Abortion and the Culture

Abstract

The continuing abortion debate in American society mirrors deeper cultural attitudes on such basic matters as the role of women in society, the use of law to solve social problems, and the priority given to individual freedom and responsibility in a liberal society. In one way or another, our attitudes and beliefs on these matters are expressions of a liberal cultural ethos. Indeed, the liberal character of the American cultural experiment is what has most influenced how we as a society have dealt with the abortion issue. For better or worse, our society is a liberal democratic polity in a heterogeneous, pluralistic culture. Our political-philosophical commitments are liberal, and they include an emphasis on individual freedom, where liberty is understood not as license but as, among other things, freedom from governmental restraint; an insistence on the separation of law and morals, associated with nineteenth century utilitarian liberal reformers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin; and a distinction between state and society, a distinction that led thinkers such as John Locke and J. S. Mill to favor limited government while relying on a resourceful citizenry to police itself, thereby preventing the excesses of an untrammeled exercise of individual freedom.¹ In the ideal of a liberal society suggested by writers such as Mill, L. T. Hobhouse, and even a liberal egalitarian such as R. H. Tawney, human conduct would be the result of spontaneous voluntary action rather than governmental coercion, and the limits of liberty in the area of private, self-regarding conduct would be set less by bureaucratic regulation than by a vast array of intermediate institutions—religious, social, educational, and familial—that would monitor and shape the moral standards of the culture.²

Labels are poor ways to characterize a person, but if pressed, I suppose I would have to describe myself as a left-of-center liberal who is Roman Catholic and a feminist. In less pretentious moments, I say that a good many of my waking hours are spent in teaching political philosophy and political science, and in doing the traditional tasks of being a wife and the mother of two young children.

I first began to think and write about the abortion issue when pregnant with our first child nine years ago. Although the experiential basis of such a concern seems obvious, other factors led me to write about abortion. I was interested in jurisprudence, and abortion seemed a timely, problematic case illustrating the general relation between law and morals. I was also somewhat taken aback by the persistent characterization, in the press and in public debate, of Catholic right-to-lifers as dogmatic extremists and fanatical rightwingers. My sense of fairness aroused, I sought to articulate the more plausible elements of a right-to-life position—while at the same time disagreeing with the political and legal implications of Catholic prolife views. My sense of fairness was also aroused by the tendency of Catholic and other right-to-lifers to ignore the complexities of women’s lives and to focus almost entirely on the status of the fetus in their discussions of abortion. This position, too, seemed to require correction and adjustment.

I attribute my own views on abortion to family, religious, and broadly educational influences and experiences. I think specifically of a period of psychotherapy (individual and group) in which I came to appreciate the value of individual freedom in a pluralistic society. The women’s movement has reinforced a concern about equality and justice and has demonstrated the continuing need for articulating a woman’s perspective on these issues. I am undoubtedly influenced by a Catholic religious upbringing. Although the church’s specific moral teaching on abortion has not figured prominently in my thinking, Catholicism as a general tradition has influenced me greatly, often in a subliminal way. It has provided a kind of world view, a value orientation, an elemental atmosphere of basic assumptions and presumptions, a cultural sensibility.

However, the most influential factor in my thinking about abortion was, I believe, my father’s illness and death. When I was 12, my father suffered a stroke that left him speechless, semiparalyzed, and bedridden. His recovery being impossible, he lingered on for 14 months, and we, his family, had to make several difficult choices regarding his care. His illness left me with several convictions of relevance to the abortion issue. I came to realize in an immediate way that persons are not to be valued according to their use or abandoned when they are “useless“ (or cannot function normally). I need not spell out how this conviction has made me sympathetic to (sanctity-of-life ethic of those who oppose abortion. Like them, I am distinctly uncomfortable with “quality-of-life” notions that separate the healthy from the unhealthy, the useful from the useless. At the same time, my father’s illness taught me that there are limits to what we can do for others and that there are times in life when hard choices have to be made. Eventually, we (his family) could not care for him and had to entrust his care to others who might not be as sympathetic to his plight. With respect to the abortion dilemma, I believe that this experience has given me some feeling for and sympathy with those who say that they do not have the resources and the energy to bring new life into the world and to care for it.

For a variety of reasons, I favor the legal availability of abortion. As to the morality of abortion, I believe that abortion may at times be morally permissible. Nevertheless, abortion seems a poor solution to the problems that women face: poverty, lack of support and assistance in parenting, and constant career interruptions because of childcare responsibilities. Because it is such a poor solution, the increasing cultural acceptability of abortion is troubling. As a society, we should be able to do better than this.