Dear Reader,
I hope that sharing my perspective on the subject of abortion, including how I arrived at my current beliefs, inspires you to reflect on your own beliefs. I welcome hearing from you if and how this long piece has affected you – assuming you’ve bothered to read it through. My email is suzannebirthing@gmail.
I am pained and offended by the shallowness of what passes for discussion – on all sides.
Abortion is not my chosen passion. You might well label me “pro-life” because I’m a proud mother and grandmother, was a nursery school teacher and care deeply about children, all of them, not just mine. And my life’s work has focused on activism about everything related to childbirth and how we bring babies into the world and care for the precious mother-baby bond, breastfeeding, care for fathers and the role of “fathering”, and for the development of the child. For me that is directly counted to how we treat the natural world and whether we are root in fear, defense and aggression or love, trust and cooperation and the people we choose or allow to lead us. I am passionate about preventing and healing early psychological trauma and the chronic health issues that often originate from how we came into our body and this world. For me, so much of how we behave and what we believe is rooted in our earliest experiences. And that usually today means “trauma”. I want to see all beings and our Mother Earth thrive.
I’ve come to realize that abortion must also my issue, although I’m 80 and well beyond childbearing myself. And, if you’re reading this piece, I assume you realize abortion must be your issue too, however uncomfortable it may sit with you. Because it has almost certainly affected your family, if you include all of your past as well as living relatives.
As you read my thoughts in this long essay, I hope you’ll be willing to feel the discomfort, sorrow, grief, and/or anger that the subject of abortion brings up. In your body, as well as your feelings and thoughts about it. You, men, definitely you, as well as women. For abortion is a subject that affects everyone and makes most of us uncomfortable. Wouldn’t we rather not be faced with the contradictions and paradoxes implicit in abortion.
To place abortion in the context of the United States laws: The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling of June 24, 2022 ended the federal Constitutional right to have an abortion and turned it over to states to decide how to deal with it (e.g. whether to protect a woman’s right to or to limit or totally outlaw it). A growing number of our state legislatures immediately rushed to outlaw it and some to criminalize it and anyone (doctor, neighbor, relative) who assists a woman in getting – or attempting to get – an abortion.
I’ve titled this piece Re-framing Abortion: Sex, Power, Patriarchy and Fear of the Feminine. I might have added “Fear of the Sacred”, because that is an intrinsic part of both the Feminine and Masculine principles of life. And each of us contains some aspects of both the Feminine and the Masculine, regardless of the sex we were labelled at birth or what our gender is.
If we ever hope to arrive at understanding each other and treating each other with mutual respect, then we all simply must stop thinking in terms of “good-and-bad”, “either-or” and think more deeply and broadly. That include long-term as well as short-term implications of outlawing and protecting abortion or not. We must be willing to hold views that seem contradictory, yet may both be true. Being able to hold opposing ideas – two (or more) things that couldn’t possibly be true – yet are true takes mature thinking. It’s damn hard to think in “both-and” terms rather than “good-and-bad”, “either-or”. That’s what the term “paradox” is all about. And in Western societies we’re seldom taught what it means and how important it is.
To give a quick example of a PARADOX: a pregnant person and the baby in their womb are both two distinct individuals, each with their own set of desires. Yes, for from the start of conception til months after the baby’s birth – extending to several years, if the mother is breastfeeding this baby – they are ONE biological system. Symbiotic. They need each other for each of their full development. More about that later.
It’s part of human nature to desire certainty, just as it is built into us genetically to be wary of those who are different from us. Yet intrinsic to life is the fact that there is no certainty – except the fact of our death and the fact that change is inevitable. And much of life exists in the area of grays, and sticky paradoxes. Like abortion.
Thinking about abortion in terms of whether there should be a cutoff date when it is no longer permitted, perhaps around 24 weeks gestation, has made me uncomfortable. Researching, listening to others, including those who completely disagree with me regarding whether abortion should be allowed when a baby has developed to where it can live and breathe apart from its mother, has definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone. But, isn’t that what learning and maturing is meant to do?
My passion regarding bringing babies into the world and caring for them and for their parents – especially their mothers – began with the birth of my daughter, shifted over time, and is today rooted in four beliefs that form the basis for my current perspective on abortion.
1) I believe that bringing a child into this world is a sacred commitment, even if one or both of the individuals involved in the conception choose/s not be parent that child but to relinquish it for others to be the parents. This does not erase the importance of the biological parents. Their traits and genetics remain a part of that child’s life forever.
2) I believe that the well-being of every child and mother – since they are one biological system from conception through some months after birth, and much longer, if the mother is breastfeeding – should be the concern of everyone around them. This includes extended family, close friends of the parent/s, the community, and also the society in which that child lives.
3) I believe that governmental policies laws, allocation of funds, and also business practices and products should reflect this caring about mothers and children and place their well-being and thriving at the center.
4) I believe that it is the fundamental right of every woman to decide whether or not to have a child and, if so, when, where, with whom and how she conceives and births that child.
5) I believe that abortion, just like a miscarriage or a birth, should be held as sacred.
6) I believe that babies are not passive victims of life. I believe that every baby born has made a decision to be conceived and born and that each has the ability to choose to end its life while in the womb, during birth, or in the first years afterward, known as “crib death.”
“Wait a minute!” you might say, having read my last premise. What do you mean? I mean that in my world view every baby has the innate ability to say NO to being alive. Does this mean I believe in consciousness before birth? Not necessarily. However, if humans, including neonates (babies in the womb) can somehow be drawn to having an embodied experience, they can also end that experience.
In my world view, some babies appear to say: “Whoops! I made a mistake. This is too hard; I’m not up to it.” For me, a baby can cause a miscarriage or end its life in the first few years. And, I feel, some, before coming into a body, “know” “I am choosing to come in to this body, into this womb, and to this family, but for only a short time” … perhaps to experience being in a body or perhaps to teach their parents and family something.
My beliefs may differ greatly from yours. They may sound weird. They are, however, in alignment with the views of many indigenous cultures.
Our post-industrialized society is so materialistic that many of us can’t believe that there’s any reality before we are born or after we die. Nevertheless, that is the experience of some, including parents who were shocked when their toddler told them that they had come before. Usually past life memories are spoken about when a child is still a toddler. Some parents have had the experience of their toddler, most often at a very quiet time before bed, stated matter-of-factually, that they used to be someone else. Or that they came before to their parents but chose not to stay, because their parents were not ready. These accounts, some from the U.S. but many from countries like India where past lives are considered real, have been written about and have helped inform my current belief that abortion does not mean the end of a soul.
For those who believe that abortion means the end of that soul, the idea is frightening. And causes many to feel they must fight to end all abortions, labeling themselves “pro life”. I consider myself to be pro-life.
I hope you will continue reading this piece and place my thoughts up against what you currently believe. More than that, I hope you read the rest of this piece with an open and curious mind.
*****
Indigenous (earth-based) cultures follow beliefs which run counter to what Western civilization has believed and passed down. We all create and live by myths, meaning-filled stories considered sacred, that help us make sense of the world around us, of which we are a part. And most of us “modern” folks also have rituals we engage in, whether religious or familial or of our own creation. We do this, just as indigenous people the world over have done, to aid us in confronting the awesome forces that are are all around us and make us afraid.
When indigenous people approach birth – or death, or abortion – they do it within a container of sacred ritual. I mention this because I believe that abortion needs to be placed in a sacred container and not done as just a physical “procedure”. After all, it is the ending of a life. And I believe life is sacred.
Two fundamental truths I’d like us to remind you of when it comes to abortion:
- Change is inevitable. It naturally brings up fear and a desire to resist. Including changing our mind about something. We humans are “wired” both to fear and dislike change, yet also being curious and attracted to novel experiences.
- Scientific evidence has been proven not to change strongly held beliefs. What others around us who are our family, neighbors and friends believe helps shape what we believe and how tightly we hold on to our beliefs as “true”. And we tend to hold onto our beliefs in the face of any amount of evidence that might show them to be erroneous. That’s part of our human paradox.
A few words about science and “evidence”, since these words have come to be disrespected by many in this country.
Science is the methodical approach finding answers to questions of all kinds. That’s all. In science, theories are put forth and then tested to see, first, whether they can be disproved or are valid. Conducting good (scientific) research is a process, often a lengthy one. What research yields as results today may be dis-proven or enhanced down the road. This doesn’t make science bad. There are today “evidence-based” facts (ones proven by science). However,these facts can and often do change as more or better evidence is discovered. That doesn’t invalidate scientific inquiry and research or what we thought we knew. We need to remember how complex the world is and how limited are our current tools are for studying anything. And we are always in the process of discovering new or old (but forgotten) information. Take for example, dimensions of reality that we currently cannot “prove”, because we cannot see or touch them.
The question I want to ask you is “Do you have the curiosity and courage to examine information that is new to you or runs counter to your existing deeply held beliefs? Please keep in mind that many of our beliefs arise from ignorance, fear, or “dogma” (what we have been led to take on faith and not question).
Statistics can help us understand what is true about abortion.
Statistics are cold when compared to the stories of real human beings – our own stories and the stories told to us by those we love or respect. Yet statistics can help us the dots between separate pieces of the puzzle, to reveal the full picture of a complex subject such as abortion.
*****
Here are a few of the facts that I hope will help you re-think or think more deeply about abortion. Some of these facts might surprise you, as they did me:
- The number of abortions performed each year in the U.S. has dropped significantly over the last few decades, without laws restricting abortion. Research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the respected Guttmacher Institute (guttmacher.org) found that between the year 2000 and 2020, the number of abortions dropped significantly, from 1.3 million a year to 930,000.
- This drop in U.S. abortions was due to a number of factors, including:
1) safer forms of contraception;
2) more women feeling comfortable using contraception, seeking and being able to get it – even when their male partner is opposed to using it;
3) more men taking their ability to cause a pregnancy more seriously and becoming comfortable with the idea that they need to be responsible about how they use their sperm
4) the rise in sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which by itself has resulted in more men willing to use condoms; and
5) the “morning after” pill having become legal and fairly accessible.
• Approximately 1 out of every 4 U.S. women has had an abortion by the age of 45; and these women come from every background and circumstance
• Most abortions in the U.S. are done early in pregnancy, done close to the time when the woman first realizes she is pregnant and makes her decision not to carry the baby. The vast majority of U.S. abortions – approximately 93% – are done before the 12th week of pregnancy, in what’s called “the first trimester”. This is well before a pregnant person feels life moving inside her body.
• Men have are becoming more aware of the need to support the desire of those women (who might be their partners or daughters) to not wish to be pregnant. For more than a decade, the majority of both women and men in the U.S. have approved of abortion, although women more so than men (63% to men’s 58%).
We tend to hear from men who view their partners and children as possessions and women and men who believe motherhood the epitome of womanhood. However, their numbers are decreasing. Yet these men hold a disproportionate majority in many state legislatures and the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court.
• 60% of women in the U.S. who decide to abort have already mothers and have had at least one living child. We can assume that most of these women did not make their decision lightly, that they know what raising a child means for them and what the responsibility of being a parent entails.
• Conception, gestation and birth are complicated processes. Nature weeds out (kills/ends) many potential babies, starting at conception and continuing through birth. Nature spontaneously does this to potential babies for a variety of reasons.
Research from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows that as many as 25% of all conceptions end naturally, in a spontaneous miscarriage before the 12th week. More than that, 50% of all fertilized eggs are lost before the woman even misses a period.
Question: Given that nature herself aborts a large percentage of fetuses, should women not be allowed to end a pregnancy? And should they be judged for and punished for doing so?
So, why do some women choose abortion? There are myriad reasons women, including: age, financial situation, desire to focus on education or career that will take most of their attention, being in an abusive relationship, not having a partner committed to raise this child, having no safe or stable place to live, not having the financial resources for parenting, and more.
