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I am feeling more disheartened than usual after reading this New Yorker piece about American attitudes about abortion in light of the Stupak amendment. Jennifer Senior’s thorough, thoughtful essay explores how public opinion and public policy have changed since abortion was legalized in 1973.
According to a Gallup poll from July, 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be either illegal or “legal only in a few circumstances.” Only seventeen states pay for the procedure for poor women beyond the standards of the 1977 Hyde Amendment—meaning if the woman’s life is in danger or she’s been the victim of rape or incest. Just two months before the health-care bill’s passage in the House, a Rasmussen poll found that 48 percent of the public didn’t want abortion covered in any government-subsidized health plan, while just 13 percent did.
And:
The youngest generation of voters—those between the ages of 18 and 29, and therefore most likely to need an abortion—is the most pro-life to come along since the generation born during the Great Depression, according to Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover, who got granular data on the subject from Pew Research Center.
I think Amanda Marcotte may be onto something when she wonders whether Generation Y’s relatively anti-choice stance is partly the result of the over-parenting and rigid scheduling many of us grew up with. Unfortunately, parents have become more and more risk-averse in the past couple decades, and they’ve tried hard to make sure the bubbles protecting their snowflakes never burst. Life isn’t supposed to be messy.
Mistakes are unacceptable; therefore, when a person woman is “careless” enough to experience an unplanned pregnancy, she must pay for it by giving birth. Nevermind that abortion is one way to fix the mistake of an unplanned pregnancy. It’s seen as taking the easy way out, because people women should have to suffer the consequences of their mistakes for life. They should never have made the mistake in the first place.
Obviously, as Senior points out, other factors have been more influential in shaping young people’s views on abortion. The under-30 set never saw women die from back-alley abortions. They weren’t alive during the second wave. The religious right has had much more influence on the political landscape than the women’s lib movement has during their lifetime. I am not sure what we in the pro-choice movement can do to turn things around.
At least this is more honest. We all know it’s been about punishing women for having sex all along — now at least people are saying that instead of all this disingenuous concern trolling about “babies”.
Plus, this is easier to argue against, from my perspective. People can say that life is about dealing with the consequences of your actions as much as they want — it’s easy to disprove. VH1 is a television network entirely devoted to rewarding people for making mistakes. I’m not sure people will be willing to believe it, but the arguments at the least are easy to make.
Personally, I never thought much about abortion access one way or the other (and honestly did sort of have the attitude that people should just “be more careful”) until, despite using birth control and being monogamous with one partner, and being a responsible college grad with a job and health insurance, I found myself in the midst of a minor pregnancy scare. I had just found out that my partner had cheated on me and we’d just broken up. I had a job, but there was no way in hell I was prepared to be a parent. I was still in graduate school, and couldn’t even make my student loan payments. My ex-partner was an abusive, lying, unfaithful asshat, and I didn’t want to be tied to him for the rest of my life, or inflict him on a child. For a whole lot of reasons, I knew that having a child was simply Not. An. Option.
All at once, in a flash of light, I realized that if I turned out to be pregnant I would absolutely seek an abortion. That realization was closely followed by the realization that doing so would mean taking off of work, driving about 100 miles to the only provider in my state, maxing out a credit card (since my supposedly awesome health insurance wouldn’t cover it) and generally going through an arse-load of trouble.
It turned out that I wasn’t pregnant (WHEW – big sigh of relief). But if I had been, I know I would have been suddenly very concerned about abortion access. Heck, I’m concerned now lest I ever find myself in that situation again – and I’m concerned for women who might not have the luxury of taking sick or vacation time from work, having a credit card to max out, or having reliable transportation to another city.
This is my long way of saying that young people who seriously oppose abortion may just be in the enviable position of never having to seriously contemplate needing one.
Some of it may be the parenting–remembering, of course, that that seems to buttonhole all those striving middleclass families–but some of it may just also be the lack of experience that young people have.
They don’t know (if/that they know) someone who has had to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, because it’s all hush-hush, and/or there’s the idea that because it will NEVER happen to them, they don’t need to protect the rights of others.
N.B. I obviously don’t mean all young people. If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
Aaaand flackette wins by a nose!
Incidentally I am so bummed that etsy seller is sold out of that t-shirt.
