The
importance of a woman’s reproductive freedom has justifiably
been framed in terms of her rights to self-determination, to personal
choice, to the inviolability of her body. But in framing the argument
almost solely in those terms, pro-choice rhetoric has forsaken a
more inspirational discussion of the profound necessity and liberating
potential of a desired motherhood. |
| When
my husband picked me up after work during my first pregnancy,
I would vomit before I could even say hello. I had to admire, in the
glazed aftermath of yet another bout of puking, the sheer will to
life displayed by this small cluster of cells. It seemed it would
do anything short of killing me to ensure its own survival. I remember
learning during my third pregnancy, when I suffered an endless string
of flus and colds, that a pregnant woman’s immune responses
are partly suppressed to lessen the chance she will develop an immune
reaction to her own baby. It seemed that as long as I stayed alive,
nature didn’t much care how sick I felt.
Many women, including myself, are unprepared for how abstract their
happiness at being pregnant becomes in the face of those first-trimester
physical surges—the midsentence stuporous sleep, the racking
waves of nausea. But in that brutal and aweinspiring contest of
bodies, I also sensed the genesis of a relationship in which the
struggle for growth in earnest was at the core, and in which my
love — already too ethereal a word — was expressed,
and even strangely defined, by my strength and resilience in the
face of that struggle. That stage of pregnancy was my best lesson
in the unsaccharine nature of mother love, its intimacy with creation
and destruction.
Pregnancy begins a relationship. Most essentially, it launches
a relationship between a woman and the potential child she carries
within. It also initiates a new relationship between a woman and
herself — her body, her history, and her future. For these
reasons, when a woman considers abortion, the question of whether
the fetus should continue to develop does not stand alone; it is
a question she wrestles with in the context of whether a relationship
should continue to develop between herself as a potential mother
and the fetus as a potential baby.
Some believe that the fetus is a full-fledged person from conception.
I do not. But the belief that the fetus is not a full-fledged person
does not make abortion emotionally easy or morally simple. Awareness
of the potential relationship set in motion by pregnancy is one
of the most heartrending and ethically fraught issues for a woman
considering abortion. Pregnancy’s ineluctably relational nature
means that once it begins, it can never be completely negated. A
baby comes to term or it doesn’t, through choice or fate.
It comes to term, and it is kept or relinquished. In any case, in
any outcome, there is a relationship the woman has to do something
with— mourn it, celebrate it, try to forget it, embrace it,
dismiss it, accept its loss. When a woman feels she must not allow
the child and the relationship to develop, it is almost never an
easy thing, physically or psychologically. Yet women sometimes feel
that as difficult, painful, even tragic as it is, they must do it
to survive, or to respect themselves and their situation in life.
This very aspect of the
abortion dilemma illuminates a facet of maternal desire. The desire
to mother involves the intention and commitment to enter into a
relationship of love and care with a child. It represents an attempt
to integrate our deepest personal longings and highest human aspirations.
There are situations in which a woman does not want to enter into
that relationship, or she recognizes she does not have the ability
to responsibly commit to it. Such a woman confronts the same basic
realities as the woman who chooses to keep a pregnancy does. First,
each grapples with the enormous importance of a potential mother’s
desire for a child to that potential child’s flourishing and
fulfillment as a human being. And second, each faces the reality
that when a woman bears a child, she channels her emotional and
physical energies in ways that are hugely consequential in defining
the person she will become. In light of these facts, what a woman
wants with respect to having a child is of absolutely decisive,
even sacred, importance.
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