As a woman who herself once chose to have an abortion, the daughter of a woman who had an abortion, and the mother of one who did, I know how deeply personal and difficult a choice it is and that it can affect the entire family and generations to come.
My maternal grandmother Ida, a 4’10” deaf woman born in the Ukraine, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and, as was the custom, denied vital knowledge about her body, about sexuality, and about the birth process.
Ida bore two children with her Catholic husband; and each time labored alone in a hospital without any emotional support. She revealed to my mother – her firstborn – that she had experienced both births to be torture. After bearing those two children, still having no access to any form of contraception, she proceeded to secretly abort every pregnancy by any means available to her, which she said included a coat hanger.
My grandmother was fortunate not to have ended up permanently scarred or dead. She was very important in my life and I’m so grateful she was there.
Let’s turn our attention to who are the folks who believe abortion should be illegal? Although media gives a disproportionally loud voice to the vocal anti-choice perspective, “pro-life” folks are not monolithic in their beliefs. Furthermore, the pro-life stance is actually a minority position.
A large 2015 survey sponsored by a nonprofit which supports pregnancy centers (which are actually anti-abortion centers) found that fully 70% of U.S. women who’ve had one or more abortions identify as Christian AND church-going, and 16% identify as evangelicals!
I was surprised to learn that 76% said their church had no influence on their decision to have an abortion.Since so many folks believe abortion is against God’s wishes, you might be surprised to learn that this same study found a mere 7% of women who had an abortion had chosen to speak directly with someone in their church about their decision.
What part does religion play in a woman wanting an abortion? Views change over time, but religion still plays a large part in the belief systems of most people regarding abortion.
You might be surprised, as I was, to learn that the respected apolitical Pew Research Group, who did a large sampling early in 2022, found that regardless of whether they’ve had an abortion themselves or not the majority of white mainline Protestants (59%), Black Protestants (56%) and white Roman Catholics (52%!) today support legal access to abortion in all or most cases. And they found that only 45% of all Christians feel that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances!
To be against abortion does not necessarily mean one is “pro-life” or “pro-child”. Being against abortion has actually never been pro-life. In fact, it is more correctly termed a “pro-pregnancy” stance, since this viewpoint wants pregnancies to be maintained at any cost. It also places a higher value on the would-be child/fetus than on the its biological mother. It’s the pregnancy that matters, not the person who is pregnant. And women, according to this belief, should be pregnant and should want to be mothers.
Unfortunately, this view in effect reduces women to objects, property to be controlled by others.
Thirty-eight U.S. states already have “fetal homicide” laws, meaning that women who attempt or have an abortion can be charged with manslaughter or murder. This is not something even most anti-abortion folks want. The state legislatures which have passed these laws are dominated by men.
There is an article in the October 2022 issue of Harper’s Magazine by Charlotte Shane, titled “The Right Not to be Pregnant”, that does a brilliant job of clarify the legal issues surrounding abortion. My head was spinning as I read it. I now understand how the pro-life movement can be viewed as being about control of women, not about saving a life.
If being pro-life were truly life-affirming, there would be bills in Congress and legislatures across the country and policies to ensure that all babies (and all mothers and fathers) would have their basic needs met, so they could thrive and be good parents.
I want to shift our attention to what all children require in order to thrive. Every child needs to receive both physical and emotional protection, nurturance and support, not only in the womb and through birth, but in the critical first months after birth, and throughout childhood and right up until adulthood. I believe that guaranteeing anything less to a child shows disregard for its life.
Some “pro-life” advocates believe this as much as I do and are dedicated to helping pregnant women and also parents and their children. However, the majority are not rallying for the essential social changes that would make it possible for those children to thrive.
I’ve met a few mothers who say they’ve loved having a big family and that not only wanted but have enjoyed raising their 8 or 10 or 12 children. Motherhood is for them the profession they felt “called” to.
I’ve known other women, often the eldest girl in a large family, who were expected/required to take care of their siblings from an early age, and who resented it and felt they were robbed of childhood.
I remember one particular LatinX woman raised in a religion that views both contraception and abortion as sins. She was pregnant with her first baby and had chosen to birth at a birth center I helped found. She wasn’t conscious of not wanting to be a mother. So, both she and her husband were shocked that, once their baby was born, she found herself viscerally unable to care for and bond with it. (As I recall, she did breastfeed, knowing that it was essential for her baby’s health.) However, their baby became her husband’s child.
Fortunately, that woman’s husband was willing and able to adjust his career and move fully into the role of mothering.
Let me clarify that mothering is a role and set of behaviors that is a different from fathering. Both men and women should be able to assume the role of “mother” or “father”. To “mother” something is nurture and protect a child from harm. To “father” is to introduce a child to the world beyond loving parental arms. To expose that child to novel experiences and even some danger. Some people in a female body are better at the fathering role; and some in a male body are by nature more nurturing and protective.
I recall reading a memoir of a journalist in Ireland who wrote frankly about many families she knew – including her own – where the mother was abusive to all of her children and let them know they that they hadn’t been wanted. Her book created a huge storm. It should be noted that most of the fathers in these families did none of the parenting, except maybe to enforce “discipline” (i.e. physical punishment). They spent most of their off-work hours at the local pub, leaving the mothers to fend for themselves, often too little money for food and other necessities.
NOTE: Ireland, a bastion of strict Catholicism, where it used to be impossible to get contraception, much less an abortion, legalized abortion a few years back.
I’ve had several friends tell me that their mother told them when they were quite young that having him/her in effect ended their life. These kids felt guilty for being born. And that wound remained well past middle age, even though one of such friend had become a psychotherapist in order to help others work through early trauma, such as not being wanted.
When I read philanthropist Melinda Gates’ book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, I was struck by how, in her travels through “developing” countries, listening to mothers everywhere, numbers of women had come up to her and begged her to take the baby they held in their arms. They told her they couldn’t give that baby what it needed and deserved and were desperate for their baby to have a better life, raised by a white woman in America.
These were pivotal moments in Melinda’s life that resulted in her, as a devoted Catholic who still attends Mass daily, to become an outspoken advocate for women’s need and fundamental human right to have access to birth control and to be able to choose if – and when – they want to bear and parent a child. Although Melinda didn’t mention abortion in that book, right after the Supreme Court threw out Roe, she publicly stated that the U.S. was “moving backwards”.
Let’s look at one of the outcomes of the ending of Roe: making abortion a criminal offense.
Many who push for abortion to be illegal also want to criminalize any women who attempts one, as well as anyone – including doctors who perform them and relatives or friends – who aids any woman in getting an abortion. Some state legislators are introducing bills to make it a punishable crime to cross state lines to get an abortion.
In addition, a proportion of these folks also want to prevent girls from getting sex education and prevent both girls and women from getting contraception. They ignore the fact it’s people they know and love who want to use contraception and people they know who are having – or have had – an abortion: friends, neighbors, co-workers, folks they sit next to in church, even close family members.
I believe most anti-abortion folks are in denial or just ignorant about the collateral suffering and death their “pro-life” position results in.
For one thing, more and more Ob/Gyn physicians are leaving the practice of obstetrics. They are not willing to live in fear of losing their license to practice medicine if they perform an abortion. Some fear for their lives. As a result, many and more and more rural areas of the U.S. are left with no obstetrician to provide care.
Making a criminal of a woman who attempts an abortion – as well as anyone who would provide her with a safe abortion – will not end abortions. It will however result in suffering, and sometimes death, for those women who do not have the money or other means to find a safe abortion and so undergo an unsafe one, performed on themselves or by someone else.
Who are these women? Most often the marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed, the poor, the poorly educated. And also women being abused by a partner. And they are predominantly women of color.
Is the aim to stop young people and adults from engaging in sexual intercourse, except within marriage? Some folks believe the only purpose for sex is to have children. That has always been the stance of some orthodox religions.
Even when girls in fundamentalist religious families agree to be “betrothed” to their dads, and have a group “coming out” ceremony in which they pledge their virginity to their father until marriage, many of these girls get pregnant. Why? Raging hormones. A yearning to be loved. Confusing sex with love. The belief that a baby will love them unconditionally.
Black and white, either-or thinking does not allow us to see the full picture or know the full “truth” of any issue. Issues are by nature complex and often require both-and, rather than either-or, thinking. That fact challenges us to think more deeply and broadly about any important issue.
I’ve been in the field of babies and mothers for almost fifty years, advocating for societal and legislative change. I’m certainly not the only one to observe that there is no greater harm done to a child than to be unwanted and un-welcomed into life. Psychologists, teachers, and researchers have made the same observation. For that reason alone, making all forms of birth control – including abortion – safe, legal and accessible should be part of every woman’s health care… regardless of how distasteful or repugnant it may be to you or me personally.
Let’s look one of the most immediate and long-term impacts of outlawing and criminalizing abortion… the impact on the children who were not wanted, many of whom have never felt welcomed into this world.
Children who were not wanted know it. I am not referring to those who weren’t wanted at conception but those not wanted throughout their womb life and, in some instances, after being born and throughout their childhood. Many a mother, discovering she is pregnant, has questioned and doubted whether she wanted this child. Most come to accept the idea of that child, and even embrace it, at some early time in the pregnancy. That baby knows that its mother has had a change of heart.
However, when that desire not to be pregnant is the dominant feeling of a woman’s pregnancy and pervades the full nine plus months of that baby’s life, it’s a different matter.
An individual who was not wanted may be plagued by lifelong feelings of self-doubt or shame, and an underlying sense that they should never have been born.
Memories like this, which occur before brain development, are called “implicit” memories, meaning they are stored in the child’s body, as opposed to being stored in the brain.
Many still refute the notion that there is conscious awareness in the womb, but more and more scientific “evidence” is showing that, as most indigenous people have believed, consciousness pre-dates the development of the brain.
And implicit memory is today a proven fact, often coming in a dream as a result of some unexpected stimulus. To learn more about implicit memory and trauma at the start of life, I urge you to look at the work of the Association of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology [APPPAH], which can be found on the website www.birthpsychology.com
Many children who were not wanted act out in aggressive, high-risk, or self-harming ways. As teens and adults they may turn to drugs, alcohol, or suicide. The long-term implications of a child not being wanted doesn’t stop there. An individual who was not wanted may become a drain on their family’s or society’s resources.
Too few “pro-life” folks are working to create social policies which would actually support their values. Here are a few much-needed “pro-life” policies:
- Paying for or reimbursing parents for childbirth and parenting classes
- Granting women a subsidy for the time they are breastfeeding
- Having universal, guaranteed paid maternity pay – ideally starts at the 6th month of pregnancy – to lower the mother’s level of stress, reduce birth complications, and give her time to prepare fully for the birth, the postpartum, and parenting
- Having paid leave for the father/partner or whomever is the 2nd person caring for that baby, as is done in Sweden
- Supporting employers to create workplace policies that allow for job-sharing, part-time work, and work from home, for new parents for the first year after birth
- Creating and staffing neighborhood centers for education and support for parents and families, in order to diminish the isolation and loneliness so many parents experience
Of course, all of these policies are called “coddling” by many who believe that people who become parents should bear the sole and total responsibility for the well-being of their children and expect no outside help, especially from government. Yet these are often the same folks who support subsidies for many industries, oppose sex education in the schools, the availability of contraception and abortion, and don’t see the hypocrisy in their stance. It’s as if these folks want to punish parents.
Single Issue thinking
Many Americans vote only for candidates who agree with them on a single issue, abortion being the most common one. In a world where there is no such thing as an isolated issue because every issue is connected to and dependent upon other issues, single-issue voting makes no sense whatsoever. And it is dangerous.
Why is it so hard to prevent an unwanted pregnancy?
Assuming both parties are fertile and wanting to have sex, preventing pregnancy requires that at least one of the parties thinks ahead and communicates their feelings and desires to their sexual partner.
Both parties in a consensual sexual relationship are fully responsible for a conception. Ideally, they are in agreement and together come to a decision about what form of contraception to use, and then take the necessary steps. This is hardly easy for a teen or young adult, whose hormones are raging, whose reasoning processes are still immature and – in the case of many girls – who want to be liked.
