In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

In defense of “bad” abortions

Caperton

Most women don’t need to be told the story of a woman’s abortion (or two abortions) after forgetting to use birth control in the heat of the moment. Most of us know a woman who’s done that. About one in three women will be her — as quoted in the linked article, one in three women will have had an abortion by age 45, and by Guttmacher’s oft-quoted report, more than 90 percent had their abortion for reasons other than the standard rape-incest-health of the mother-fetal abnormality inconsistent with life that is more likely to get a pass. Statistically, several women reading this post at this moment have not just had an abortion, but have had a “bad” abortion. So they don’t need to read about someone else’s just to understand.

Really, I’m kind of just posting Laurie Abraham’s account of her abortions because of this:

I’m tired of the rhetoric, even from pro-choice advocates, who in their understandable defensive posture seem to restrict themselves to discussing the most “sympathetic” abortions: those performed because of rape or incest, because the life or health of the mother is in danger, or when the fetus has some devastating disease like Tay-Sachs. All those taken together account for less than a tenth of the more than one million pregnancies terminated in this country each year, [Katha] Pollitt tells us in Pro: “So sorry, fifteen-year-old girls who got drunk at a party, single mothers with all the kids they can handle and no money, mothers preoccupied with taking care of disabled children, students with just one more year to a degree, battered women, women who have lost their job or finally just landed a decent one, and forty-five-year-olds who have already raised their kids to adulthood, to say nothing of women who just don’t feel ready to be a mother, or maybe even don’t ever want to be a mother.”

So, yeah. It’s usually easier to talk to anti-choicers, or particularly the choice-ambivalent, in terms of the sympathetic stories of women who’ve “done nothing wrong” and yet ended up making such a difficult decision. But the fact is, women deserve agency over our own bodies regardless of the circumstances. A woman with a nonviable pregnancy who desperately wants to be a mother, and a woman with an unexpected pregnancy who (like six out of 10 women who get abortions) doesn’t want to be a mother again, both deserve to make their own health decisions. And while the latter might be less likely to turn the heart of an otherwise stalwart anti, she’s no less deserving of support and acknowledgement, and no less deserving of the right to decide what happens to her own body.

8 thoughts on In defense of “bad” abortions

  1. Hear hear, Caperton. You’re right – while the “good” abortions might offer more capacity to win over anti-choicers, the potential to do so is limited, and the cost – allowing the rhetoric of the anti-choice movement to dominate the pro-choice conversation – is substantial.

    We see this in a lot of progressive debates – a tendency to focus on the most morally exemplary individual stories, as if the rights we are fighting for are actually privileges that one earns by being saintly. But ultimately, if you believe something is a right, you believe it’s a right for everybody, not just those whose individual circumstances tug at your heartstrings. Women who have access to birth control and forget to use it may be making a mistake, even a stupid mistake, but the right to an abortion is a right for everybody, even those who do something stupid.

    (Although as an aside – I wonder how many of the women who report that they forgot to use birth control were actually pressured by their partner into not using it. Not a small number, I imagine)

  2. Anti-choicers implicitly support the patriarchy in its imposition of a certain form of reproductive labor onto women, regardless of what anti-choicers like to tell themselves. So any attempt to share moral ground with them is doomed to either turn out fruitless or, worse, reinforce the same patriarchal norms that such a sharing of moral ground is supposed to dismantle. And this article expresses that point very well.

  3. Thank you so much for this article. I had a “good” abortion (fetal abnormalities incompatible with life in a very wanted pregnancy). Whenever I tell my abortion story, I don’t want to position my own abortion as “good” and others as “bad”. I try to emphasize how the lack of waiting periods, lack of ultrasound requirements, etc. were so important to me at the time to avoid that hierarchy. Thanks for giving me some more to think about on this one.

  4. I spent nearly 5 years getting treatment for “unexplained” infertility. I had 4 pregnancies that never made it out of the first trimester: 3 early losses and an ectopic. Then I had a very difficult twin pregnancy that resulted in live birth at 25 weeks of gestation. Both babies were 1 lb 13 ounces and spent almost 6 months in the NICU. They came home 2 weeks apart both on oxygen. One was able to get off oxygen after a month at home and the other is still on oxygen 7 months later. After 5 years of infertility treatment my husband and I didn’t really take our chances of spontaneous pregnancy very seriously, but we still used condoms every time except one when we “threw caution to the wind.” In mid-June of this year I started feeling sick when I had gone too long without eating and my already meager breast milk supply started dwindling even more. I took a HPT and it was so ridiculously positive. There wasn’t even much of a discussion about what we consider our only option. I have two high needs babies and I couldn’t risk being placed on bed rest again, having another preemie, or even having a full term infant to care for while trying to care for the two we have. I’m not sad about it. I don’t regret it.

  5. I usually point out that desperate girls and women find ways to get an abortion, whether it’s legal or not, which leads to a lot of unnecessary deaths. In fact, it’s often the case that stricter abortion laws are correlated with more abortion. US is stricter than Norway, yet we have more abortions. Better to support things that prevent abortion like sex ed, contraception, and freedom to use it (as in not feeling shamed about using it). Of course, accidents still happen. So again, let’s prevent unnecessary deaths by ensuring that abortion is safe and legal.

    1. Norway also has more social safety nets in place, reducing the need to abort what may otherwise be a wanted pregnancy due to reasons of financial distress or lack of support.

  6. Pro-liars like to point up the “bad” abortions in caricature terms, talking about A Woman I Know who Sleeps Around and “doesn’t even bother” to use any form of contraception because She Can Always Get An Abortion.

    And I always say that I’d far rather that than have anyone other than the pregnant person make the decision “YOU are to be allowed or denied an abortion depending on whether I do or do not approve.”

Comments are currently closed.