Anti-choice brigade's emotional blackmail
BY LISA MACDONALD
A predictable list of right-wing commentators lined up last month to heap praise on the latest ideological onslaught against women's right to choose abortion. Melinda Tankard Reist's new book, Giving Sorrow Words, is just the ammunition they've been looking for in the battle that they just can't seem to win.
The book, published in April, tells in detail the stories of 18 women who, after choosing to have an abortion, suffered depression and various psychoses, so severe in some cases that it led to attempted suicide. The conclusion, say Tankard Reist and her media fan club, is not just that abortion was the "wrong choice" for these women, but that abortion per se is the wrong choice.
In case you think Giving Words to Sorrow might be the result of serious sociological research, be clear about where Tankard Reist is coming from. As a policy adviser to Christian-right Senator Brian Harradine, Tankard Reist is unlikely to have a sympathetic view of abortion.
Ideology
On the contrary, her book was undoubtedly intended to push further to the right the public debate about the "morality" of abortion, which was re-raised in Australia in 1998 by Leslie Cannold's The Abortion Myth: Feminism, Morality and the Hard Choices Women Make.
The fact that both purport to be examining the issue from a feminist perspective does not lessen the reactionary nature of their conclusions: that women's right to choose abortion is and should be qualified by the fact that it involves another "human being" (the foetus).
Advocates of women's unqualified right to terminate their pregnancy have never denied or ignored that some women are deeply disturbed by their experience of abortion. Indeed, it was pro-choice activists — the first to recognise that women experience a wide range of feelings about their pregnancy and foetus — who campaigned for comprehensive information and non-directive counselling services to be available to women before and after an abortion.
However, the fact that some women feel guilt and/or remorse after an abortion does not mean that all women do. For many, deciding to terminate a pregnancy is not difficult, and the associated feeling is relief, not guilt.
Choice
So what determines whether an individual is emotionally traumatised or not by having an abortion? Assuming that the woman was not forced to abort, and acknowledging that women who decide to abort have different degrees of conviction about not wanting to bear a child at the time, the decisive factor is the social context in which the decision is made.
Can she tell her partner, family and friends without feeling embarrassed or selfish? Can she easily obtain information about the procedure from her GP? Is she made to justify her decision at length to strangers (psychologists, etc.)? That is, does she have an uninhibited choice about whether or not to proceed with an abortion?
In a glowing account of Tankard Reist's book in the April 8-9 Australian, Angela Shanahan writes, "It is one of the great fallacies that has dominated discussion on abortion ... that choice is the dominating paradigm. This notion completely ignores the subtle coercion to abort, and that there are good choices and bad. Abortion, as this book illustrates, is a bad choice."
The idea that women in Australia are systematically coerced into have abortions is ludicrous. Few women make the decision lightly; for all the advances in medical care, the procedure still involves some physical risk, and it still costs more money than most women have to spare.
In fact, the institutional pressures not to terminate a pregnancy are still enormous. Each time a woman decides to control her reproduction by having an abortion, she must defy both the church and, even if she has no church, the state, which imposes on all women the church's decree that abortion is murder by keeping abortion on the criminal code.
In such a society, no woman can make a truly free choice to have an abortion. Whatever she decides, she has been pre-judged, if not by the people she knows, then by society at large, embodied in the state.
'Morality'
It is not surprising, therefore, that some women, having decided for perfectly rational personal reasons to have an abortion, feel guilt and distress afterwards. Every person's moral code is shaped by the society in which they live. The period and country they inhabit, their religion, ethnicity and class position largely determine their sense of right and wrong, including about abortion.
Women's decision to abort will inevitably be much more difficult in a society which invests the foetus with a moral content based on the notion that it is a human being.
But this notion is a myth. Human beings, unlike foetuses, are conscious. Consciousness is not injected by god at the point of conception, or any other stage of foetal development (even the Vatican has not maintained a consistent position on when the "miracle of life" is supposed to happen). It is a product of human beings' interaction with other human beings; that is, it is a product of society.
A foetus becomes a human being when it is born and begins interacting with others. That is when destroying it becomes euthanasia or murder. Until then, the foetus is simply a collection of living cells, like any other organ in the body.
Presenting the guilt and remorse felt by some women who have had an abortion as an argument for why choosing abortion is always wrong, or at least a difficult choice for all women, is a crude attempt to emotionally blackmail women. The message is that if you don't feel bad about having an abortion you are somehow inhuman or in denial, an immoral or misguided individual.
Shanahan asserts, "For most women, abortion is not the serious rational decision made in good conscience that feminist activists ... would have us believe. It is often completely irrational, prompted by fear, confusion and sheer panic." This is the same patronising, oppressive old tune that's been sung for centuries: women are too emotional, they're inherently amoral, they can't think for themselves, they need others to protect them from themselves.
Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of women (being quite as rational as men) have always and will always resist such emotional blackmail; they will make up their own minds about whether they want to be pregnant or not. The extent to which they are able to act on their decision, however, depends largely on whether or not their right to do so is socially sanctioned.
For so long as contraception is imperfect, women will have abortions. If we are to avoid a return to the backyard butchery of decades past, women's ability to freely choose abortion must be defended and extended.
Whatever the personal views of Tankard Reist and her ilk, if we allow such people to set the public agenda on abortion, how any individual woman feels about the rightness or wrongness of abortion will be irrelevant — because she will not have the choice.