Puberty is occurring at a much younger age than ever, even to girls as younger as six! And preventing unwanted conception requires that both people understand and accept the possibility that, despite careful planning, a pregnancy might still occur.
Whenever sex is forced or there is a power differential between the two people, such as age or education or social class, then the subject of contraception and abortion becomes even more complex.
A last note to consider: Whenever a female is fertile, the ultimate responsibility for preventing an unwanted pregnancy actually lies with the male, it is his sperm that results in conception. Without male sperm, there can be no pregnancy.
Women have the right not to be pregnant. Yet this has never been written into law. The Supreme Court case of Roe v Wade made abortion a privacy issue, therefore guaranteed in the Constitution. However, the decision about abortion, under Roe, was placed in the hands of physicians, not women. The Court’s written majority opinion called abortion “a medical decision”, thus placing the decision to abort in the hands of an outside “authority”, a doctor. That’s not much better than placing it in the hands of a legislative body or a church authority, or a mother-in-law.
In the wake of Roe being thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24th, 2022, how does the U.S. electorate feel about abortion today?
While pro-life advocates are rejoicing, an unprecedented number of women are coming alive to the issue of abortion and saying “NO! You can’t control my body (or my partner’s, or my daughter’s)!” They’re becoming vocal, joining demonstrations and taking to the polls. And many men are also waking up to the fact that abortion, like contraception and like parenting, is an issue they need to care about.
On August 2nd, 2022, voters in the traditionally conservative state of Kansas said a resounding “NO” to a proposed amendment to that state’s constitution that would have made abortion illegal statewide. Kansas was the first U.S. state to vote on abortion rights since the Supreme Court ruling, and the vote was astonishing for 2 reasons: 1) nearly 60% of eligible voters went to the polls and voted NO, and 2) it was a record high voter turnout. AND it wasn’t just younger voters, but older women and men who don’t want their adult daughters or young friends and relatives to be criminalized for wanting an abortion.
The door was thrown wide open by the U.S. Supreme Court for states to make abortion a criminal act. Note that 6 out of these 9 judges are political and social conservatives and most of them Catholic or fundamentalists. Soon after, Roe v Wade was overturned a number of mostly conservative U.S. state legislatures, believing they are the moral police, rushed to pass laws forbidding and criminalizing abortions, placing physicians in a cruel predicament where, to save a woman’s life, they may end up losing their license and spending time in prison.
These legislatures, mostly comprised of white men, do not reflect many or most of the voters in their state. Yet these men are now free to enact whatever draconian laws they wish, to place women back in the home in a house dress, raising their kids. Ironically, it may turn out that the unintended positive result of making it possible for states to criminalize pregnant women and doctors will be for more women – and men – to become pro-choice and hopefully get interested in other pressing issues as well.
Many who have called themselves “pro-life” are now questioning what that means. And many public official and representatives are now walking back their pro-life declarations, admitting there need to be allowances for rape, incest, the extreme youth of the girl, maternal health complications that might be life-threatening. They’re beginning to view the subject as having a grey area.
Yet there are some, like a woman I watched being interviewed the other day, who want all exceptions removed from laws criminalizing abortion. This particular woman was the child of a rape. One can understand someone like her. Nevertheless, as I’ve said before, black and white thinking runs counter to nature and biology.
What are the roots of folks’ anti-abortion stance? I will focus on 5 beliefs (feelings, actually) that I think are unconsciously at play for many pro-life folks, beyond a love of babies and a heartfelt view that all life is sacred and therefore no life should be aborted.
1. The role of religion. Religious or spiritual values plays an important part in views on/feelings about abortion. The world’s major mainstream – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have all weighed in on the subject, and that has shaped the views of their followers. Yet those very precepts are either unclear or have changed over time.
The Quran, Islam’s sacred book, declares that a fetus is not a life until the soul is breathed into the body, which does not occur at conception but some unspecified time later.
The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that “personhood” begins at conception is a recent position, and it is unclear how that got slipped into church dogma. A growing number of Catholics disagree with the Church’s official stand on a number of issues, including on contraception and abortion. The Roman Catholic Church continues to condemn abortion as a “moral evil” but not the prosecution of women who have abortions. I already mentioned that, immediately following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, philanthropist and practicing Catholic, Melinda Gates, published a statement that American was taking “a big step backward”. The National Catholic Reporter is considered a credible independent now-global voice in Catholic journalism, accountable to a lay board of directors. For many years they were the only Church publication reporting on clergy sexual abuse. They’ve been a voice for marginalized communities, including disabled, immigrant and LGBTQ.
On May 6, 2022, a particularly nuanced piece on abortion was published in the Opinion section of the NCR, which has received a volume of positive responses. The author, Madison Chastain, is avowedly pro-life and anti-abortion. Here are some excerpts of what she wrote:
“I am anti-abortion, but I do not think criminalizing abortions will stop them, because having access to abortions isn’t what causes them…Things that cause abortions: lack of comprehensive sex education, inaccessible health care, violence against women, religious shame and exclusion, familial rejection or coercion, and workplace inequalities including but not limited to barriers for advancement, disparities in pay and lack of paid parental leave or child care.
Making abortion illegal before addressing these injustices is going to kill women, because women will continue to have abortions, secretively and unsafely.
The nuance I’m arguing for is not about the morality of abortion, it is about the effectiveness of this particular tactic of assuaging it: making abortion illegal. This particular tactic is not going to work…We can recognize that abortion being legal represents a certain form of public complicity in permitting a grievous sin to happen. But are we actually permitting it any less without changing the causes of abortion? To achieve the desired society in which abortion is no longer permitted, we have to create a reality where abortion is no longer caused. We are complicit in those systems, too.
We need mandatory and comprehensive sexual education and accessible health care. We need to address income inequality and mandate paid parental leave. We need to demolish the prison industrial complex and stop criminalizing the poor and marginalized. We need robust community-based postnatal care and to crack down on violence against women. We need to revolutionize the way churches approach sexuality, that we might embrace and support sexually active women in crisis, regardless of their marital status.
I am amazed at how quickly solidarity came with my pro-choice loved ones the moment I articulated my nuanced beliefs: I am pro-life and pro-choice, and I definitely do not want abortion to be illegal.
According to Jewish law (a compilation from the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – and other sacred texts comprising the Talmud), life does not begin at conception under Jewish law. Sources in the Talmud note that the fetus is “mere water” before 40 days of gestation. Following this period, the fetus is considered a physical part of the pregnant individual’s body, not yet having life of its own or independent rights. The fetus is not viewed as separate from the parent’s body until birth begins and the first breath of oxygen into the lungs allows the soul to enter the body.
Modern rabbis are mostly unanimous in condemning abortion, feticide, or infanticide as an unconscionable attack on human life. Jewish law allows abortion if the pregnancy will cause severe psychological damage to the mother. The large and powerful National Council of Jewish Women advocates for abortion access as “an essential component of comprehensive, affordable, confidential, and equitable family planning, reproductive, sexual health, and maternal health services.”
As religions go, the Church of Latter-Day Saints is less rigid than many. It continues to be against abortions, but allows for a number of exceptions, including rape or incest, or if the pregnant person’s life or the fetus’s is endangered by the pregnancy. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, Mormon leaders declared that members “may appropriately choose to participate in efforts to protect life and to preserve religious liberty.” This has a lot of latitude for interpretation.
As for Buddhism, there is no single Buddhist view on abortion, although life is considered to begin at conception and the Buddha made it clear that abortion is the taking of a life.
2. The belief that adoption is the fix that will make abortion unnecessary. In my research for the two books I authored on the relinquishment and adoption of babies (To Love and Let Go and Adoption: A Handful of Hope), I came across a number of men and women who were anti-abortion and saw adoption as the answer to unwanted pregnancy, because it doesn’t end a life. From adoptees, I heard anguished variations on the theme of: “If my mother could have had an abortion, I wouldn’t be here!”, with the implied assumption that, had they been aborted, they would have forever been deprived of life. To that I would only say, “Perhaps; perhaps not.” There’s a growing body of research to support re-incarnation.
3. The man is head of the family and makes decision on behalf of his mate and the family. A belief that drives a good number of anti-abortion folks is that the male is head of the household and his female partner needs to follow and serve him in order for him to do his best for the whole family. This notion lies at the core of all patriarchal and paternalistic institutions and systems, and all fundamentalist religions.
4. Women can’t be trusted to make wise decisions. This belief doesn’t often get discussed because it raises the ire of most women. However, many anti-abortion folks don’t trust women or girls to make wise decisions regarding sex and think that they become pregnant because they’re irresponsible. Many of these folks – women as well as men – believe a teenage girl or adult woman can prevent an unwanted pregnancy; or, she can take the “morning after” pill. This is a proven false assumption.
5. Unacknowledged anger at the mother, generalized to mistrust of – and anger at – all women. I’ve observed that many people – women and men – carry an unconscious, generalized anger at women that is connected to feeling they, as babies or children, were unprotected by their mother. This has a lot of truth to it*,* since especially around issues of how a baby is born, whether a boy baby is circumcised, whether the mother chose not to breastfeed, and whether crying babies are responded to with tenderness. In all of these important developmental issues, mothers all too often defer to what the male authority (husband, father, doctor, mohel) says is in the best interests of the child. That is a result of centuries of patriarchy and resulting marginalization and domination of women.
We mothers give over decisions regarding our body, our childbearing, and the welfare of our baby or child at great cost to ourselves and our children. It’s time to admit the truth of that, examine the why of it, and work to erase the causes.
Let’s talk about the baby. To any baby in the womb, their mother is the universe. Every baby has an implicit expectation that their mother will meet all of their needs and protect them from harm. When those needs are not met, there is hurt and unconscious anger, the result of trust betrayed. That is no small thing. Researchers, educators, and parents alike used to believe that trust is something we learn as babies. Not true. Babies, from conception, trust until or unless that trust is betrayed. And it often is, by we parents trying to do our best and failing because we are doing it alone, without necessary support!
It’s been rightly said that the nuclear family is a construct of patriarchy. As such, it is a “power-over”, dominator institution and implicitly unfair and unsustainable. I reckon most of us living in post-industrial societies built around the small “nuclear” family didn’t get our needs met at the start of life, as our brain was rapidly developing, along with our sense of ourself and the world/our mother.
Researchers in the field of attachment have found that fully 50% of us did not experience full healthy attachment with those who raised us. I’d say the figure is even higher in the U.S., where there is no guaranteed, universal, paid maternity/paternity leave, where most births include drugs that get to the baby’s brain, mother-infant separation after birth, and limited or no breastfeeding.
I believe maternal deprivation, along with maternal anxiety and/or depression, is the norm today and has been for many years. I will go out on a limb here and state that it is a form of “normative abuse”, something we accept because it is the norm (what we grew up with and see all around us). Normative abuse is built into our so-called “health care” system and especially evident in maternity care, workplace practices and also family life. The consequences of babies and young children not having their needs for nurturance – trait of the Feminine that is partly induced by hormones but partly learned – are there for all to see.
We live in a culture built around fear and defense, where individuals are raised to pride themselves on engaging in competition and aggression, abuse themselves or others, and allow a public policy which declares war as necessary. The “war on cancer”, the “war on drugs”, the “war on poverty”.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” And for most of us, that was an enfeebled hand.
We need to stop believing that it is women who are the problem with unwanted pregnancies. As a society, and in our religions, we still place the primary responsibility for conception on the female and believe they – regardless of her age, means or circumstance – should be able to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and should be required to keep a pregnancy if and when it happens, because “It’s not the baby’s fault.”
We also believe, whether or not we say so, that the woman/person in the female body ought to provide most of the nurturance an infant’s and partner’s needs and do most of the housework and cooking, even when they are working full time at a job outside the home. As most women today do.
Yet the male is always the one who caused the pregnancy: no sperm, no baby.
