Via Jeremy Brooks @ Flickr.
I didn’t read it until a little while ago, but Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, has written an op-ed piece for Salon entitled “Can we ever say a woman can’t choose?”, which appeared online yesterday. I read it eagerly, since I do feel that Kissling’s work with CFC was valuable, but was deeply troubled by her current perspective, which, in my opinion, betrays women. My general loathing of the commenting atmosphere at Salon made me think we might have a more productive discussion over here, in our nest.
My first response to her titular question is “yes, we can–hell, we do–but perhaps we shouldn’t.” But I want to wade through her essay–which is at least thoughtful–a little more slowly, just to be sure.
Kissling refers to a Planned Parenthood conference she attended more than a decade ago, and describes her growing discomfort with the moral/ethical aspect of “abortion-on-demand.” At the conference, she took part in an ethical discussion built around a number of scenarios in which a hypothetical woman’s reason for seeking an abortion could be considered “shallow” or otherwise dubious: the family wanted a girl, not a boy; the fetus is developing a minor, non-life threatening physical deformity, etc. This conference caused her to rethink her previous “AOD” stand. In her article, Kissling writes that she now believes that under certain circumstances, women should be forced to continue an unwanted pregnancy. Good thing she changed jobs, or we might have to rename her previous institution “Catholics for a Free Choice, Unless I’m Personally Uncomfortable With that Choice, In Which Case You Can No Longer Choose It,” and that just isn’t as catchy.
The myth that women are just looking for any ol’ reason–or not even bothering with reason–to terminate their pregnancies has been used against the pro-choice perspective since Roe was passed in 1972, and is based solely on the idea that women are a) frivolous bitches and/or b) stupid, irresponsible cunts, who therefore cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. I’m deeply disappointed that Kissling seems to be buying into it.
While some women certainly turn to abortion for reasons that other women might disagree with (oh no! disagreement! there oughta be a law against that!), examples like those Kissling mentions mostly serve to obscure the fact that the vast majority of women approach abortion like they would any other serious medical procedure–and one that often runs far greater social than health risks: with care and no small amount of forethought. This is not to say that abortion is necessarily a grueling ordeal, but that because it is rather invasive, and because there are already hoops, both legal and extra-legal, to obtaining one, I would stake my life on the fact that a vanishingly small percentage of women get abortions “flippantly.” (And even if they do: not my business.) Given that 88% of abortions are performed in the first trimester of pregnancy, long before viability, and only 1.4% happen after 20 weeks gestation, when viability is still uncertain, her concerns for the “rights” of a fetus over those of it’s parent-host seems seriously misplaced.
Kissling is Catholic, and her concern for ”life” in the abstract seems to be crowding out her concern for women’s lives in reality. Her ultimate point is that we should reject “single value ethics”–which, for choice advocates, is the women’s legally protected right to choose abortion–as an “extremist” postition, and freely “[express] our views about controversial issues.” I would argue that thinking people on all sides of the debate have had or are continuing to have difficult, often exhausting discussions in which we express/ed our views. We can “say” all we want to about the issue. Kissling certainly has taken her turn. What she seems to forget is that in these discussions, people who fully value and respect women must, at the end of the day, argue that putting up more barriers (be they legal, cultural, or “moral”) to abortion, even if we find ourselves occasionally uncomfortable with the reasons or outcomes, is not the answer to the debate.
You are free to disagree, and say as much in comments. Please, though, let’s keep whatever discussion ensues respectful and on-topic.
I’m just not sure that Kissling’s stance is a very helpful addition to the debate.
As you’ve already pointed out, PhDork, there are plenty of ‘hoops’ through which women seeking abortions have to jump – not least of which is the fact that fewer and fewer doctors are providing abortions.
Here in the UK we already have a 24 week gestational limit after which abortion is illegal. In addition, despite our nationalised health service, many abortions are now ‘out-sourced’ to third sector organisations (BPAS, Marie Stopes etc.) The barriers to women seeking terminations are already too great without placing additional ‘moral’ strictures on the pro-choice position.
Whenever people bring up the “you can choose, but only if you make a choice that conforms with my expectations of what reasons are acceptable,” I always think of this piece by Amy Richards that appeared in the NYT magazine in 2004. Basically, Richards found out she was pregnant with triplets and decided to reduce to one. Her reasons were (in my opinion) pretty shallow: she lived in a 5th floor walk-up and didn’t want to move and didn’t want to buy economy sized jars of mayo at Costco.
