Abortion and the Meaning of Life

Abstract

Abortion polarizes. Much like abolition, civil rights, and the prohibition of alcohol, abortion is an issue whose advocates see little in the way of nuances. People who care about the issue of abortion care intensely, and the abortion debate is marked by passionate heat and very little light.

As a social scientist who has spent the last seven years probing the whys and wherefores of how people come to feel the way they do about abortions, I am embarrassed to say that I am not entirely sure where my own interest in the topic comes from. I myself have never had an abortion, and my mother underwent lengthy and painful fertility treatments in order to have her three children. Of course, as I am in my late 30s and have lived for many years in California, abortion is very much a part of my life: Almost all my friends have had abortions, a predictable number of my students have abortions every year, and many of those closest to me have faced the abortion dilemma. In addition, because most of my professional life has focused on abortion, people who know of my research interest often feel compelled to tell me about their experiences with abortion, partly because they feel that I will take a professional interest and partly because they have never been able to discuss this intimate event with anyone else. (Although it may be hard for people in their 20s to imagine, until the latter part of the 1960s, abortion was simply not discussed in polite company. I lived through the period when women suddenly felt the opportunity for the first time to speak freely about abortion.) My elderly Berkeley landlady once told me shyly of an abortion she had had in 1926; my best friend’s mother told me of going to Mexico during World War II. Thus I, more than most, have come to see what abortion means to women, and to the men who care about them.

If I had to choose a single event that triggered my interest in abortion, it would probably be my college roommate’s illegal abortion in the early 1960s. As a loyal friend, I accompanied her for her pregnancy test (she, demurely attired with a borrowed wedding ring on her finger, which she twisted nervously throughout). Once the pregnancy was confirmed, her choices seemed stark: Her boyfriend had left her, the shame and stigma of a home for unwed mothers seemed out of the question, and an illegal abortion seemed the only remaining option. Like the activists I studied, my roommate and I were drawing on tacit beliefs about the nature of the embryo, women’s roles, and the role of human control over unforeseen events. The abortion was a nightmare, as were so many in that era. She was met on a street corner in Mexico by a taxicab driver, aborted without anesthesia, and unceremoniously dumped, shivering and retching, on still another street corner. This was my introduction to abortion and—when I realized how totally a woman’s life can be changed by one microscopic, wayward sperm—my introduction to feminism, although it took me years to make the connection.

My personal and professional experiences have convinced me of several inescapable conclusions. First, there is no reason to assume that the answer to the abortion problem is contraception. Americans smoke, drive when they’ve been drinking, and steadfastly refuse to fasten their seat belts. Why should we expect contraceptive behavior to be of a higher standard, when everyone agrees that correct behavior in these other areas can literally save lives? Unintended pregnancies, like lung cancer and automobile deaths, are a fact of life. The only real policy choice that confronts Americans is whether a significant portion of those pregnancies will be ended legally or illegally. (My conversations with elderly women make it clear that many unintended pregnancies will be ended, no matter what law or social policy says.) Finally, I am convinced that this policy choice cannot be made rationally. Feelings about abortion draw too much on deeply held, tacit values about the meaning of life for people to admit of any compromise.