I’m so tired of women (and men) buying into the lie that we/they don’t know what’s best for us, or our children, or our country. It’s amazing that we/they continue to listen to men in positions of authority and power and bow to their wishes about parenting, even when they display ignorance regarding:
1) whether or not to circumcise our precious newborn baby boy,
2) whether to sleep with or alongside our infant,
3) whether to breastfeed or to delay weaning until our child is at least two-and-a-half, (which is how long research shows babies benefit from breastfeeding and breast milk,
4) whether to pull our child from a classroom where bullying is going on or the teacher is shaming the kids, or
5) whether to raise a storm if our LGBTQ child is being maltreated. The list goes on and on and it ends up in parents who betray their kids at the polling booth.
I know this from experience because I’m still someone who, when asked at a doctor’s office to remove my clothes, put on a paper gown, and lie down on a table on my back, immediately drops into my little girl self: pliable, wanting to please the big adult.
Most adults today, I observe, living in a culture that does everything to separate our body from our emotions, mind and soul, as well as from each other, allow outside “authorities” to make decisions for us and our children. Where does this come from? It’s rooted in what psychologists and child development researchers today term “learned helplessness.”
We’ve learned early on that our needs and desires were not going to be met by those closest to us. We weren’t breastfed, had to sleep far apart from our parents, often weren’t responded to sympathetically when we cried or were presented with an angry parental face and body language.
Our learned helplessness(i.e. passivity) forms a pattern that runs counter to nature’s blueprint for creating thriving humans. And it is part of what some of us in the field of child development and parenting call “normative abuse”. That is the treatment of children (adults too) that is not in alignment with what nature asks for, but which is the societal norm, acceptable because it’s what we see all around us.
Remember how often you heard a big adult tell you, “If you continue crying, I’ll give you something to cry about!” or “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Those statements are an example of “normative abuse”.
What I’ve discovered and rediscovered over and over again is that parents – especially mothers – who opt to be pregnant and decide to move to a cheaper, smaller place (maybe near a bus stop, so they won’t need a car) and to cut work hours or get a low-stress job so they can have a calm, slow-paced pregnancy – are making difficult decisions that are NOT supported by the culture. When they choose to put their career on hold in order to be a full-time parent for the first years, or go for a “natural” childbirth with a midwife at home or in a hospital, and who become parents who pick up and comfort their crying child even when friends and relatives tell them they’re “coddling”, they’re judged harshly.
Yet these are the very kind of parents every child needs. They make decisions according to what their inner voice – their internal nature – tells them. They’ve learned (usually re-learned) to trust themself – their body and their children, if they choose to be a parent.
The issues surrounding childbearing, including contraception, of which abortion is a part, are replete with other people and institutions shaping our values. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that so many women, as well as men, have come out strongly against abortion and call themselves “pro-life”. In my book Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth(published 1975, with 2 later editions), I examined the erroneous beliefs/deceptions that underlie modern hospital-based childbirth practices. One is that women don’t know what is best for them but outside authority figures – doctors – do. This myth lies at the root of every male-created and male-dominated system, including organized medicine and religion, even when most physicians in many medical fields, and more and more ministers and rabbis are now women.
The dominator model that wrested control of birth from wise women herbalists and midwife neighbors, and which has women sit separate from men at orthodox religious services, still prevails.
Today’s strenuous fight to prevent sex education, limit family planning and contraception, and outlaw abortion are examples of patriarchy at its most toxic, whether it’s practiced by someone in a male body or a female body. The results are suffering and trauma for women and for the most vulnerable of us – babies and children.
Rampant hatred, and fear of, women and all things female – called “misogyny” – is thousands of years old and still permeates our society as deeply as racism and classism. Boys are still for the most part raised with a sense of superiority and entitlement, especially white boys. That is a key component of the elevation of all things male and white and desecration of all things feminine and of color. It’s not just men who carry this belief.
How many of us women are not living directly from a sense of our own power and feel we can’t do without the protection and/or support of a man?
Born at the end of WWII, raised in a culture where everything male was considered better, I carried this unconscious belief for many years. Both my mother and father instilled in me the notion that I could do anything I put my mind to. Yet my mother earned only 2/3 of the teacher salary my father did, despite being a “Master Teacher”. She did almost all of the housework and handled the bills. Yet she didn’t have the courage to protect us children from the man – her husband – who was abusing all of us, using the excuse that she couldn’t leave “a sinking ship”, when it was really fear and shame about being a single parent that drove her to stay with him.
That’s “learned helplessness” in action. In college all my professors were male and so were the books we read; and I never questioned that. It was simply the water in which I swam, invisible.
Why is it that we women so often vote for the tall, strong-appearing male candidate, thinking he is better able to lead? Why do most women prefer to date and marry larger alpha-type men, who appear to be powerful and invulnerable, even though we/they complain that these same men aren’t in touch with their feelings and don’t take ours seriously? Ironically, many of us were ourselves abused when we were young and vulnerable by a man, too often a man in our family or close relative.
As adults, women who vote against policies that would help children or the earth, show signs of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, which occurs when, after being abused by a perpetrator who imprisoned them for a prolonged time and then were freed go, on to defend or join forces with their abuser/oppressor. Didn’t kidnapped Patty Hearst go on to marry her bodyguard?
I cannot write about abortion without directly addressing the subject of sex. I hope you find some new information on the subject in what I’ve written here.
Attitudes toward sex – specifically about women’s sexuality and the sexuality of LGBTQ folks – are directly connected to one’s religious or moral beliefs, beliefs about abortion, and the relationship that should exist between Church and State. And how families, especially parents, address the subject of abortion – or try to avoid doing so – is greatly influenced by what their religious faiths tell people they should believe and what their views of morality ought to be.
The U.S. is a strange nation when it comes to the subject of sex. Here, sex has long been used to induce people to be rampant consumers, despite the fact that we still hold many Victorian attitudes about sex. We have a long history of prosecuting writers and comedians for talking about sex, and a confusion of sex with pornography.
Sex is used to advertise everything from toilet paper to pizza, because it sells. Yet sex is still taboo: in some places it’s specifically against the law for a woman to bear her breast in public or to breastfeed in a public place. I can remember being asked to leave a restaurant because I was breastfeeding my baby. And, although laws are changing about breastfeeding in the work place, many working women still have to breastfeed in the bathroom. Misogyny? Of course.
Research shows that differences in attitudes toward abortion usually stem from differences in beliefs as to when life begins and the circumstances in which abortion may be, is – or is not – morally acceptable. These beliefs are heavily influenced by religious leaders, most of whom are men, perhaps more than by the religious “sacred” texts.
Among people who claim to be religious, there is a proven direct correlation between how they view abortion and how religious they believe (and claim) themselves to be, as you might expect.
All organized religions have patriarchal – misogynistic – roots, with the exception of Buddhism. And religious institutions, including Buddhism, were organized around patriarchy. Religions with the largest followers have specific dictates and traditions about sex: if, with whom, when, why, how, and how often. Just as they have specific beliefs about contraception and abortion.
HINDUISM
I’ll start with Hindus, because it’s notable for its difference from other major religions, viewing sex as a natural and normal part of life. There are no sexual prohibitions in any written Hindu text. However, according to Hindu tradition, a husband should only approach his wife sexually during her ritu (season), which is a period of sixteen days within the menstrual cycle. And intercourse is forbidden on 6 of these 16 days: the first 4 days, and the 11th and 13th. Those are days when a woman is considered unclean, and dangerous to man. Patriarchy and misogyny? Of course.
Hinduism teaches that one can engage in sex simply for pleasure and not specifically for procreation. The use of contraceptives is not a religious issue in Hinduism – it is entirely up to the discretion of the participants.
However, because Hinduism believes that a child is a distinct life with the basic attributes of humanity from the moment of its conception, traditionally Hindus place a high premium on life in the womb. And abortion is therefore considered a crime.
BUDDHISM
The most common Buddhist view on birth control is that contraception is acceptable if it prevents conception, but that contraceptives that work by stopping the development of a fertilized egg are wrong and should not be used.
Buddhism’s attitudes to abortion are colored by the belief in rebirth and the idea that life is a never-ending continuum. Many Buddhists therefore feel that abortion is prohibited by the First Precept against taking life.
The Dalai Lama has said:
“Of course, abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative, generally speaking. But it depends on the circumstances.
If the unborn child will be retarded or if the birth will create serious problems for the parent, these are cases where there can be an exception. I think abortion should be approved or disapproved according to each circumstance.”
CHRISTIANITY
The Old and New Testaments
Despite some believers’ insistence to the contrary, the Old Testament does not take a hard line against contraception or abortion. The Bible and the 24 other books that make up the Jewish canon make both direct and indirect references to women using contraception. In neither the Old or New Testament is contraception explicitly prohibited.
For most of the last 2000 years all Christian churches have been against artificial birth control. This is not based in Scripture but in the how the Church (i.e. “fathers”, all men) chose to interpret the “word of God”.
It’s interesting to note that, in the first centuries of Christianity, contraception (and also abortion) were regarded as wrong because they were associated with paganism or with heretics such as the Gnostics, the Manichees and, in the middle ages, the Cathars. And early Catholic leaders wanted to separate themselves from other belief systems.
According to the Christian Bible, any sexual activity outside of marriage is wrong. That has continued among all major Christian denominations. Yet the Bible never explicitly states that sex outside of marriage is a sin. Nor does it talk about abortion.
CATHOLICISM
Catholicism holds the strictest views on sex outside of marriage, declaring it to be a sin against nature, and specifically forbidden it and naming it a “mortal” sin. “Homosexually inclined” Catholics are expected to be “chaste”, in other words not to engage in sexual acts.
The Roman Catholic Church only allows ‘natural’ birth control, by which it means only having sex during the infertile period of a woman’s monthly cycle. Artificial methods of contraception are banned.
Thus the only way for a Catholic couple to be faithful to the Church’s teachings on human sexuality and to avoid having children is to use ‘natural’ family planning. Increasingly, practicing Catholics are choosing to go against the Church’s dictates by using birth control and also having abortions.
Nevertheless, the official teachings of the Catholic Church hold any form of abortion, right from conception, to be a mortal sin.
PROTESTANTISM
The Protestant Reformation was begun in 1517 by Martin Luther, a German monk and professor. The movement he began challenged both the authority of the Catholic Pope and the power of Catholic priests to transform the bread and wine of Communion into the body and blood of Christ. Over time, various Protestant sects developed, ranging from the rigid and anti-body, anti-sex churches to ones that did not denigrate the body. Protestant sects include: Adventists, Anabaptists, Anglicans [also called Episcopalians], Baptists, Calvinists, Lutherans, Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Presbyterians, the African American Church, and Quakers [also known as The Religious Society of Friends].
Protestant views on sex arose directly from their views about the nature of the human soul: whether it inherently tends toward evil, is neutral, or is inherently good. The Quakers who uniquely believed that human beings are inherently good.Instead of seeing sex as something dangerous and innately sinful, many Protestants began to regard the human body and sex as part of God’s great gifts to humanity.
And sex slowly became recognized by many as a force that could preserve the institution of marriage if couples didn’t feel threatened by the possibility of having children they could not support. So some Protestant churches concluded that, as the use of birth control often led to stronger families and better marriages, churches should allow believers to use birth control as their own consciences dictated.
This change came slowly – as late as 1908 the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican (Episcopal) Church stated that birth control “cannot be spoken of without repugnance,” and denounced it as “demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.”
Yet, the Anglicans were the first church to issue a statement in favour of contraception, in 1930.
Nowadays most Protestant denominations permit artificial birth control to some extent.
Similarly, Protestant attitudes to birth control began to change in the 19th century, as theologians became more willing to accept that morality should come from the conscience of each individual rather than from outside teachings.
