| Desire
and Selfhood
There is a stark, almost shocking difference between how one feels
when one wants to be pregnant and how one feels when one doesn’t.
The same physiological event can be experienced as a blessing or
a catastrophe, as being in harmony with one’s body or as being
mugged by it. Women’s lives are often described as contextual,
but this may be the most contextual aspect of all, “the mother
of all contexts.” The extremes of women’s responses
in the face of pregnancy, and every ambiguous point in between,
puts us face-to-face with how central the issue of wanting is to
the abortion dilemma.
We have difficulty knowing how to weigh the mother’s desire
for a child; by its very nature, it seems too capricious, too emotional,
and too devoid of principle. And perhaps because this desire is
so hard to evaluate, its complexity is flattened both by abortion’s
opponents and proponents. On the right, the mother’s desire
is too often dismissed as a selfish concern with “convenience,”
a touchy-feely, morally insignificant wisp in comparison with the
sober matter of fetal life. On the left, it seems desire had best
not be inquired after too energetically, for fear that women’s
ambivalence about their abortions might be used to discredit their
decisions and undermine the legitimacy of their right to decide.
In fact, a woman’s desire is absolutely central to the morality
of abortion, even though the ways we have tended to talk about it
have not always helped us to understand why. In the wrong hands,
sometimes in women’s own, the notion of “wanting”
has been facilely assimilated into the “we are empowered and
can do whatever we want” school of moral nihilism. But desire
is actually more complex than our more casual notions of feeling
or preference imply. It is not simply about feelings, however complicated
or conflictual; it is also about intentions, the coordinated movement
of feeling, thought, and action toward a self-chosen purpose. The
critic Adam Gopnik aptly described desire as a “thought-through
feeling.” The freedom and responsibility to choose the intentions
most important to us are central features of what we believe it
means to be a person. A woman’s desire with respect to something
so consuming and momentous as carrying a pregnancy to term involves
just these sorts of intentions.
In Fruitful, a memoir of her life as a mother and a feminist,
the writer Anne Roiphe reflected on the folly of trying to ground
the ethics of abortion in when life begins, as she and her friends
had tried to do in the days before Roe v. Wade. “We should
have drawn the line on whether the fetus was or was not wanted and
shaped the debate on that issue,” she wrote, “instead
of getting mired in metaphysics or theology about the beginning
of life.” Roiphe speaks of whether the mother wants the fetus;
but she is actually implying something much broader about the fact
that the potential mother is the person in the best position to
assess her desires and make judgments about them. Whether a child
is “wanted” functions as a shorthand to convey two related
but distinct meanings: a woman’s feelings concerning having
the baby and her prerogative to evaluate her own feelings and come
to her own decision.
A woman’s feelings about an unintentional pregnancy are almost
always mixed. Even when she is deeply chagrined to be pregnant,
she may feel remorse about having an abortion. She may imagine pleasure
at mothering a child but see no practical way to support it. She
may have no interest in caring for a child but feel swayed by her
family’s wishes for her to keep it. She may ultimately hope
for a child with her partner but feel that to have a child now would
threaten the viability of their relationship. She may ambivalently
decide to continue the pregnancy and one day find herself very happy
about it. When a woman considers her feelings, whatever they are,
she also likely considers them in light of her values. It is almost
impossible to have feelings about abortion without those feelings
becoming interwoven with ethical concern.
Yet whatever a woman feels about an abortion — whether she
feels bereft, suicidal, liberated, that she will go to Hell, or
all of the above, whether she has an abortion half awake, half asleep,
or completely confused about what she wants — her entitlement
to make her own decision does not derive from the content of her
feelings. It derives from her own ultimate authority to weigh her
own competing desires, intentions, and values and to undertake her
own course of action.