There has been so much SHAME that has surrounded this issue for so long and I think that’s shaping peoples attitudes. Even people who consider themselves to be pro-choice will often times follow that up with, “but I wouldn’t have an abortion myself.” Not all, but many pro-choice woman are just so apologetic about the whole thing.
@bluebears Agreed!
I agree, PhDork. I think not knowing someone who’s been through, or not having been through a pregnancy scare yourself (flackette) makes it much easier to judge the choice someone else would make. As soon as you have been through it yourself or have someone close to you who has it opens up your eyes. If only more women could tell their stories.
bluebears, it’s not always about being ashamed of the idea, though. Before I got successfully pregnant, I thought I would never have an abortion because I was upper class and had great family support, and was never in a position where I felt my life would be ruined by a baby. Though I never said it out loud. It’s just what I thought.
Of course, then I discovered that I hated pregnancy with every fiber of my being, came to the conclusion that asking women to go through pregnancy for a child they didn’t want was an act of torture, and became much more passionately pro-choice. Also, now that I have a living child, I know I would abort a pregnancy that risked me in a heartbeat, because I feel I owe more to my living, breathing kid.
In my prepregnancy days, it was just a failure of imagination.
Av0gadro: well did you actually voice that? I assume a lot of people might think to themselves that they wouldn’t have abortions but why do (some) people feel the need to follow up all pro-choice declarations with that statement? I still say its a form of apology.
@Av0gadro – I’ve always been pro-choice, but once I had my children (2), and experienced pregnancy, I became a frothing at the mouth pro-choicer. To this day I cannot understand how anyone who has actually had a child canNOT support abortion access for all women.
Pregnancy is hard on the body, hard on your other kids, hard emotionally, and I cannot imagine carrying a child to term that I did not want or could not care for. ESPECIALLY because the brunt of raising said child would fall on ME for the rest of my life.
Anyone thinking otherwise seems to be dreaming of some kind of utopia, which certainly doesn’t exist here in the U.S.
A person who is 29 was born the year Reagan was elected, and grew up with the so-called moral majority and a hundred other related cultural trends. Reagan made a devil’s bargain and we are still realizing the effects now.
While I realize it’s not as feasable as it seems from where I sit in one of the most pro-choice states in the country – I put up with the rain in Seattle because my state government is pro-equality and pro-choice – but I have to wonder if some of the attitudes amoung my generation toward abortion are related to the availability of birth control pills. That’s the other thing that’s a really huge difference between now and pre-Roe. With this extra method of protecting against unwanted pregnancies, if you get pregnant anyway, you have to deal with “The Consequences” so you learn to be a better steward of your body or whatever.
The other thing is, when you’re young and invincible AND on birth control you might think “I’m being responsible and won’t need abortion services” and of course “I’m not like THOSE girls cuz I’m on BC”.
bluebears, No, I never said it out loud, because it seemed judgmental to me. I can see why you think it’s apologetic (I’m not a slut! But I think sluts should have options), but I think it’s a split, between the women who don’t want to be judged and the women who are judging other women, even if they don’t mean to.
Ms. M, I know! I read those articles by women who say they became pro-life when they saw the ultrasound or felt the baby, and I’m mystified. I know my pregnancies have been unusually hard, but I also know women who had uncomplicated pregnancies who still failed classes, had to cut back hours, or (in my mom’s case), dropped out of college because they were too tired to cope. How can anyone who’s been through it not think it’s a huge deal? I know you can give a kid up for adoption and, in this day and age, even be pretty sure it was going to good people who would send you pictures and stuff, but that sounds unbearably unfair to me. Why would you put your body through this if you weren’t getting some benefit from it?
Rachel, I’m 31, and have never known a lack of birth control. And certainly, amongst women like me, the availability is part of the judgment. You hear people speaking derisively of women who use “abortion as birth control” and I think that meme didn’t exist so much when it really was one of the only options for woman-controlled birth control.
Ms. M… you took the exact words out of my mouth. I was pro-choice in theory before my first pregnancy, and I became absolutely, rabidly pro-choice after. I was so sick and so tired that I gave up every non-essential thing in my life just to be able to work full time in order to keep my insurance. My second pregnancy was a little better because I no longer worked on my feet all day, but I still wouldn’t wish that on an unwilling woman. I wouldn’t even wish it on a willing woman who didn’t have a support system!