Among Protestant religious leaders there is a long tradition of not condoning abortion. There’s a wide range of moralistic beliefs among the various Protestant faiths, some continuing their tradition of preaching “hell, fire and damnation” while others having altogether left behind moralistic views about sex and sins. In recent decades Protestant clergy have mostly embraced the value of being emotionally supportive of any women having sex outside of marriage or considering – or having had – an abortion.
Protestant spiritual leaders and clergy are trained to feel compelled to love and provide “pastoral care” to everyone in their flock. Paradoxically, although most protestant theologians and clergy emphasize the importance of empathy and compassion for people who have unplanned pregnancies, only those individuals whose attitudes are “pro-choice” or neutral on the subject consider they have an obligation to confront stigmatizing attitudes and behaviors towards women who experience or are considering abortion – regardless of the person’s age or marital status.
CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY
Evangelical Christianity supports sex only within marriage. Within marriage, there are separate injunctions for husbands and wives: husbands should love and honor their wives and wives should submit to their husbands.
White evangelicals in the U.S. in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade. They considered abortion a Catholic issue. Instead, they organized around defending racial segregation in evangelical institutions.
In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, organized a conference with the Christian Medical Society to discuss the morality of abortion. Noted theologians from throughout the evangelical world debated the subject over several days and then issued a statement that acknowledged the ambiguities surrounding abortion, which, they said, allowed for many different approaches.
“Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”
Two successive editors of Christianity Today took equivocal stands on abortion. Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine’s founder, affirmed that “a woman’s body is not the domain and property of others,” and his successor, Harold Lindsell, allowed that, “if there are compelling psychiatric reasons from a Christian point of view, mercy and prudence may favor a therapeutic abortion.”
In 1971, the delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention, never a liberal institution, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.
Because evangelicals had considered abortion a Catholic issue until the late 1970s, they expressed little interest in the matter; Falwell, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, more than five years after Roe.
Opposition to abortion was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions. With a cunning diversion, they were able to whip up righteous fury against legalized abortion and thereby lend a veneer of respectability to their political agenda!
MORMANISM – The Church of the Latter Day Saints
The Book of Mormon contains many passages about sex and relationships for a Mormon couple – from masturbation to procreation – and the Church has rules for all of it. However, sex for Mormons is not only for procreation but also a way of expressing love and strengthening the emotional and spiritual bonds between a husband and wife. Furthermore, sex within marriage is supposed to be celebrated and enjoyed.
Although, according to the leaders of the Mormon church, marriage is not for those of the same sex, there has recently been some loosening of the prohibition against same sex marriage.
Nevertheless, the Mormon Church has been strongly opposed to artificial birth control and abortion. In its beliefs, heaven has millions of spirits awaiting an earthly body, and since the female body is considered the tabernacle of the spirit, women are meant to bear as many children as possible. But today’s Church leaders do not condemn birth control.
Abortion is a most serious matter and Mormons are only supposed to consider it after they have received confirmation through prayer and not for personal or social convenience.
JUDAISM – followers of the Old Testament & other sacred Texts
Judaic law encourages full enjoyment of sexuality, but only within marriage. And sex is not permitted during a woman’ menses. There are specific rituals to follow regarding the start and ending of the time when a woman is “unclean”.
Unlike Hinduism and Mormonism, the Hebrew Bible makes it clear that a fetus does not have the status of a human life. However, different Jewish denominations – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstruction – hold differing views regarding abortion.
Among Orthodox Judaism, use of birth control has been considered only acceptable for use in limited circumstances. Conservative Judaism, while generally encouraging its members to follow the traditional Jewish views on birth control, has been more willing to allow greater exceptions. Reform Judaism has generally been the most liberal with regard to birth control, allowing individual followers to use their own judgment in what, if any, birth control methods they might wish to employ.
Many Jews today feel that the benefits of contraception – female health, family stability, disease prevention, etc – uphold the commandment in Judaism to “choose life” more strongly than they violate God’s commandment in Genesis, “be fruitful and multiply.”
While Judaism takes a far less rigid approach to abortion than do many pro-life denominations of Christianity – including providing explicit exceptions for threats to a mother’s life and rabbinic support for terminating a pregnancy in a host of other situations – there is nonetheless broad objection to abortion in cases without serious cause. And, despite the consensus that abortion is permitted in cases where continuing the pregnancy poses a threat to the life of the mother, there is disagreement among rabbinical scholars over just what constitutes a threat.
Jewish law does not share the belief common among abortion opponents that life begins at conception, nor does it legally consider the fetus to be a full person deserving of protections equal those accorded to human beings. In Jewish law, a fetus attains the status of a full person only at birth.
Sources in the Talmud – which is the central text and primary source of Jewish religious law – indicate that prior to 40 days of gestation, the fetus has an even more limited legal status. And one Talmudic authority declared that, prior to 40 days, the fetus is “mere water.” Elsewhere, the Talmud indicates that the ancient rabbis regarded a fetus as part of its mother throughout the pregnancy, dependent fully on her for its life — a view that echoes the position that women should be free to make decisions concerning their own bodies.
ISLAM
In Islam, sexual relations between husband and wife should be mutual and done in a good manner, and not by oppression, hatred, violence, coercion and intimidation.
One is prohibited from having intercourse while being a pilgrim atthe “House of Allah,” in the sacred city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia – a journey every Muslim is expected to make at least once in their lifetime – or when one is staying in a mosque for a special religious purpose. Other than that, the only time intercourse is prohibited is during a woman’s menstrual period. If a man and woman have intimacy during a woman’s period, both have committed a sin, for which they must repent.
Islam teaches strict respect for every human being., especially to women. Islam also forbids injustice to anyone. The Koran (Quran) and the “hadiths” allow only sex with married and “what the right hand owns”. This historically permitted men to have extramarital sex with concubines and sex slaves. Otherwise, extramarital sex is strictly forbidden.
The Koran, first and sacred source of Islamic law, does not mention contraception.
Although there is no single attitude about contraception within Islam, eight of the nine classic schools of Islamic law permit it as a means of birth control. But more conservative Islamic leaders have openly campaigned against the use of condoms or other birth control methods, thus making population planning in many countries ineffective.
Nowadays, because of the risks of overpopulation, the majority of Islamic governments have passed family planning laws; however among the masses the erroneous belief that Islamic law prohibits contraception is spreading.
Although opinions among Islamic scholars differ over when a pregnancy can be terminated, under Islamic law there are no explicit prohibitions on a woman’s ability to abort, because abortion is not mentioned in the Koran. Today there are several Muslim countries that have specifically legalized abortion.
I found researching various religions’ beliefs about sex, contraception and abortion, to be enlightening. In particular the story behind the evangelical Christian right’s current rigid anti-abortion and anti-contraception stance/
We can’t think clearly about sex without recognizing that, traditionally, in patriarchal societies women were always considered to be property. Growing up, a girl was the property of her father. He could do with her as he pleased. And in marriage a woman was also property – purchased by, and owned by, her husband. This is why women were, in many non-indigenous societies, not permitted to leave or divorce an abusive spouse.
Patriarchal attitudes toward women, sex, contraception and abortion are deeply entrenched in cultures around the world. They do not die easily and contribute greatly to the pervasiveness of rape and the full range of male abuse of girls and women, including within marriage. And they directly influence beliefs about the rights of a woman when it comes to her body, including the right to use contraception or to have an abortion.
The role of patriarchy and what are called “dominator cultures” really ought to be included in any serious discussion of abortion. Yet is seldom is.
Why? Outlawing abortion is always about telling women we/they don’t know what’s best for ourselves or our potential children, but that someone else does. And that someone else is part of a powerful culture – whether family or church or state – and usually that culture is patriarchal, male focused. Even matrilineal cultures are usually patriarchal in nature. And that’s been true for thousands of years.
Abortion never occurs in isolation, as just a woman and a pregnancy. It occurs within a system, a family a community and a culture. Even when the woman wanting the abortion is single and living far from the biological father of this baby, her family, her friends, and her culture. This is important to remember and consider when looking at the impact of abortion on that baby and biological mother.
What is the broadest implication of outlawing abortion? Let me repeat, because it bears repeating: whenever an outside force has control over a woman’s body and reproductive capacity, that female becomes a slave to that force, be it religious, political or social. This external force/control may come in the form of a mother or mother-in-law who pushes a newly married woman to have a baby, or a religious dictum that women must bear children and that contraception and abortion are sins and women will be damned for it.
It may come in the form of a law stating that abortion is illegal, at a particular gestational age of the fetus, or at any time. Or it may come in a law that prevents a man from buying a condom or a woman from buying a “morning after” pill at a pharmacy, because the person behind the counter says it goes against their religious beliefs. And the courts uphold that.
Whenever a woman who has become pregnant is forced to remain pregnant, her body and psyche are being violated, whether or not she is conscious of that fact. And our body holds memories, starting right from when we are in our mother’s womb.
I know that is true, not just from my research, but from my own experience. When I was being sexually assaulted by my father, my conscious mind compartmentalized it and hid it from me, because I was too immature to be able to deal with something as enormous as this was. I knew I hated my father and felt repulsion when I was around him. But I didn’t know why. There were clues that might have been picked up by an observant physician, such as my extremely painful periods, or by myself, years later when I because sexually active but could only orgasm with a stranger and hated sex with someone I truly loved.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I had a body (physical, felt sense) memory of those years of trauma. It began to surface when a yoga teacher and friend simply placed her hand on my butt to show me a posture, and a vivid and felt memory suddenly emerged.
My body is wise, and it stored the traumatic memories until such time as my psyche was ready to acknowledge them. That was the beginning of the long journey to heal that early trauma.
I repeat: Being physically – especially sexually – violated always creates trauma, whether or not that person is aware of it or not.
Outlawing abortion always entails psychological trauma. For the mother and the baby, and by extension, the family. Emotional trauma results whenever the body is overwhelmed by an experience and cannot integrate it. It lodges deep in the body, whether or not the person is conscious of its being there.
And, psychological trauma, when unrecognized and/or unaddressed, has lifelong ripples for a child, and for an adult. And childbearing trauma, such as not being able to get contraception or not being able to have the abortion she wants, traumatize that woman and will affect her relationships: with other or future children, her current or future partner, her self-esteem and the decisions she makes or allows others to make for her. And research is now showing that it doesn’t stop there; unhealed, trauma continues from generation to generation.
Fortunately, there has been recently a body of knowledge made public about the nature and impact of trauma, especially when it occurs early in life. We now have professionals – nurses, physicians, teachers, etc. – being trained in how to provide compassionate listening and “trauma-informed care”.
We must never forget the critical role of the biological father in pregnancy.
I don’t want to ignore the critical importance of biological fathers in the discussion of abortion. There are men who want to be a father but have created a pregnancy with a woman who either doesn’t want them involved in raising that child or who simply doesn’t think their decision needs to involve him. These men understandably feel helpless and injured when the person they’ve had sex with – or used their sperm to become pregnant with – chooses to abort. And, I would add, so do those men who would like their baby to be born “naturally” and at home, and who want their child breastfed and not circumcised if it’s a boy, but whose partner wants something altogether different.
I empathize with these men.
The idea that a biological father should have rights when it comes to a child being conceived further complicates the issue of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, because now there are three people to consider: the biological mother, the to-be child, and the biological father. Some progressive-minded couples who become pregnant yet don’t wish to stay in relationship, choose for the woman to continue with her pregnancy and bear the child, and the man to raise the baby apart from her, with or without her involvement.
As with what is occurring in trans-gendering, this should be supported. However, because it concerns a small minority of the population of the U.S., I will not go more deeply into it here.
My greatest concern always lies with women when it comes to reproduction, because it is her body and psyche that bears the physical burden and the greatest emotional pain. Denying any woman the right to abort her unwanted pregnancy, whatever her reason, dramatically affects the course of her life and all her relationships. To repeat, it is a form of enslavement.