The initial letters were scathing (calling her cold and unfeeling and her “surviving” child “doomed”), followed by a round of more tempered responses (e.g., “Unless you outlaw all abortions there will inevitably time when you find a woman’s reason for aborting morally reprehensible.”)
I’m okay with people being morally squicked out by someone’s reasons (even though it’s none of their business), but I cannot see a way to practically address this. What would Kissling propose? That all women seeking an abortion be interviewed and only be allowed to have an abortion if their reason meets certain criteria?
Also, what’s up with this?
When a fetus reaches the point where it could survive outside the uterus, is healthy, and the woman is healthy, and she has had five months to make up her mind, we should say no to abortion.
I was fairly certain that this was currently the situation and what we’d been working from since Roe.
I’m with FashionablyEvil. I’m always perplexed at the fact that people can’t seem to separate “what I would personally do” and “what should be legal”, because it’s not like the two concepts are related in the vast majority of situations. I see people making choices I wouldn’t make every day. In fact, I see people making choices that make me very uncomfortable (I mean, leggings as pants? For serious?) But I just do not understand making the leap from that to “that should be illegal”. Especially on something like abortion — my brother is a philosopher and has arguments about when personhood begins and what personhood is all the time. The fact is that there’s no objective way to define philosophical concepts like that, and it’s clear that our society has yet to come to a consensus.
Right? It’s not that complicated. But people make this argument all the frickin’ time, and it irritates me to no end.
Although, I have to say, whenever I’ve had arguments with people about things like abortion, they always end up saying things that are…more indicative of their positions than their premises are. For example, I was just debating a guy last week who started out saying “Susan B. Anthony was against abortion, so that means that only people who are against abortion truly care about women” and ended up asking me to prove why he shouldn’t knowingly oppress women. Then, in all earnestness, he tried to argue that things like whether or not pizza should taste good are questions of morality. So, basically: people who make arguments like this woman, in my experience, often have other concerns that they aren’t voicing, which are really more central to their positions than the concerns that they are voicing.
Why are people operating under the assumption that abortion is legal and unrestricted from conception until the woman goes into labor?
It’s all laid out in Roe, and it drives me insane that people wax philosophical about restricting something that’s ALREADY RESTRICTED.
It’s STILL none of my business why a woman wants to have an abortion. I might disagree with her reasons for having one. I might even be offended by them. But at the end of the day it’s still her body. It’s none of my fucking business and it ain’t the government’s either.
Sigh, and now that I’ve actually read the article:
“Don’t we express moral views about every other issue under the sun, from the number of embryos it is ethical to insert into a woman’s uterus to the morality of bonuses for Wall St. executives who robbed us blind? Expressing our views about controversial issues is how society develops norms and shared values.”
This is a huge failure of logic on her part. The first concern is one that, if regulated, is regulated by doctors and not the state. It’s always been a doctor’s choice not to do any surgical procedure. No one’s saying that individual doctors, or even medical associations, shouldn’t have the right to make ethical guidelines. But that’s a completely different statement than one about legality.
As for the Wall Street bonuses: that was our money! Tax money! We had a perfect right to weigh in about that! If the question of abortion concerned, for example, my child, then yes, I’d expect to be able to voice my ethical opinion (and I’d expect that even if I were male). But to compare tax money coming from Americans at large to fetuses conceived by two individuals is fallacious enough to make my eye start twitching.
When I had my pre-Roe, illegal abortion, I could have given lots of reasons, but they all boiled down to one: I didn’t want to bear children, and I believed that carrying a pregnancy to term would ruin my life.
People who think that was shallow, or morally dubious, are free to express those opinions (they are also free to kiss my grandmotherly ass). What they should *not* be free to do is make it illegal to behave shallowly, or from morally dubious positions.
Oh, and it’s a good thing I didn’t want to have children, because that illegal abortion was a mess, and left me infertile. Even so, more than 40 years later I can say that I’ve never regretted making that choice to break the law.
What SarahMC said. Also, when (supposedly) pro-choicers say that “abortion-on-demand” is a bad thing, it hurts my brain. What should we have instead–abortion by lottery?
As a thought experiment, I’ve been trying to come up with an abortion scenario that I find truly immoral. Sex selection doesn’t cut it–is it moral to force a girl-baby to be born to a family that hates women? (In general, I think this is a problem solved by social change to end misogyny, not abortion restriction.) Amy Richards’ reduction sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Three babies is A LOT, and I can’t imagine the pregnancy would be easy. Even the frivolous straw-woman who decides in her 8th month that she no longer wants to be pregnant should be allowed to end her pregnancy–let them induce labor or perform a c-section.
