Social Science and Ethical Issues

Abstract

Abortion is by all accounts the most difficult public-policy issue in contemporary America. “No end to the dispute over abortion policy can be foreseen”¹ by policy analyst Gilbert Steiner, who sees no “philosophical resolution” to the question of when life begins.

I have had more of a struggle with abortion than with any other moral or social issue. In fact, I began to write on the abortion issue as a way of clarifying my thoughts after a long period of trying very hard not to think about it at all.

My views on abortion are probably affected by my Catholicism. That this is problematic may surprise some people. But the Catholic influence here cannot be taken for granted, as my views on contraception, nonmarital sexuality, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, women in the priesthood, and even authority are all in disagreement with the orthodox Catholic position, with little trauma on my part. Furthermore, when I was growing up Catholic, the abortion issue was not all that important. One learned that abortion was wrong, but it was an abstract wrong with little emotionality attached.

The Catholic influence on my views in this area was more general and more positive. It was not that abortion was wrong, but that babies were right. From Catholic sense of family, I drew a sense of the joy of children and the value of fetal life. The value I ascribed to conception intensified with my fertility problems, my threatened miscarriages, and eventually my pregnancy; my first child was often “at play” prenatally and very responsive to music.

I was, then, opposed to abortion in principle. I was very uneasy when abortion was supported by population experts or planned-parenthood representatives, whom I generally supported, and by colleagues in sociology. As the abortion rights movement developed in the 1960s and the early 1970s, I tried to ignore it, because I found accounts of women seeking abortion threatening to my position. I could put myself in the place of these women and think that I, too, might find no other solution, even though in the abstract I opposed abortion.

After a long period of tension, I concluded that the claims of fetal life are limited. The claims of others—the woman, sometimes the family—are strong ones. I came to believe that abortion should be permitted in some cases and that it would be difficult to limit the cases.

This change of views was an intellectual rather than a personal development. Having avoided the abortion issue for so long, I decided to plunge into the sociological literature on the subject, in the hope that I might learn something that would help me deal with the issue. In fact, I found myself disagreeing with the prochoice position on many points, including the efficacy of abortion as a solution to various personal and social problems. Nevertheless, I came to believe that there are situations, perhaps many situations, in which the well-being of the already-formed human being takes priority over fetal life, especially early embryonic life. The situation of the pregnant teenager was especially convincing here, because it had the potential of damaging so many young lives. I am sure a personal intensification again, that my daughter’s arrival at puberty made this point important in my thinking. Thus, though I think fetal life has value, partly from personal experience, I hold other claims paramount, partly out of concern about the risk that any teenager, such as my daughter, might encounter today.