Let’s take a look at the harm that abortion restrictions and criminalization has caused health care workers: doctors, nurses, PAs, nurse practitioners. Anyone who providing services and care for childbearing women. These men and women are now on the front lines of the war on abortion and contraception.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision and the laws being passed across the country in state after state, today whenever they are confronted with a a woman in the midst of a miscarriage or an attempted abortion, they are in a quandary. If they provide any care and services to this woman, they may be sued in court, may lose their license to practice, may be jailed, may even be killed. That’s the truth.
A decade before the Supreme Court’s decision, hospitals in rural America were already closing their obstetric services and Ob Gyn physicians were stopping their obstetric practices. Doctors and hospitals found there was not enough money to be made caring for childbearing women. And so, pregnant women often found themselves having to travel a hundred miles or more just to find anyone willing to see them. And having no choice of care provider, if they were lucky enough to find anyone offering services.
And now the situation is worse. And, as always, it affects the already marginalized and underserved populations of black, brown and indigenous people worse. As a result of the stress these women live under during pregnancy, the likelihood of going into labor prematurely, having a still birth, and of dying from complications of pregnancy and birth have increased.
I mentioned before that these dire outcomes – women not being able to find anyone to care for them during pregnancy, at birth, and in the months postpartum – could and should have been predicted. Anti-abortion activists, most of them, didn’t intend to cause that kind of harm. The minority, however, is now pushing an expanded agenda: to eliminate all teaching of sex ed and contraception and all “artificial” forms of preventing or ending pregnancy. It’s amazing the lengths these individuals are going to, and in the name of God and Christ.
There will eventually be an end to this insanity and abortion and birth control will again we legal and hopefully enshrined in an amendment to the U.S. and state constitutions. But in the meantime, it’s a disaster.
Let us remember: Abortion is a painful choice for a woman and is seldom undertaken lightly. There is strong evidence that, immediately and in the years to follow, the vast majority of women who’ve had an abortion feel they made the best decision, given their circumstances and the options they had. They therefore carry no guilt, no self-recrimination, though they may have remorse, wishing it could have been different.
However, there are some women who are not good candidates for abortion. Research has shown that tiny minority of women who’ve had an abortion find their decision very difficult thing to live with, and they do carry both remorse and guilt. Most of these women could/should be identified during the counseling process that happens prior to abortion in respected centers like Planned Parenthood.
I believe this small minority of women should be encouraged not to have an abortion, but to carry and bear the baby and consider immediate open and cooperative adoption – where the child always knows who their biological parents and is also in contact with them during childhood.
Let’s look again at adoption, because it’s been painted as the panacea to unwanted pregnancy – a quick and easy solution that leaves everyone happy.Although it’s seldom discussed, adoption, at any age, is fraught with complications and consequences, immediate and long-term, for everyone involved: the biological parent/s, the adoptive parent/s, and the adoptee.
In the past, especially in the U.S., there were 2 primary types of adoption. The first is those done within the pregnant woman’s biological family or extended family. A relative of the pregnant woman or girl is chosen to be the de facto “parent/s” of that baby or child, and nor court or legality is involved. The child simply grows up believing that that the person they call “mother” is their biological mother. Unfortunately, this fairly common practice was and is based in a lie and results in family secrets.
The new “mother” is usually the biological aunt or grandmother of the baby or child. I want to emphasize that it’s not only hard for people to keep secrets year after year; but, whenever there are lies perpetrated in a family, individuals suffer. And in the case of intra-family informal adoption, it’s the child who suffers most. Because can “feel” in their body that something is not right. And it is in the nature of children, when they “feel” something is not right, that they most often feels it’s they who are not right. They who are bad!
In the U.S. intrafamily informal adoption was a common practice especially in Catholic and fundamentalist Christian families in the U.S. Secrecy and lies were the norm because pregnancy in a very young or unmarried woman was a matter of deep family shame.
In tribal indigenous cultures intrafamily adoption has never been so problematic, because children in these cultures “belong” to everyone. Everyone in the group is expected to share in the responsibility of parenting that child.
A friend of mine, Sobonfu Some, an indigenous woman born and raised in a Dagara village in Burkina Faso, who came to the U.S. in her 20s, married to a man from a neighboring village, told me that she didn’t know who her “real” mother was until she was five years old. She told me that she thought every woman in her small village was her mother or grandmother. After all, as soon as she learned to walk she would spend her days wandering freely from one hut to another, always within a few feet of each other, receiving the food and nurturing hugs of every woman.
In cultures such as the dominant culture in the U.S. where there is great emphasis and importance placed on 1) heredity, 2) male dominance, and 3) parental “ownership” of children, the idea of to whom you “belong” is an altogether different matter. And adoption in these cultures takes on a whole different, and unwholesome, cast.
The second primary form of adoption in the U.S. past was closed agency-controlled adoption. It was the norm for decades and still exists. In agency adoption, the baby is actually relinquished legally (or illegally) to an agency, and that agency selects the new parents. The adoption is “closed”: the identity of the biological parents is blacked out on the birth certificate and the child’s birth certificate and health records are “sealed” and kept in a file at the agency.
Two key components of closed adoptions are secrecy and lies. The adoption agency literally owns the rights to the relinquished baby until those rights are transferred to adoptive parents. These adoptive parents were almost universally “promised” that they would never be contacted by the birth mother or family because the child’s records were “permanently sealed”. This practice and promise was false, and cruel and harmful to everyone – the adoptee, the biological parent/s, and the adoption parent/s. It was based in a lie.
In fact, it was and became more recently often possible for a birth parent or an adoptee to search for and successfully locate the adoptive parents and extended family. An entire profession grew up around “closed adoptions”, consisting of individuals who, often for a fee, would conduct a search and locate the birth parents or grown child.
Most agency adoptions in the U.S. were ones where the adoptive parents had no biological connection to the birth parent/s and the relinquished baby. The county of New Zealand was unique.
New Zealand had (and may still have) a unique national approach to relinquishment and adoption in which, when a baby was expected to be relinquished by a birth parent/s, the state moved in and made an exhaustive effort to find a suitable biological relative to that baby who would be willing to adopt and raise the child, if need be with the financial aid of the New Zealand government. This practice arose from an enlightened understanding that there is a strong blood connection when it comes to parenting a child. And stranger adoptions were found to be less healthy for the child than adoption by a relative, however distant.
I want to note that, in the U.S. there has been a strong fight waged by indigenous people for decades to be able to prevent indigenous babies from being adopted into non-indigenous families. That effort is finally succeeding. For several centuries, indigenous children were literally “stolen” from their families and either placed in boarding school, where they were “taught” by force and deprivation to become “white”. OR they were placed in the home white parents, Christian parents, often Mormon and coerced into giving up their native ways (language, customs, etc.).
When I was researching the first of the two books I wrote on the experiences of adoption, as lived by birth mothers (and birth fathers) and relinquished and adopted children, I discovered a third type of adoption. In these adoptions, it was the birth mother’s physician or an attorney who acted as intermediary and sought out a suitable couple to take the baby right after birth. Sometime money changed hands. Sometimes not. No formal agency was involved. When it was the birth mother’s physician who found a suitable adoptive couple there might even be no formal adoption papers filed. Or the papers were filed with a court and the mother had no one to represent her except the very person who was also representing the adoptive parents. This practice was fairly common, no money was exchanged, and it was done with only good intentions, to save the birth mother from shame.
Adoption by single individuals was for many years frowned upon, as was adoption by a gay couple. Thankfully, that too is changing and it is much easier for a single person or a gay, or even transgendered person or couple to adoption.
Some birth mothers have taken an very active role in the adoption of their baby. I ran across a several well-educated pregnant women who had chosen to take charge of their relinquishment by pre-selecting the couple (or individual) who would be the adoptive parent/s. In some cases these birth mothers did not wish to have any contact with their child after placing them with the chosen parents. In other instances, the birth mother specifically chose as adoptive parents people who would promise to remain in contact with her or even give her a place in their lives.
It was not uncommon, I found, for an enlightened birth mother to insist that she be permitted to physically breastfeed the baby, or at least to give her breast milk to the adoptive mother to feed the baby, for the first weeks, to help build the baby’s immune system. This naturally created a stronger bond between the birth mother and the baby she was giving up. And that bond results in more pain and grieving for the birth mother. But mothers who do this do it for the sake of the their baby, and as a gift to the adoptive parents.
Some adoptive parents have chosen to “open” what was a closed adoption, and to invite the birth mother/parents into their lives, as one way of lessening the trauma to their adopted child.
Likewise, some adoptive parents choose to renew on the promise they made to the birth mother – to stay in contact by phone, zoom, emails and mail, or to keep her in the child’s life. That is a sad fact. There’s often quite a discrepancy between the income levels of the adoptive parents and birth parents. It’s a class issue and some adoptive parents wield that power unjustly.
Psychologically, and for the general health and wellbeing of all members of the adoption “triad” – the biological parent/s, the adoptive parent/s and the baby, I believe it’s ideal when the birth mother (or couple) consciously chooses to carry the baby to term, maintaining the best possible physical and psychological health for herself (and therefor for here baby), preparing herself for the most physiologically normal (“natural”) possible birth, inviting the adoptive parents to participate at the birth. Ideally she has some time in private with the baby to say goodbye. And it is she who places the baby directly into the arms of the person/couple whom she has selects to be the parents of her child.
Ideally, the birth mother has made the decision to relinquish early in her pregnancy, has then sought out and “chosen” the adoptive parent/s as early as possible. She has understand the importance of letting the baby growing in her womb know what her plans are and why. These birth mothers hold long conversations with the baby growing inside them, and she “introduces” the baby to the prospective adoptive parents.
Also ideally, the birth mothers has had conversations with the parents she’s chosen regarding their grief about having come to the decision to adopt as a result of infertility (which is most often the case), and the hopes and plans they have for their child.
Ideally, both the birth mother and the biological father (or other relatives, such as the grandmother) form a close and ongoing relationship with the new parents, based in trust and openness, all on behalf of the baby.
This constitutes what I’ll call a “child-centered adoption”. It requires a lot from both the biological and adoptive parents: trust and willingness to be vulnerable being foremost.
I want to repeat that in many, if not most, newborn adoptions, there is a disparity between the age, background, education and economic status of the birth parent/s and the adoptive parents. It’s all too easy for the adoptive parents to take advantage of the birth parent/s, and to intentionally lie about their intentions. Or they may simply not be aware of their unconscious motives and desires. For those reasons, I believe it’s important to have a third party involved, a social worker, a psychotherapist, a skilled “coach” in an adoption where no agency is involved.
The honest, trust-based relationships formed in planned, open and “cooperative” adoptions are invaluable. They make it less likely that 1) the biological mother/parents will feel abandoned after the birth of the child, less prone to serious depression and also less likely to unconsciously go out and become pregnant again, to fill the void left by the child she relinquished; and 2) make it less likely that the adoptive parents will renew on promises they make to the birth mother/parents.
A special and invaluable benefit of creating open, cooperative adoption is that the birth parent/s are a resource to turn to if the adoptive parents separate, get divorced, or one or the other of them dies.
Most importantly, open, cooperative adoption removes the likelihood of secrets and lies being perpetrated on that child. That in itself is significant! That child grows up knowing it has been both wanted and welcomed into the world in the best possible way.
Unfortunately, there are still a significant number of couples seeking to adopt an infant but who want nothing to do with the biological parent/s. These individuals have not done and are unwilling to do the deep and necessary psychological work of grieving their own infertility. They feel entitled to procure a baby by whatever means their money can buy and the money to prove it.
With fewer and fewer U.S. babies available for adoption, since single parenthood is no longer stigmatized, many infertile couples go abroad to “developing” countries, to find a baby or child. Often the baby or child is not of their race; and that poses additional complications for the family as the child grows up.
I’ve spent so much time on the subject of adoption in this essay because I’m tired of hearing people ignorantly touting adoption as the panacea, the “solution” to the problem of abortion.
The imprint and scars on those who were relinquished in adoptions in systems where secrets and lies prevail persist. The imprint and scars on the birth mother persist. That is one reason why I believe that adoption should never be seen as the solution to abortion! [I wrote more about this earlier in this series.]