My initial, gut reaction to the question “Can we ever say a woman can’t choose?” was whether we or anyone else can, no one should. After reading over the article, and all the comments here, I stand by that.
It comes down to a pretty basic idea I have, that other people’s choices are not my responsibility. By allowing people to make their own decisions, I accept that people will not always make choices that I like. Tough. It’s not my choice.
The core of the argument is always personhood. We rarely make laws restricting what a person can do to themselves. Although I understand that a few states still consider attempted suicide a crime.
We restrict, by law, what a person can do to another person.
Trying to argue that a woman has a right to abort a pregnancy if she has a “good” reason to do so, such as self defense, is a pretty clear statement that the pregnancy has person hood, without coming right out and saying so.
This particularly disingenuous argument has been getting a lot of traction lately as a reasonable compromise with the extreme anti abortion laws that states have tried, and in some cases succeeded in passing. It isn’t a compromise at all. It is the thin edge of the wedge.
I think the reason 3rd trimester abortions on healthy fetuses are illegal is because at that stage the majority of people also take into consideration that the fetus has it’s own body and is also self-aware of it’s body. Not to mention that it can live outside of it’s mother’s body at that point so a termination is viewed as unnecessary. So in a way the law is not restricting what a woman can do to her body it is restricting what she can do to another’s body. This is why some states have laws to charge offenders with a double homicide when the fetus dies along with it’s mother. The fetus does not die the exact minute the mother does, it’s own life is separate from that of it’s mother.
I support the law the way it is now. I’m not sure I’d be able to check yes if a measure were put on the ballot to allow abortions at any stage.
I also wanted to say that I don’t think term restrictions are there to shame women, but to respect the life of the person that is inside of the woman.
PhDork are you saying that term restrictions are insulting to women because no woman would ever do that? If that is the case I have to disagree, people do unimaginable things all the time. Maybe you just have more faith in humanity than I do. There are many laws we might deem unnecessary because we think nobody would ever do that but they are there ‘just in case’.
You know, what bothers me to no end about this discussion is the way in which people try to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ abortions.. even if I was a ‘slut’ getting pregnant ALL THE TIME and couldn’t quite deal with the prospect of having to change nappies (me being more into have unsafe sex with random men)… even then I should be entitled to do whatever I want with my body and have abortions. Period. There is no grey zone, because the existence of the grey zone depends on the assumption that the fetus (a clump of cells, that is) has rights in some instances, but not others – and that those may prevail over those of a woman’s. And that I do not buy. So I get so tired when people say it’s undesirable, but necessary sometimes; or when we talk about abortions under different circumstances and when they would be legit and when they wouldn’t. It’s all a woman’s choice, and to me it doesn’t matter what she has done to get pregnant. If I fuck up I don’t want the moral police examining whether I ‘deserve’ an abortion.
Dirty: Term restrictions are not there to shame women, no. There are enough other things taking care of that angle. However, in many cases, they exist to punish them for the crime of fucking. My understanding is that fetal viability has a lot to do with the general ban on third-trimester abortions, but concern for maternal health is also an issue, since the further along a pregnancy is, the more dangerous abortion can be for the woman. Of course, there are also cases where continuing the pregnancy is considered a greater danger, which is why there is a whisper-thin, rarely exercised exception clause.
And the double-homicide charges against those who murder a woman and thus her fetus (because of or despite their pregnancy) which you mention are not, to my knowledge, reserved for pregnancies that are past 20 weeks (or whatever each state decides is viable). That’s clever lawyering used to whip up sentiment and outrage, and to lobby for harsher punishments. After all, the brain doesn’t necessarily die at the same moment the body does, and yet there aren’t reduced criminal charges if someone attempts to murder another and only succeeds in causing their brain death.
I am certainly aware that people do unimaginable things all the time. I am about as cynical a person as you can imagine. However, I am also aware that “people” disproportionally do these unimaginable things to women, and yet there is little concern for legislation to protect us, to say nothing of movements to deal with any just-in-case scenarios.
Regardless, the tiny percentage (again, 1.4%) of all abortions that happen after viability should not be the ones that set the parameters of the abortion debate. Policy based on the activities of outliers is bad policy.
We may simply have to disagree on the value of a fetus (viable or not) versus that of the woman who is hosting it in her body. I believe that abortion is an issue about women, not about fetuses, and it is for women to settle.
