Should the decision to have an abortion be treated as a valid, moral, and even normal choice in a woman's life? Many people don't think so, and that includes Christians who are anti-choice as well as Christians who are ostensibly supporters of legalized abortion. Does it make sense to defend a woman's right to choose, but then denigrate women who do choose? Actually it can make sense to support a right to choose but not agree with all choices, but not if you also denigrate those who choose.
In Why I Am An Abortion Doctor, Suzanne T. Poppema writes:
[W]omen carry shame, guilt, and sadness as their major abortion-related emotions. Would they feel these emotions if certain elements of society didn't insist that abortion is dishonorable? I don't think so.
The shame derives directly from society's view that abortion is something bad. The prevailing thought on the subject seems to be: We're not sure we like it at all for ourselves; we think that maybe it's all right or at least understandable in the case of a woman who has been raped or has been a victim of incest; we're a little worried that women are just doing this for convenience sake. No woman makes this decision lightly or in a moral vacuum - she thinks and feels long and hard about it.
When the antichoice people use terms such as "murder" and "kill" and "blood-dripping abortionists," they employ these highly charged words to create an aura intended to dissuade women who face the abortion decision. We who are prochoice always talk about changing the language of abortion. But we're not going to change the language until we all agree that abortion is a valid, moral, and honorable decision.
It's one thing to say: "Well, there are too many abortions, I wish we didn't have to do them anymore and hope that the day would come when we'd put ourselves out of business." But that dismisses the reality of women's ongoing need to not be pregnant under certain circumstances.
There's certainly something to be said in defense of wishing that there were fewer abortions. Women may think long and hard before making the choice to abort, but that doesn't mean that they are happy to have to choose to abort. I doubt that there are any women who, if given the option, would prefer to have an abortion over never having gotten pregnant in the first place. It just wouldn't make sense.
It's reasonable to think that in an ideal world, abortion wouldn't be something that would occur much at all, but how do we reconcile this with also saying that, once placed in the position where a decision has to be made, the decision to abort is every bit as moral, valid, and normal as the decision to carry the fetus to term? Don't the two contradict on some basic level?
It's a difficult tightrope, I think, that requires careful use of language. The key thing to keep in mind is that in this "ideal world," it's not the case that women are choosing to carry pregnancies to term rather than to abort. Instead, women in this ideal world aren't getting pregnant as often in the first place and, therefore, aren't being faced with the choice of whether to abort or not. For conservative Christians, this ideal would be achieved by women not having sex except in the context of marriage and when they want to get pregnant; for others, this ideal is achieved by people having easy access to contraception and sex education.
This distinction is vital because just as conservative Christians do not want support women's choices to abort, they also don't want to support women's choices to be sexually active or use contraception. It's all part of a larger agenda of opposing gender equality, sexual liberty, and personal autonomy. Women, being a traditionally oppressed class, bears the brunt of this anti-choice activism because women also bear the brunt of so many other anti-Enlightenment ideals promoted by the Christian Right.
If we imagine that the ideal world is where women are choosing not to abort while also being unable to choose to be sexually active or to use contraception, then we will have trouble treating abortion as a valid and moral decision in the real world where we live. When we realize that the ideal world is one where the need, and therefore the choice, doesn't come up so much because all of women's personal decisions about what to do with their own bodies are treated as legitimate, then we can understand why abortion shouldn't be stigmatized. If anything should be stigmatized, it's that society provides so little sexual education and support for contraception that the need for abortions is so much higher than it should be.