Consciousness is rising when it comes to both abortion and adoption. The crisis that was created by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow states do whatever they want with regard to a woman’s rights over her body, and to procuring a safe abortion (and contraception) has brought abortion front and center for the American public, especially women. Many people who never before gave the idea of abortion a thought now find themselves vociferously championing a woman’s right to her body and to deciding what’s best if she becomes pregnant.
Let’s look once more at what I believe is one of the 2 core issues in abortion. The first, as I’ve pointed out many times, is that limiting our outlawing abortion results in forced pregnancy and the biological mother becomes enslaved. The second is what I want to turn your attention to now
The wellbeing of the baby/child
More and more scientific “evidence” is showing that we humans, even as infants, and including in our mother’s womb, know if we/they are wanted, are not welcomed into the world at birth, or are not fully cared for and nurtured. That’s physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. And not having been wanted results in deeply rooted emotional trauma. And, as we are beginning to understanding, from decades of research, trauma has deep and lasting effects. Not just on the person traumatized, but on all those with whom that child forms an intimate relationship. Trust, something that is implicit, has been broken.
There’s personal trauma. There’s family trauma. There’s cultural trauma. There’s trans-generational trauma. Fortunately, we as a culture are finally addressing it, one piece at a time.
The Efforts to Criminalize Abortion Has a Long, Nasty, and Puritanical History
The long history of the efforts of church and state to restrict abortion and contraception of all kinds has been the subject of extensive research and fine recent books. There was a set of laws passed by the U.S. Congress (when it was then entirely male) in 1873, known as the Comstock law, named for a man named Anthony Comstock, who found all forms of unmarried sex obscene. (He is not to be confused with Henry Comstock, who discovered the first major deposit of silver ore in the U.S.)
The Comstock Act of 1873 resulted in a set of U.S. Congressional laws that made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, “immoral”, or “indecent publications” through the U.S. mail. They also made it a misdemeanor for anyone to possess, give away, or sell an obscene book, pamphlet, picture, drawing or advertisement. All contraceptives were declared obscene and illicit and it became a federal offense to disseminate birth control or information about it through the mail.
There are many in the U.S. today who want to see all forms of birth control outlawed, as well as literature about it and not allowed to be sent through the U.S. Mail. So, abortion and other forms of birth control have a nasty woman-hating as well as sex-phobic history in the U.S. I recently discovered that for 75 years the American Medical Association (AMA) lobbied to have abortion banned. It had nothing to do with either morality or religion but was all about the effort of male physicians (traditionally only they were allowed to attend medical schools) to eliminate the traditionally female practice of midwifery.
Midwives traditionally and across the world cared for women at all stages of their lives, notably their entire reproductive life, and midwives have had a long history of being skilled in the wise use of herbal remedies for children and for adults when they were sick, and especially for pregnant and birthing women. And midwives throughout history have aided women in abortions.
Today, a small number of American OB/GYNs have been putting their reputations, their license and their life on the line by performing abortions. Some of them are now teaching doulas and midwives how to perform safe early abortions. Increasing the number of abortion providers, in an era when doctors are not required to learn how to perform abortions and many won’t.
Thanks be to those non-physicians now training to provide safe, early abortions. It places pregnancy back in the hands of women, where it belongs.
Who or What Dies in an Abortion?
Anti-abortion folks not only want to eliminate abortions performed by licensed physicians; they want to eliminate the possibility of women using medications for abortion. Before I talk about the death of the fetus, which anti-abortion folks are most concerned about, let me remind you that, whenever pregnant women desire, but cannot obtain, legal and safe abortions, many turn to “underground” abortions or attempt a self-induced abortion. Both of these options have always come at great risk to that woman; and a fair number of those women die from them or end up with lifelong health problems.
Unsafe abortions are a leading cause of preventable maternal deaths across the world. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, the rate of maternal mortality in the United States was 34 deaths for every 100,000 births. In 1973, following the legalization of abortion, that rate declined by 50%.
To those who are pro-choice: let’s stop trivializing abortion by referring to is as a simply a “procedure”.
Abortion does result in a fetal death, albeit a regrettable one. I believe there is a distinction between ending a life by abortion and intentionally perpetrating the murder of a child, as pro-life folks claim it is. Furthermore, I do not shy away from declaring that the life in a woman’s womb is both sentient and conscious.
Research now shows that, from fairly early on in womb life, a fetus experiences the full range of human emotions. This is a natural part of its development. A fetus experiences everything that its mother is experiencing, and takes into its body whatever nourishing – or toxic – substances she is taking into her body. Whether in the food she eats or the air she breathes. The fetus also takes in its mother’s thoughts and feelings, in the form of hormones. No, a fetus does not have self-awareness, because it is fused to the mother and cannot differentiate itself from her.
We must therefore consider a mother and fetus to be one being throughout pregnancy. For this reason, many of us in the movement to improve childbirth birth, refer to them as “a mother-baby”. Regardless of the essential oneness of a mother and baby, at times aborting a baby’s life in the womb is the wisest choice for everyone: the baby, the mother, the father, and the entire family, both immediately and over the long term.
I believe, and research in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology affirms, that a fetus/prenate is both sensitive and aware. Given this, a pregnant person is already a mother and is therefore ought to be communicating her feelings and desires with – and listening to – the developing life inside her. Shouldn’t that include letting that tiny being know if it is not the right time for it to come into the world, or at least not through her body, not now?
If killing is wrong, why should only the fetus be protected?
Let me suggest, dear reader, that if any life is sacred it should follow that all life is sacred. And that is seldom part of the right/wrong abortion “debate”. Anti-abortion folks are not consistently against killing. Many of them support capital punishment, even though, like all forms of imprisonment, it has always been applied unfairly and frequently killed innocent people.
Given the same crime, black men are still far more likely to receive a death sentence than are whites, and a fairly high percentage of these men are later – sometime many decades later – proven innocent. Why then don’t pro-life folks vehemently protest capital punishment and show up to demand systemic changes in our unfair criminal justice system?
Here’s another issue that you might consider bringing up at a family gathering, in your workplace, or at a neighborhood picnic: the huge and growing number of preventable child deaths from air pollution. The State of Global Air Report confirmed that, in 2019 alone, half a million babies worldwide died from the effects of air pollution.
I suggest that it is hypocritical to claim to be “pro-life” if we are only concerned with the life in a woman’s womb.
The now-renowned and well-respected ACEs study has been one example of rising consciousness about what constitutes psychological trauma, its immediate and long-term consequences. It has shone a light on what it takes to grow a healthy, thriving child.
The ACE Study – ACE being the acronym for “Adverse Childhood Experiences” is perhaps the largest investigation of the link between childhood maltreatment and the health and wellbeing of that individual later in life.
It measures traumatic events in a child’s life childhood, such as abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, that present a risk for that child having future problems as an adult. For example, there’s a proven direct link between childhood trauma (at least when it has not been addressed and integrated/healed) and the adult onset of 1) chronic disease, 2) incarceration, 3) employment challenges, and more.
The original 10 ACES of trauma are:
1. Physical Abuse
2. Sexual Abuse
3. Verbal abuse
4. Physical Neglect
5. Emotional Neglect
6. Mental illness in a household member: e.g. suicide, chronic depression
7. Substance addition in a household member or caregiver
8. Imprisonment: a member who is/has been incarcerated
9. Witnessing abuse, especially against a mother
10. Losing a parent- to separation, divorce, death…
Since the ACE study began, in 1995, other types of childhood trauma have been added to the original list, including: bullying, racism, community violence, natural disasters, refugee or wartime experiences, witnessing or experiencing acts of terrorism, homelessness and food insecurity.
The ACE research is ongoing and represents a landmark in our culture. It ties in with the subject of abortion because, when a girl or woman has been abused or neglected as a child, she is more likely to be exploited by an older boy or man, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy, have no “agency” over her body, be unaware of her rights and what services are available to her. she may believe, and rightly so, that she will be unable to care properly for that child.
In just a few years we are seeing the positive results of the ACES Study: “trauma-informed” health care, mental health care, and education.
One example, and an important one, of how the ACES research is changing he face of education is that when a child seriously misbehaves in school, they are less likely to be asked by the principal or guidance counselor the blaming/shaming question: “What is wrong with you” or “Why do you do these things?” The implication of such questions is always: “You are a bad person and deserve to be punished.”
Principals, guidance counselors and teachers are now receiving training to understand and have compassion for children who are “acting out”. They learn to ask a misbehaving or clearly depressed or angry child the open-ended question, “What happened to you?” And when asked with a caring tone of voice, the result is most often that the child will reveal what is going on at home, in the family, and who or what is the source of the hurt that has resulted in these anti-social behavior or self-destructive behaviors. Progress!
It’s been a journey for me to complete this long piece, that I began writing 2+ years ago… all the more so because I’ve had to contend with illness and injury. I won’t bore you with what a good friend of mine who, like me, had cancer calls discussing physical health issues “an organ recital”. Aaah.
Up until now, I’ve attempted to keep the tone of my writing dispassionate: thoughtful, respectful of all sides, and calm, while making it clear what my personal beliefs are. My hope was to elicit the interest of some people who’ve named themselves as “anti abortion” or “pro-life “to think more deeply about this vitally important issue as it relates to the bigger issue of reproductive health and justice.
I hope some folks who are not rigidly anti-abortion will reconsider your stand, in light of the dangerous consequences of making abortion a crime. Or at least softening your position. I know it’s unlikely that anyone passionately opposed to abortion will have read more than the first page or two of this series, much less gotten this far.
I’m mainly interested in reaching those who are not sure where they stand or who who say they are “pro-choice” but haven’t thought deeply and broadly about the subject. My hope for those of you who’ve stuck with this piece this far is that you find compassion for those who are opposed to abortion and that you find discussion points with which to engage them in conversation.
I hope those of you who’ve stuck with reading my thoughts thus far, probably most of whom already call yourself “pro-choice” now have more that you can talk – and listen deeply to others – about…with your friends, family and colleagues.
If you have been unaware of the deep hatred of women – and all things feminine, especially nature – that many men carry…and some women too, who’ve been socialized against their own nature…I hope you are more “woke” about it.
I want to remind us all of now proven fact:
The majority of us are not swayed in our beliefs by so-called “facts”, even those which are backed by a lot of evidence-based research.
We humans are creatures who all too often go with our “gut” feelings, which too often have not been shaped not by listening to our body but by authority figures who we trusted.
If we listened deeply to and trust the “still, small voice” within, I feel we’d be much better off. But in our patriarchal, overly speedy, culture we live in, it’s hard to be still for even a few minutes and to quiet the noise all around us and in our heads. So hard to pay attention to the quiet voice within, which combines both our heart and our ability to think deeply.
I ask you: Please dare to engage in the difficult topic of abortion. I have to push myself to do that with those I’m closest to, especially my own family and friends! You’re not alone.
I’ve discussed most of the things which I find hypocritical in the so-called “pro-life” stance. Here’s a big one: the idea that government should stay out of people’s private lives and bedrooms EXCEPT when it comes to a woman wanting an abortion. I think this is a crucial talking point in any conversation we have with those who are anti-abortion.
It is hypocritical to want NO government intervention in our private lives, while at the same time wanting this same government to prevent women from having agency over their own bodies and being able to have safe abortions. There’s a connection between calling one’s self ß“pro-life” and hold a libertarian value that no restrictions should be placed on what someone does on their private property, while asking/demanding that government to force their beliefs on others.
