As a young teenager and through a lot of my college career, I identified as "pro-life"; that is, I believed that women should not have a right to abort a fetus they created as a result of voluntary sexual intercourse. After taking my undergraduate Bioethics class (and falling in love with the subject - indeed, it is the only Bioethics class I ever took even though it is now my main area of research), my professor helped me to see that there are pretty solid pro-choice arguments - the most convincing for me being Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument that no person is obligated to use their body to sustain the life of another person. Just as I cannot force you to give me even in milliliter of blood to sustain my life (even though I am a person with a right to life), a woman cannot be compelled to use her body to sustain the fetus (even if the fetus were considered a person). I carried that view with me for a long time, through my graduate training, and right up until July 2008, when I saw my daughter's image for the first time on the ultrasound screen. That first image was, to use Rudolf Otto's term, awe-ful. The ultrasound technician pressed the wand against my belly and the little fetus somersaulted in response. While the technician continued to speak to us, my little tenant continued frolicking in my womb. My husband and I drove home in silence afterwards. While stopped at a red light he commented, out of the blue, that after seeing our fetus, he could never bring himself to abort it. My response seemed so foreign given my beliefs: Neither could I.
Being pregnant and giving birth has given me a new found respect for fetal life - whether or not I think the fetus is a person with the full rights of an extra-uterine person is irrelevant. I believe it is a being worthy of respect. The purpose of this entry, however, is not to argue in favor of this. What being pregnant made clear to me was that abortion is a far more complex moral issue that I thought it was when I identified as pro-life and also when I identified as pro-choice. Being pregnant, feeling the fetus growing inside of me, being subjected to the physical turmoil and dangers of pregnancy, and understanding, really understanding, how hard it is to raise a baby made me far more sensitive to arguments on both sides of the issue. And one thing that my subsequent research has taught me is that many advocates on both sides lack appreciation for the complexities of the issue.
A 1989 case study by Marsha Vanderford illustrates that pro-choice and pro-life advocates use similar tactics to slander and vilify each other. Pro-choice advocates largely dismiss pro-life advocates with accusation of religious extremism, and charge them with wanting to relegate women back into oppression. Pro-life advocates accuse pro-choice advocates of being Communists (a term that incited much fear during the Cold War era) with an agenda that includes compulsory abortions. It seems safe to say that such an unfortunate trend continues today. Many pro-choice advocates do not regard pro-life advocates as genuinely good people who truly believe that fetuses are morally equivalent to infants, and are troubled at the killing of beings who they perceive as innocent persons whose right to live has been violated. Rather, pro-life advocates are charged with sexism, elitism, and authoritarianism. They are viewed as religious extremists and as perpetuators of a rhetoric of fear and hate. Certainly, this describes some individuals on the pro-life side. For example, Scott Roeder, who murdered abortion-provider Dr. George Tiller in 2009, seemed to have done so given religious convictions. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who delivered the Roe v. Wade majority opinion, was exposed to a high degree of hate mail and "personal abuse" from many who opposed the legalization of abortion. But this does not describe all abortion-rights opponents; indeed, it may not even describe the majority of them, since many of them condemned Tiller's murder, for example.
Pro-choice advocates are equally vilified. They are not viewed as people with genuine disagreements about the moral status of the fetus (no pro-choice advocate sincerely thinks abortion is akin to killing children), or with concerns about the very real plights and sufferings of single mothers and unwanted children, or with a deep conviction that women are entitled to equal opportunities and treatments as men in the social world, which can very well be impeded by her biological capacity to become pregnant and by the deep-seated expectation that child care predominately falls on women's shoulders. Rather, pro-choice advocates are viewed as people with ulterior motives, pushing abortion in order to make a profit at the expense of women in difficult situations. They are described as anti-family and anti-child. They are portrayed as evil people who advocate, sell, and revel in the destruction of infants.
Vilifying pregnant women who abort rather than immersing oneself in her world, her circumstances, her concerns, her pains, her hopes, dreams, aspirations, and limitations makes it easy to write off all abortions as intrinsically immoral. It allows one the luxury of ignoring the very real negative circumstances facing young and single mothers, and the collective responsibility we all share in our purportedly (but not actual) pronatalist society for raising our future generation. Writing a pregnant woman off as self-serving for aborting means we don't have to struggle with her as she makes the very real, life-altering, decision to either continue educating herself or building a place in society for herself, or to become a mother - and we don't have to question the moral dimensions of our societal practices that imposes such a decision onto women, rather than fighting for a society where single motherhood is not mutually exclusive with developing oneself as an individual. We don't have to face the inconsistency of telling women that they cannot abort and must bear a child in a society where single parenthood is correlated with poverty, and then also simultaneously admonish them as "welfare mothers" when they must rely on public funds to care for the infants that those fetuses become. Vilifying women who abort means that we do not have to take a serious look at the social circumstances that underlie so many decisions to abort and, therefore, we do not feel the need to fix them. It means that we become impervious to all the evidence that illustrates that women who abort tend to be mothers (and so very much care about children and family), typically used contraception when engaging in sexual activity (and so are not necessarily sexually irresponsible), and often abort because of financial difficulties and lack of support (and so not necessarily due to mere convenience or selfishness). Writing women who abort off as careless monsters means that we don't have to engage in very real stories of struggle and heartache.