In this sense, decisions about continuing a pregnancy confront
us with the connection, in its most naked form, between a woman’s
very claim to personhood and her reproductive freedom. The reality
of pregnancy is that having a baby one does not inwardly consent
to is a traumatic offense to one’s integrity as a person;
having a baby that one desires is an ultimate fulfillment of oneself
as a person. Not being able to have a baby when one wants to is
experienced as a great injury to the self. Ending a pregnancy that
would have shortchanged one’s other commitments is experienced
as a wrenching but necessary act of self-preservation. Each instance
bears out just how deeply our reproductive fate is enmeshed with
our very selves. Whether abortion is legal or illegal, safe or dangerous,
women will always have abortions, not only because practical limitations
or social stigma urge it, but also because there are situations
where to have a baby represents a compromise of herself or her values
that a woman will take great risks to avoid.
The trivialization of this connection between a woman’s integrity
and her procreative choice has at times found expression in legal arguments against women’s reproductive self-determination.
In her article “Are Mothers Persons?” (note the pointed
reversal of the more usual question, “Are fetuses persons?”),
the philosopher Susan Bordo demonstrates the stunning desecration
of women’s personhood right under our noses in the realm of
reproductive law. The principle of a person’s right to physical
inviolability has been strenuously protected in cases concerning
such issues as whether someone can be legally compelled to donate
bone marrow to a dying relative. The import of this protection is
not simply physical; it constitutes, Bordo writes, “a protection
of the subjectivity of the person involved — that
is, it is an acknowledgment that the body can never be regarded
merely as a site of quantifiable processes that can be assessed
objectively, but must be treated as invested with personal meaning,
history, and value that are ultimately determinable only by the
subject who lives ‘within’ it.” When this “meaning-bestowing
function is in danger of being taken away,” the law tends
to interpret “the situation as a violent invasion of the personal
space of the body.”
But look what happens, Bordo says, when the body in question is
a woman’s pregnant or reproductive body. The right to physical
integrity and the protection of subjectivity gives way to the abrogation
of a woman’s will for the sake of saving an unborn child’s
life. Courts do not order people to make personal sacrifices on
the order of a transplant or marrow donation, even to save their
own child’s life; for, despite the fact that a child’s
life hangs in the balance—a full-fledged person’s life—the
potential donor’s claim to inviolable subjectivity overrides
the potential recipient’s need for life-giving support. In
contrast, where a woman’s specifically reproductive
decision making is concerned, courts have ordered caesarean
sections, intrauterine transfusions, and the delivery of babies
of terminally ill women against their will. Here we see in sharpest
relief a particular bias directed not simply against women but specifically
against women’s autonomy in pregnancy decisions.
If a woman happens to be poor, pregnant, and of non-European descent,
she “comes as close as a human being can get to being regarded,
medically and legally, as ‘mere body,’ her wishes, desires,
dreams, religious scruples of little consequence and easily ignored
in the interests of fetal well-being.” Bordo cites a 1987
study that found that 81 percent of court-ordered obstetrical interventions
involved African-American, Asian, or Hispanic women. In the case
of Ayesha Madyun, a woman who resisted a caesarean on religious
grounds, the judge ruled that “for him not to issue a court
order forcing her to have the operation would be to ‘indulge’
Madyun’s ‘desires’ at the expense of the safety
of her fetus.” This sort of dismissal of religious beliefs
by the judicial system is, as the legal scholar Stephen Carter has
argued, part of a more general cultural tendency to treat religious
convictions as optional and expendable. But even beyond that, such
legal opinions essentially deprive the pregnant woman of the right
to informed consent, paternalistically declaring how she should
interpret the meaning and value of a given procedure. By so doing,
they preempt the very act that forms the core of her entitlement
to informed consent: that is, her own subjective determination of
what a given intervention means to her. Bordo helps us
appreciate that coercion in reproductive decisions undermines not
simply what individual women want but also their entitlement to
subjectivity itself. In the polemics of abortion, the pro-life
side objects to a woman sacrificing an actual human life merely
for the sake of her own “convenience” (that is, reproductive
control), whereas the pro-choice side argues that a pregnancy can
be terminated with little impact on a woman’s autonomous self.
The fact is, a woman’s personhood cannot be disentangled from
her reproductive life so cleanly. “The nature of pregnancy
is such,” Bordo correctly observes, “that to deprive
the woman of control over her reproductive life . . . is necessarily
also to mount an assault on her personal integrity and autonomy
(the essence of personhood in our culture) and to treat her merely
as [a] material incubator of fetal subjectivity.”
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