Examples of things some people want the government to intervene with or make illegal:
1) same sex marriage,
2) trans-identified youth receiving medical care,
3) children of immigrants receiving medical care
4) women from having access to proven safe over-the-counter abortion-producing drugs that they can take in the privacy of their own home
And the list goes on, as many are trying to:
5) criminalize doctors and other health care professions from caring for women who want or need an abortion or are in the middle of a miscarriage and could die from infection or blood loss
6) force librarians to remove so-called “offensive” books from school and public libraries
7) prevent all teaching of sex education in the schools
8) the sale of contraceptives, and giving those working in pharmacies the “right” to refuse to sell contraceptives, as part of their religious freedom
WHEW! I’m angered just finishing this partial list…
Let’s talk for a moment about the ingrained view that has been passed down from generation to generation in many cultures and families: parents having total right to make decisions about their children’s bodies, education, health care, etc. Many who claim to be “pro-life” because life is sacred and children are sacred, hold the belief that their children are their “property”, to do with as they see fit. This belief runs contradictory to how humans in traditionally viewed and treated children, which is that raising children to thrive is everyone’s shared responsibility.
Reminder:
While wanting to keep ownership over their own children, many adults in this country, insist that it’s not their – or their government’s – responsibility to provide for a woman and baby over the long-term, when it was that woman’s supposed “choice” to get pregnant in the first place. In recent decades, “pregnancy centers” have sprung up in shopping centers across the U.S., often right alongside day care or Head Start Centers. The clear intent is to confuse the public and cause a troubled pregnant woman, especially young woman, to believe they will offer her unbiased knowledge and help.
As I’ve said before, adoption is not the easy solution. Children relinquished at or near birth often carry a lifelong wound and are haunted by the sense that they are “throwaways”. In my research and from interviewing adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and teachers of kids relinquished or taken away at or soon after birth, I discovered that adoptees tend to fall on one end or other of the emotional wellbeing spectrum.
As kids and throughout teen years and adulthood, adoptees (like kids raised in foster homes) tend to be either high-performing but driven and anxious, or low-performing and self-abusive or aggressive. This is not information widely known; but teachers know. And so do adoptive parents, although it’s hard for them to accept the truth that their adopted child bears scars from having grown in the womb of a woman who didn’t want or couldn’t keep them, and then having been relinquished at birth.
To summarize my current observations, about abortion, which subject to change if and when I learn more and become more conscious:
- Every child and every adult’s body inherently belongs to them – not to their family, not to a set of traditions, not to a religion, or any outside authority.
- A woman’s womb – regardless of her age – belongs to her. A womb is about as Feminine as nature gets. It is such a sensitive organ that even, sometimes, withdraws/“migrates”, or repositions itself after the woman has experienced trauma
NOTE: When a woman’s womb is believed to belong to – is de facto “owned” and controlled by – an outside agent, whether a husband/partner, a legislative body, a judge or a religious institution or leader, this most intimate part of her body, is turned into a product akin to a postage meter. And, as with a postage meter that you rent from the outside agency called a Post Office, it may sit on your desk (or, in this case, in the woman’s body) and she/you may use it. But she/you should never forget that you don’t own it! She becomes an indentured servant or slave to an outside force. - When any person, group or system declares ownership of a female body, unwanted pregnancy and birth become forced labor (pun intended!). You need only to look at what goes on in the hospital labor and delivery unit to understand this.
Little known important fact: When a baby is born in a U.S. hospital and is not kept in the arms of one of its parents or family members, the hospital has legal ownership of that newborn. Agents of the hospital, in this case, doctors/nurses, are legally entitled to make whatever decisions they feel are best in caring for this infant while it’s under their custody. In labor, parents are never told this. Furthermore, when a woman who is legally a “minor” gives birth in a hospital, doctors/nurses feel entitled to make decisions for her on behalf of her baby. And judges often uphold this. - Roe was overturned (handed over to the states to allow or outlaw) by a Supreme Court whose members are not elected include 5 very conservative Catholics and 1 extremely conservative, fundamentalist evangelical Catholic. This court is comprised of six men. These judges serve for a lifetime and up until now there has not been any way for the public or any other part of the U.S. government to hold them accountable or get rid of them.
For as long as abortion and contraception issues are to each U.S. States (and their mainly male legislators) to decide upon, many women of all races, backgrounds, and ages will continue to suffer and even be permanently damaged physically, psychically, spiritually, and sexually, or die from lack of caring and skilled care. This is a proven fact that has been true historically, across the world. And evidence proves it is still true. - The “Feminine” principle is the generative, life-giving force in nature. It must be honored as well as respected, if we are to be truly civilized and fully human.
- If we profess to care about life, then we must care about the well-being of the mother, whatever her age, circumstances, background.
- If we profess to care about the well-being – and rights – of babies then we must face the paradox that every baby and its biological mother are actually one physiological unit – a symbiotic pair who need each other for their full development – but who may nevertheless have differing needs. Examples of mother-baby symbiosis abound. Without the baby suckling at the mother’s breast after birth, her body will not produce the hormones that make her uterus contract firmly and she may hemorrhage (bleed excessively).
- Yes, babies/prenates/fetuses have rights, in the womb, at birth and in the weeks afterward, as they are physically separating from the mother. It is right then that the biological mother make decisions on behalf of that baby until – or unless – she is proven incompetent to do so. The rights of the biological father may also need to be considered.
- We must prioritize the childbearing woman, her needs and her desires, above that of her fetus/prenate/baby, until that that being is developed sufficiently to live independently outside of its mother’s body. That usually occurs between 22 and 24 weeks gestational age. Only then, I argue, ought that tiny being be viewed as a person and accorded separate, individual rights.
There’s growing evidence that babies are not only sentient and aware, but also “conscious” in the womb, at conception and, as a soul, even before conception. Nevertheless, being viewed as a separate individual at, say, 14 weeks, is different from a baby being capable of sustaining its own life outside the womb [breathing, maintaining its temperature etc] and therefore deserving of having individual “rights” apart from it’s biological mother. - There is a wealth of evidence-based data to support that, overall, women want the best for their children, including their unborn. The rare exceptions, women who abuse their babies and children, do so because they themselves have been abused/neglected or are living under the domination of a man who hates babies/children and wants to control that woman.
- Under the economic system called “capitalism” (as practiced in the U.S. today), corporations have virtually unlimited power. Capitalism is a product of patriarchy, which created the belief that girls and women are inherently less than men and need to be protected and cared for by men, because they can’t be trusted to know what is best for them or their offspring.
AND, under capitalism, babies are turned into commodities, products.
Outlawing abortion turns pregnant women – all women, whatever their age – into man’s “property”, with forced pregnancy and forced birth producing a “product” called a baby. This product is seen as having greater value than its mother. This viewpoint, which is still strongly held in many Christian, Jewish and Muslim places of worship and homes, displays a fundamental devaluing of the feminine. - Starting at conception, every human being has innate (biological and neurological) needs that must be met if they are to fully develop and thrive physically and emotionally. To become fully human, requires parenting and communal care-taking that also honors a child’s sou and spirit. Babies are increasingly sentient, aware and, “conscious” as they develop in the mother’s womb.
Evidence is showing that the several weeks prior to conception are also part of this baby’s development. During this time the female egg and the male sperm are able to be altered according to the environment in which the prospective mother and father live. And part of that environment is their mental and physical health, their attitudes and beliefs, and the amount and types of stress they are experiencing. This is the field known as “epigenetics” – influences that are above and beyond mere genetics.
Worth knowing:
While it has been known for decades that the female egg’s genetic makeup can be affected by various kinds of adversity and stress, it has recently been shown that the male’s sperm are also affected. It’s not their DNA that changes, but whether and how the genes “express” themselves. For example, a gene for bi-polar might be present in either or both the prospective mother or father. If the environment is particularly stressful or even toxic, the resulting fetus may exhibit signs of bi-polar, triggered later in life by additional stressors. - In its mother’s womb, a baby is learning about the world – first of all, whether the world is safe or not. To a prenate, the mother’s womb is the world, the universe. And the womb is also that prospective child’s first classroom. In that hopefully protected space, a growing baby experiences the full range of human emotions and develops its own “character”.
- The mother-baby bond starts at conception and forms the most basic template for a person’s lifelong bonds with others. The new field of prenatal and perinatal psychology provides a growing body of research – both randomized studies and case studies – that is enriching our understanding of babies, starting pre-conception, and what it takes for a human being to thrive.
- Parenting is an enormous responsibility and few people are able to do it well without the ongoing support – emotional, physical, perhaps financial – of others. Indigenous cultures have always understood that to be true, and they have made sure that a mother is not left alone with a baby for any extended period of time.
- Whenever a child is unwanted, they have trauma. Trauma at the start of a child’s life, even in the weeks pre-conception, and in the womb and at birth and afterward is “primal trauma”. Whenever trauma is ignored and left unhealed, it inhibits that child’s full development. It damages not only that child but also the and the symbiotic mother-baby system and their bond, which is the pivotal. It also damages the father-mother-baby bond. The ground-breaking ACES study is showing us just how important early trauma is and how deeply and adversely it affects children over their lifetime.
- There is trauma for the entire family whenever a woman is forced to carry a baby or have the abortion she desires. That baby in her womb is growing every cell of its body in the sea of its mother’s amniotic fluid, which will be laced with her “molecules of emotion” produced in her body from her fear, anxiety, depression, self-blame, and anger at having to carry this being. Example: when a pregnant mother is over-stressed, her adrenal glands secret stress hormones such as cortisol. And cortisol, which is essential at certain specific points in a prenate’s development, is at other times a neurotoxin to that developing baby’s brain, at the very time during which it is developing neuro-tissues and neural connections, in the womb.
- Access to safe abortion is vitally important to the well-being of all families. It is an essential part of women’s health care.
- It’s a rare woman who, though against abortion, wants to see another woman punished, perhaps jailed for wanting not to bring a new life into this world. These women are themselves damaged and need help.
- Before any of us pass judgment on a woman who becomes desperate when she is unable to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, we would be wise to become detectives of our own family history. We will likely discover that there has been unwanted pregnancies, attempted abortions, still births. As with sexual abuse and (from molestation to rape), trauma from these experiences shaped the mental and physical health, parenting style and more, of our mothers, our grandmothers and others in our lineage.
- In order to rear thriving children, families and communities and shift our culture’s values from fear-based competition, aggression and greed, all babies need to be wanted. Wanted, welcomed, kept safe, cherished, nourished and nurtured throughout childhood.
- Childbearing, like child-rearing, is a sacred responsibility. Equally so is a woman’s right to choose not to bear a child. And so is abortion. Abortion has been wrongly placed on the stage of political theater, where it has degenerated into a false duality of “pro-life” or “pro-choice”. It’s so much more complicated and nuanced than that. We all need to be “woke” about it.
- Banning abortion, ironically, has never been, “pro-life”. If it were, there would be bills in Congress and legislatures across the country to ensure that all babies would have their needs met, after birth and on throughout the rest of their childhood. Anything less shows utter disregard for the welfare of babies and children.
Fact is, most babies and children who are unwanted or neglected know it in their gut and they blame themselves and often don’t achieve their potential and even become a drain on society. Yet we don’t see right-to-lifers championing universal paid parental leave after birth, or free and easy access to family planning and contraception, free childcare and nursery school for all whose parents want it. - To be truly “pro-life”, a person should be consistent: anti-war, anti-capital punishment. Seeing all human beings as being at their core, radiant creatures of the light. Star dust.
Remember who are having abortions today. It’s women everywhere; and I’m certain that you know some of them: your neighbor, your best friend, or sister, even perhaps your mother. And these women come from all backgrounds and faiths.
*****
There’s a TED TALK DAILY 12” episode worth listening to and sharing from October 2023, rebroadcast on January 11, 2024.
I offer this resource for you: “What Happens When We Deny People Abortions” by researcher Diane Greene Foster
I will end this lengthy piece by restating that I am a woman. I am pro-woman, pro-child, pro-family…and pro-choice.
I have had an abortion, as have most of the woman I know. I am fortunate and feel grateful, to have lived at a time in this country, the United States, where I, a white educated woman of the middle class, was able to have a safe and affordable abortion, because it was legal.
Warm Regards,
Suzanne Arms
