CULTURE VULTURE
History one apparently never learns at school, Part V
The Abortion Wars
Nobody, but nobody in their right mind can truly be in favor of abortion. I got some push-back on that statement at the recent celebration of Women’s Equality Day, marking the 94th anniversary of the ratification of the SuffrageAmendment. But my friend was arguing less that abortion is a good thing, on a scale between good and evil, than that it’s a very, very good and necessary thing to have the option of safe, legal abortion if a woman must make that choice. On that we agree.
Abortion is a surgical procedure fraught with more emotional and theological baggage than any other contemporary controversy I’ve run into. But in the rush to protect the life of an embryo, or at best a fetus, one glaring fact tends to be forgotten: The incubator of that life is a larger life: A breathing, sentient, functioning woman who, for a wide array of reasons, may not wish to be an incubator or, in the long run, to ransom decades of her life to raise an unwanted child. That child might negatively impact the family, and other children, emotionally and financially. In the long run, for a society, unwanted children tend to turn out badly.
Don’t bring up the option of giving the child up for adoption here. Sociological and psychological studies have shown the great harm that choice does to the mother, sometimes persisting till the end of her life and affecting her other children and their father as well. Those studies also show that women who choose a safe, legal abortion suffer less, if at all. All surgery is iffy, but the early removal of fetal tissue, I’ll wager, is less traumatic than 18-plus years of raising and educating an unwanted child or, more psychologically stressful and harder still, having a child somewhere in the world you never know is safe, or cared for, or loved or even alive.
Women have always found ways to end unwanted pregnancies, probably since the beginning of time. Criminalization during the 19th century and legalization in the 20th, however, happened slowly. When I was young in the 1960s, abortions were legal, and therefore presumably safe, in only a few countries; I recall stories of young women of means traveling to Japan or to Sweden. I even heard stories of an aunt vacationing in pre-revolutionary Cuba for that purpose, many years earlier.
Moving from the topic of surgeries performed by medical doctors in clinic or hospital settings, there have always been back-alley abortions or kitchen-table abortions. Abortion is big business, and every city, every college campus had its information network to lead desperate women to surgeries that are too often neither sterile nor safe. When on Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, it “ . . . deemed abortion a fundamental right under the United States Constitution, thereby subjecting all laws attempting to restrict it to the standard of strict scrutiny” (Wikipedia). No other court decision has so divided the nation. The so-called right to life movement has, in many states, successfully limited access to even first trimester abortions and has tilled the soil for the growth of the Radical Right holding the House of Representatives hostage today.
The irony here is that the same people who most vociferously oppose abortion are often the same people who oppose contraception and sex education in the schools. There is no logic to this stance; it is faith, based on theological teaching, and the last thing I would argue for is any control over what people believe. What I fight for, however, is my right to believe what I believe (because of what my faith teaches, actually), and to act on those beliefs without risking my life. This, in a circular fashion, returns us to the belief of the compulsory pregnancy camp that life begins at conception and that, therefore, abortion is murder.
They are entitled to that belief. What they are not entitled to do is to force other people to act or not act depending upon their belief. There is a name for nations that subscribe to a state religion: Theocracies. The United States, remember, is a Democratic Republic, often called a democracy. Our Founding Fathers (yes, they were all Fathers, in spite of the spirited, epistolary advice of Abigail Adams to her husband, John) wisely prohibited the establishment of a state religion.
The extent to which the right to a safe, legal abortion is being abridged, if not functionally denied, is the extent to which the United States is abdicating the principles of its founders and is on a very slippery slope toward theocracy.
What happened to the Christian warning “Judge not, lest ye be judged”?
This concludes this series of lessons on women’s history/feminist theory. There may be others.
That’s all for now. Gotta fly!
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Thank you, Connie, for a clear, concise and well-reasoned article that respects the “breathing, sentient, functioning woman” who is affected by an unwanted pregnancy. While I don’t mind people following their beliefs, I do mind it when they want me, and/or everyone, to follow their beliefs.
Brava to you, Connie! You put to words what so many of us believe about abortion. Not being in favor of abortion, the reasons you gave were my exactly reason why I became Mona Freeman’s recovery room nurse after she opened the Women’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach. More often than not, the women and teenagers who came out of the OR, were in tears, not because they’d done it but because it was not an option they would have chosen had there been another viable option for them. Yes, some who were pre-counseled by Mona chose to have the baby and let him or her be adopted, but most could not do that for many of the reasons you put forth. Thank you!