Hi to all – I’ve agreed to blog here for the next two weeks. It seemed to be a good idea a month or so ago. I am in Mexico for the month of August, mostly writing and working on a few projects. Pretty solitary time and blogging a bit would be companionable. I have often said that I’d blog for bottle caps and comments, forget the pay. Where else can you test out new ideas, write drafts of chapters for your book and get the comments that help you figure out if you have written the stuff in a way that the people you want to understand you do – feedback is invaluable.
A little bit about me. I started working in abortion rights when the first abortion clinics opened in New York in 1970. I’m a Catholic, was inactive then, but I had long come to terms with abortion. The church was so wrong on everything to do with marriage, sex, and reproduction. I’d been through a divorced and remarried mother who I knew was not an adulteress and was not going to hell. I knew I wasn’t interested in children or life long monogamous marriage but thought the idea that God expected me to never enjoy sexual intimacy seemed bizarre. I thought getting pregnant when you did not want to have a baby if you could avoid it was more likely to be a “sin” than using birth control or having an abortion. I still believe those things, although the language of “sin” is no longer in my vocabulary.
I reconnected with my Catholic roots in 1978 when I went on
the board of Catholics for Choice, became their president in 1982 and worked there till 2007. I liked Catholics for Choice, not so much because it was Catholic but because it was a space where moral questions about gender, sex and reproduction could be explored in ways that seemed impossible in the standard prochoice organization where the main concern was not saying anything risky that might give ammunition to the other side. The fact that abortion is such a political yes or no – it is either legal or its not – makes it hard for people who feel passionately one way or the other to also talk about any concerns they may have.
These concerns need not translate into the conclusion that abortion should be illegal or even that it can be immoral, rather they are, for me, the way we all struggle to figure out what is the right thing to do in a given set of circumstances.
I’ve always been bemused by the reluctance of progressives who have no problem putting forward moral reactions to all sorts of human behavior from CEO pay to sex trafficking to the war in Afghanistan or Iraq but draw the line at ever commenting on what they think about decisions related to abortion. Can we never say that in our opinion an abortion for x reason or after multiple pregnancies without contraception which all end in abortion are immoral, even if they should be legal? Somehow we think if we make comments in this area we are telling women what to do or imposing our morality on others. No one needs to listen to us or do what we say, but the give and take of a good public discussion about abortion later in pregnancy, or about abortion for sex selection, or multiple abortions, or using abortion as a conscious method of birth control, seem to me to be helpful in sorting out the questions that real life people have. When I worked in the abortion clinics, these were questions people asked. In telling their story to a counselor, they talked about the stuff they thought about – and most of them thought about a lot of deep ethical questions.
So when I left CFC, at a time when abortion rights seemed, as they now do, more challenged than ever, I decided that I wanted to break out from the orthodoxy and fears that keep many of us silent about the many conflicting values we weigh when we think about abortion. I’d seen that repeating the mantra over and over that it is up to a woman, no one can judge, had not gotten us to the place where the public was comfortable with reasonably unrestricted access to abortion. With polls showing a slight tilt toward “prolife” , it was urgent that some new strategies be tried (and the development of the reproductive justice frame is a good example of putting out a new way for the public to think about abortion.) The challenge, it seems to me is not that more people are anti-abortion than in the past. but that people believe abortion should be legal, but regulated or restricted. Those who would like to see abortion banned have more readily adapted to this reality. Rarely do they talk about making abortion illegal. They play on public ambivalence and talk about “reducing the need for abortion” or about women being “hurt” by abortion. Those of us who are writing and advocating for abortion rights have had less success in finding new ways to convince people that abortion should not be subject to regulation and we fall back on the arguments of 30 years ago about near absolute control of the body – and no one new is moved.
Some of my reflections on abortion in the 21st Century can be found on Salon.com where I wrote a column for the year 2009. I look forward to posting a bit on those ideas here and to getting a lively discussion going. I like answering comments, so if you chose to engage, I will be active. I’m looking forward to these two weeks.