PhDork:
I think the thing that complicates the concept of “abortion is an issue about women, not about fetuses” is when the fetus is being terminated for being female. I don’t think a woman should have to listen to the state, but it doesn’t mean that I can celebrate her choice to get a sex-based abortion. I know that we aren’t supposed to, and I wouldn’t support a law that dictated it, but I still see a world of difference between choosing not be a parent and choosing not to be a parent of a girl.
SallyRidden: Women, even women who are pressured by their societies to denigrate/destroy other females, win out over female fetuses. I’m only advocating abortion as something to celebrate as much as I’m advocating appendectomy as something to celebrate. Both are medical procedures that sometimes need to happen. When they are needed and do happen, that’s a good thing. It is good for people to have the health care they need.
There are different reasons for termination, and some of them will seem more legitimate than others, and of course people will disagree about what is “legitimate.” Like you, I think that terminating a female fetus for its femaleness is pretty crappy. But maybe that’s preferable to a girl being born and raised in a family enviroment that resents her. And in any case, restricting abortion is not the answer to sex-selective abortions that result in massive population imbalances. Feminist education/revolution is.
“However, I am also aware that “people” disproportionally do these unimaginable things to women, and yet there is little concern for legislation to protect us, to say nothing of movements to deal with any just-in-case scenarios.”
PhDork- I may be mistaken but outside of reproductive rights there are no separate laws for women and men (unless you think there should be). So there is not a lack of concern for legislation on issues that mainly affect women (outside of RR) because the laws are there to protect men as well. There may be a lack of concern when the cases go to court or if they are even prosecuted, but it is not necessarily with the laws themselves.
And when I say unimaginable I’m not talking about things like rape or murder I’m talking about things like cannibalism. I’m pretty sure only 1% or less of the population engages in cannibalism but the laws are there just in case. Rape or murder are completely imaginable to me.
@DirtyLaundry – I think you’re misunderstanding PhDork. Laws often treat men and women differently. For example, it is illegal only for women to go shirtless. In many states, it is legal for someone to take a picture up a skirt worn by any person, but since 99.999% of people who wear skirts are female, that lack of legislation negatively affects women. When legislation is proposed that protects women from sexism-specific issues (such as the Ledbetter law, for example), many lawmakers protest. We don’t have sufficient laws to promote maternity leave or accessible childcare. There is no doubt that our laws (and not just the enforcement of them) fail to adequately protect women, especially poor women or women of color. Whether or not the trials that women go through because of our lack of protection under the law satisfy your definition of “unimaginable” (which, let’s be serious, was being used as a strong term for “bad”) is immaterial to how the law actually treats women.
Baraquiel: thank you, that’s getting at it.
Dirty Laundry: Quite apart from laws that are unequally enforced for men and women (or white women and WOC, or cis-women and trans-women, etc.) there are laws that simply treat men and women differently. Laws are meant to protect as much as punish (okay, maybe I’m dreamin’), and surely you can’t argue that women currently receive equal treatment under the law.
However, as I go back to review your comments and try to figure out what cannibalism has to do with reproductive rights, I’m wondering if you’re really arguing in good faith. There are restrictions on abortion, quite a lot, actually, even if Kissling’s piece conjures the image of a free-for-all. The likelihood that these restrictions will be lifted is very small. My point is that framing the debate around under what specific, weird-o circumstances a woman “deserves” an abortion makes the default setting “women must have defensible reasons for termination, because it’s horrible, just horrible,” which sends us into the endless BS discussions we’ve been having for 37 years now about what exactly is a defensible reason. We (pro-choice advocates) need to adopt a perspective that throws out this “good reason” crap and instead make the debate about providing women desired medical treatment and ensuring a woman’s right to gestate/birth/raise a child when and only when she decides she is ready.
PH.Dork, your title raises yet again the egregious failure of the pro-choice movement to win the rhetorical war. No, in the mind of the average person, choice is not the moral equivalent of life-life is a trump card every time.
For feminists, the right to choose IS (sorry, don’t know how to do italics here) the right to life-the life we want and deserve. But for most people not engaged in the issue, choice sounds like something frivolous-”Oh, should I choose the black shoes or the blue ones?” That word allows-indeed, encourages-the kind of thinking that Kissling engages in. If choice is based on whim and personal taste, then some choices are better than others. So “choosing” an abortion after the first trimester, or for reasons that aren’t dire, sounds selfish and flighty.
We need to use words more effectively to state our position-that abortion is about our lives-women’s lives. Without the right to abortion, we are not free, and thus, we can’t be the person we could be. Abortion access is freedom. Abortion access is life.