| 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.
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