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Abortion by Daphne de Marneffe

page four

What Is Sacred?

The mystery of abortion is that while at times unspeakably sad, ending a pregnancy can involve love. A woman can feel strongly that to have a child in a compromised situation, in a situation where she is not prepared to devote her full attention and commitment, is not something she would want to do to someone she loved. This paradox is captured in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem about abortion, when she writes “You were born, you had body, you died,” and, only a few lines later, “Believe me, I loved you all.” By dint of their biology, women are charged with the knowledge that life involves ruthlessness, even sometimes toward those we love, or those we could love. We bear children, and we are faced at times with terrible decisions about how to value a life — our own and the one growing within us. We rear children, and we become intimate with the psychological realities of relationships, including their pain and conflict and moral complexity. Recalling her illegal abortion in 1938, the activist Lana Phelan said, “I was laying on that gurney just sobbing my heart out, and I’ll never forget that woman [her abortionist], she was wonderful. She came around, big black lady, she put her arms around me on the gurney, and she put her face down near mine, and she kind of put her cheek up next to mine. And she said, ‘Honey, did you think it was so easy to be a woman?’”

The paradox that we can feel love for a potential life that we choose to end becomes suspect, even incoherent, if we believe that the fetus is a person just like ourselves. For if we regard the fetus as a full-fledged person entitled to rights, the notion of loving a potential life we choose to end becomes indistinguishable from the delusional or grim claim of the murderer to have loved her victim. The passionate disagreements between people about abortion appear to revolve around the rights of the fetus to life on the one hand, and the rights of the woman to self-determination on the other. But perhaps there is a way to think about these issues that does justice to our intuitions both about the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual.

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin has argued that very few people actually believe, even if they think they do, that fetuses have the right not to be killed and an interest in remaining alive. Most abortion conservatives, for example, permit some exceptions to their anti-abortion stance, in cases such as rape or incest. Yet if a fetus had a right to life on par with already-born individuals, ending that life could never be justified on the basis of a crime of which the fetus itself was innocent. Instead, Dworkin suggests, their objection to abortion is grounded on something else: the belief that individual human life is sacred.

According to Dworkin, people with widely divergent views on abortion hold in common a belief in the sacredness or intrinsic value of a human life. We revere both the “natural miracle” of “any human creature, including the most immature embryo, [as] a triumph of divine or evolutionary creation, which produces a complex, reasoning being from, as it were, nothing.” Likewise, we honor the human creative investment, both “the processes of nation and community and language through which a human being will come to absorb and continue hundreds of generations of cultures” and “the process of internal personal creation and judgement by which a person will make and remake himself.”

The sacredness of human life lies in both natural creation—of the natural world, the species of the earth, our human bodies— and human creation, the human creative force that feeds art, culture, and human personality. In Dworkin’s view, the difference between abortion conservatives and liberals often lies in the aspect of sacredness they deem most important. Abortion conservatives tend to rank the natural creative element above the human, though they acknowledge the latter’s importance. Abortion liberals, while recognizing the value of the natural, tend to give greater weight to the human creative contribution. Different positions on abortion can be understood as lying along a continuum of the relative value people place on the natural and human creative contributions to human life.

Any woman considering abortion who regards the embryo not as just a bunch of cells but as a biological wonder and a potential human believes both the natural and human creation to be meaningful and worthy of reverence. Yet many women regard the confluence of natural and human creativity that the desire to have a child represents as itself a sacred feature of bringing a child into the world. Being ready to fulfill one’s procreative potential with a certain person, at a certain time in your shared life, brings to the experience of pregnancy and anticipated childbearing a sense of integration, of being in tune with one’s chosen destiny. This integration of human and natural creation is what many women experience as the “highest form” of childbearing. We feel engaged on every level, physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual; we fully participate in our own life and the life we are creating, in the continuation of the species and the continuation of culture.

Obviously, to require women to carry all pregnancies to term is to thwart their aspiration to this integration. If women do not have reproductive choice, they are frustrated in their ability to exercise their specifically human creativity. This is not because having and caring for children itself frustrates creative aspiration. Rather, it is because preventing women from making their own reproductive decisions curtails their choices with respect to their own human investments. Determining the meaning of having children for women, deciding for them when they will have children and when they will not, effectively takes the choice about how they will use their bodies and what work they will do out of their hands.

Women must obviously be in a position to decide for themselves how they will value the natural and human contributions represented by an unborn child. But it is exactly their powerful sense of the connection between natural and human creation that makes an abortion decision so complicated and so painful. Women throughout history have been in a position to experience that connection in an immediate way, because it is they who have both birthed and nurtured babies. “Conceiving children is not enough for the continuation of human life,” wrote Annie Leclerc; “it is also necessary to feed them, care for them, cajole them, talk to them; it is necessary to live them so that they live.” The primal, psychological truth of relationships is that babies are conceived from sex, but unless they are nurtured and brought into the human community, they die. They need the passionate commitment of another human to become fully human. Women know that if they are able or willing to provide that nurture, to commit huge amounts of their own energy, talents, time, and emotion, the fetus will indeed, under most circumstances, become a fully human child. That is part of the difficult context they confront.

The fact that a woman needs to invest herself for the child to grow is treated as dispensable and all but morally weightless when the natural and the human contributions to life are cleanly separated and placed in a hierarchical relationship, with “nature’s miracle”— conception— as the highest pinnacle. The moral clarity with which some argue the pro-life position seems to depend on treating as part of “nature’s miracle” — and thereby erasing — women’s investment of their humanity, their time, and their love in enabling the flourishing of an individual human life. In this scheme, any intuition women might have about the value to a child’s development of their own desire to mother is deemed completely irrelevant. Yet if our aspiration is to create humans in the highest sense, people who can love, reflect on the world, and bring understanding and compassion to their relation to themselves and others, we should acknowledge and honor both the natural and human aspects of creating a child and view their integration as itself sacred.

On the abortion rights side, 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. The birth control activist Margaret Sanger wrote in 1920 that voluntary motherhood was “the most sacred aspect of woman’s freedom.” Unashamed to engage the spiritual dimension, she contended that a motherhood that was the “fruit of a deep yearning” was a motherhood “ready to obey its own urge to remake the world.” Through a desired motherhood, a woman brought integrity and joy to her relationships to herself, her children, her mate, and her larger community. The contemporary pro-choice movement would benefit from conceptualizing abortion not only in terms of rights but also in terms of the sacredness of desired motherhood. Through that effort we might deepen our understanding of maternal desire and find a more encompassing, expressive language to describe the seemingly contradictory aspects of women’s reproductive life.

next:
Pro-life Feminism and Saintliness

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