 40 percent in
situations where the woman simply could not afford to raise another
child.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular
defective fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come
along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed
terminations are already catching heat from disability rights
groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are
currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little
sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these
cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.
It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about
aborting defective fetuses. At least 30 million American
women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for
the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as
convenience - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of
American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group,
only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that
there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others
the right that they once freely exercised themselves.
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions
during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a
bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse
worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a
grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the
actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But
assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called
this bad faith, meaning something worse than duplicity: a
fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails.
Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for
your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are
easily taken away.