That’s partly why the adoption argument always seemed dangerously over-simplistic and misleading to me. It’s certainly a good option for some, and maybe even the best option for some, but not for everyone!
rodriguez – Agreed. Plus I’ve lived in 4 states and can say that the anti-choice voices are often the only voices heard at all. I grew up in the Bible Belt, with a mom who was mostly progressive but entirely apolitical (to my eyes, at least, and in those days), and I had never in my life heard a woman say she’d had an abortion until I was 19. Never. But you’d better believe I’d heard approximately infinity stories about the “selfish”, “promiscuous”, “misguided”, “unsaved”, “lost” &c. &c. women who got abortions from every other direction.
Then I was in college, my best friend had an abortion, complications arose, I *confessed* to my mom that I’d helped her set it up (in tears, mind you. Catholic guilt, sigh), and she looked at me, said “Is she going to be okay?” and then told me about the abortion she’d had while she was dating my dad but before they got married. Honest to dog, in under 4 seconds I’d gone from “I helped kill a baby!” to: My mom had an abortion, my mom’s the best person I know, a good person had an abortion, ohmigosh is it possible that abortion is not pure evil, abortion is not pure evil. Further study and contemplation was needed to round out my beliefs, but I basically got intellectual whiplash from the speed of that transition.
Moral of the story: we shouldn’t let the antis control the dialog.
I found it interesting and also ironic that the article speculates that one reason the younger generation is more pro-life is that “The major development in reproductive technology during their lifetimes wasn’t something that prevented pregnancies but something that created them: IVF.”
IVF involves the creation and destruction of embryos, sometimes after they have been implanted. It seems to me that if all abortions were outlawed, then IVF might become suddenly less available. I wonder if that would make a difference to any of the anti-choicers.
“People can say that life is about dealing with the consequences of your actions as much as they want — it’s easy to disprove.”
Exactly. That is the one pro-life argument it’s hard to argue with. However, I always follow up with “Why are you treating babies as punishment?” Every child should be wanted and loved not seen as mistakes or regrets.
I really don’t know what to do.
I would say that focusing on the fact that even if you have doubts about it, it’s better to have it legal than not might be a place to start. That’s where I am, I guess.
I also always thought that I would never have an abortion, and I still hope I don’t get in the situation where I have to choose, because I do think it’s a complicated issue, but I am glad it’s available in case something goes wrong. In fact, one of my few recurring nightmares is of being pregnant and HAVING to have the baby (I blame this on my mother giving me a magazine special issue about teen pregnancy at age 10 and telling me that *that’s* what happened to women who have sex before marriage. No lie. No idea how I turned out semi-sane after that sexual education…), and in the dreams I always wish I could get an abortion.
Reading L’Evenement (the Happening) by Annie Ernaux, about her back-streets abortion, also strengthened my commitment to having it legal. She doesn’t waste ink on hemming and hawing about whether to do it – she is sure right away, and the book just deals with the search for a way to do it and the rather horrific procedure, which is hardly described at all and yet lodges in your head.
This breaks my heart. We, the 2nd wave feminists who made Roe possible, have failed utterly in the last 25 years. Because I’ve said this more than once here, I’ll keep it short-I hold mainstream feminist organizations responsible for our current situation. They have been completely impotent in countering anti propaganda. [Btw, people who oppose abortion are not pro-life, and we give them a little victory every time we use that term.]
This connects to PSoul’s piece here this morning. Access to abortion is not an abstract philosophical discussion topic. It’s the very foundation of physical liberty. As posters have said above, pregnancy has huge physical ramifications, even if it goes completely smoothly. No one-NO ONE-should have the power to force a woman to go through that.
I think we need a groundswell of women willing to tell their stories about abortion. We need a public relations campaign that calls out all the falsehoods and sick logic that the antis use. We need to make young women-and men-think about this in real terms, not in terms of a pretty Hallmark baby that never cries and never costs any money and never grows up to be a rebellious teenager. Abortion is our right. We have no cause for shame, nor need we bow and scrape to Congress for “allowing” us our bodily integrity, albeit in more and more limited forms.
I wonder if these polls reflect the way women behave. They may say that they’re anti-choice. But we see women like that at the clinic every single week. When you get pregnant unexpectedly, your life really flashes in front of your eyes. Our silence has allowed the antis to shame us. It’s time to stop being silent.