Letters to the Editor
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To Anna in particular
“The attacker could take the calcium from your bones, could destroy your health, could raise your blood pressure into dangerous places, could potentially kill you (yes, still) ...” - Anna
That argument would (and does) make sense in situations where the pregnancy threatens the mother’s health. But it really does stretch the analogy to describe a fetus as an “attacker” when (except in the cases of rape) it got where it is because the “victim” left the door open, even if just a crack. Given that (as I said earlier) there are NO real parallels, still some analogies are better than others. A fetus is not an attacker unless the woman was raped. Even then, it’s not actually an attacker—the attacker was the rapist; the fetus is a monument of the woman’s violation and as such (I feel) her right to integrity trumps its right to life if she chooses.
But in most cases (I’m thinking out loud here; this is not something I’ve worked out in detail) it seems to me the fetus is more like a house guest. An unwelcome guest, obviously--you didn’t realize you were inviting it to move in; you didn’t have any such plan; you carelessly said or did something that the guest took as an invitation; you got a little too drunk at a party and invited someone you didn’t really mean to invite ... but there they are. And you are REALLY upset that they have moved in. Understandably so. It's going to change your life. You wish to hell you could just turn back the clock and not make the invitation. And not only that-—it turns out the house guest is a helpless CHILD who is a close relative with a serious moral claim on your time, house space, and money, for years and years. And if you throw them out, they have absolutely nowhere else to go and will DIE. What do you do?
Yeah, you can shoot the analogy full of holes, but I still say it’s closer to the real situation than the (forgive me) OUTRAGEOUS image of the fetus as an attacker.
Now for another analogy. Several posters have made the claim that only women have any right to pronounce moral judgment on the issue of abortion, because no male human being can ever imagine what kind of feelings accompany the experience of discovering one is pregnant unintentionally. Sounds plausible on the surface. But what about the following scenario:
A soldier in combat experiences terrible fear and stress, goes berserk, and kills a civilian. He (or she) is court-martialed by officers who have never been in combat, and is found guilty of a war crime. The soldier says, “You people have no right to judge me: you have no idea what it is really like in combat. You don’t understand about the stress: I just HAD to do it.” The officers reply, “Sorry; we may not have been in combat but we are in the army; we know the general code of ethics; we appreciate the stress and have tried to understand it. Stress or no stress, some things are just WRONG.”
Push the analogy a little further: our military is supposed to be governed by civilians, on purpose, for the very reason that civilians, NOT being under that kind of stress, are BETTER able to see the larger moral issues. Our culture is currently very big on the importance of feelings-—victims’ need for closure, etc. etc.—-but traditionally in Western political systems (and in most others, I believe), the moral and legal codes are not built on feelings, but on a system of theoretically abstract principles of justice. I would submit that we lose this principle at our peril. Empathy is important, all right; but so is impartial, unemotional principle. And the ones who can see that and remind us, in the heat of emotion, of the need for moral principle IN SPITE of our very real feelings of desperation, are making an important contribution to the whole moral dialogue. They shouldn't necessary have the last word, and certainly not the only word; but to rule them out of the discussion entirely is to ultimately cede rationality in favor of emotionality. To see what that would look like, here's one more scenario.
Our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001 and certain people have made much of saying to the other nations of the world, “Since we became victims on September 11, we are allowed to do ANYTHING, ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous and disproportionate, in order to feel safe again. If you haven’t felt threatened in this way, you have NO MORAL RIGHT to pronounce on the degree or nature of our response.”
Do you buy that?
Of course, a hell of a lot of the men who argue against abortion aren’t doing it out of abstract moral principle, they’re doing it out of visceral prejudice and hatred, and none of this argument applies to that.
And I hope I don't need to add, this is about the moral issue of abortion, not the idea of banning it.
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Two abortions that happened, and one that didn't, part 1
I've been thinking hard all evening about how to answer a parent and episcomom, both of whom I probably agree with much more than I disagree. And yet, and yet, and yet. All evening I've been trying to frame a response to their thoughtful, clearly deeply felt arguments in favor of the personhood of the fetus, which I myself believe in more than not (as I write this, my 28-week bab is doing backflips just under my heart). And yet, and yet, and yet.
Real life is so messy. It shouldn't be, it should line itself up neatly with all the good and loving and passionate arguments a parent and episcomom make, and yet it stubbornly won't. So the most I can do is tell stories (anonymously, not out of shame but because one of them is a friend's story and one is a story heard through a hospital, and the stories are important but their personal confidentiality is paramount).
My abortion: I was clinically depressed, emotionally wrecked in the aftermath of the death of a relationship that I'd been dead certain would lead to marriage. I fell, too hard and too soon, for someone who reminded me in a lot of ways of the man who'd just broken me. He fell, too hard and too soon, for me because I was the complete opposite of the woman who'd just broken him. He had an 8-year-old daughter of whom he had 50% legal and physical custody, for whom he was working himself half to death, to whom he was devoted, who was the reason he hadn't committed suicide after the death of his own marriage. We made the mutually horrible decision to get physically involved because we were wounded and sick with loneliness, too raw and jangled to make wise choices and too raw and jangled to realize that and back off until the timing was better.
We had protected sex. The protection failed. The day before I told him, his doctor told him his latest colonoscopy looked very bad and he needed further testing for colon cancer, immediately (his mother and several other close family members had died of various cancers). I thought about killing myself, about leaving the state, about having the baby and giving it up, having it and keeping it, about killing myself.
He didn't, couldn't, love me. He couldn't turn his back on a baby he'd conceived; he couldn't support the living, breathing, vibrant daughter he already had and a second baby in a second household. He didn't know if he'd still be alive by the time the baby was born. He thought about fleeing, about killing himself.
I aborted. I was frozen with grief, but absolutely convinced that after all the bad choices we'd made it was -- not the best decision, there were no best decisions, but the least bad decision. A few years later, he is cancer-free, emotionally steadied, engaged to a good woman who's loved him and been a true and steady friend for a very long time. I'm married to someone I never would have met if I'd been a single parent, another divorced dad who was frozen in his own world of grief after the death of his own marriage. When he told his father he'd finally come unstuck from his fear and sadness and was going to marry me, his father wept and said, "I knew how sad you were. I've been saying the rosary for you every night for months. God heard me."
Now, feeling my husband's daughter swimming inside me, I still regret that other child, still feel her absence, still wish I could undo the shitty decisions that led to that last sorrowful one; but I'm still absolutely certain that at the end of all that misery, that was the least harmful thing I could have done. For my clinically depressed self, for my sick and frightened lover, for the soulmate who was with him all along but whom he was too sick and sorry to recognize just yet, for his just-this-side-of-poverty daughter, for the man who has come back to life at my side. None of that erases the regret or turns it into joy, but real life is just that messy and fucked up and full of shades of gray. What would you have advised?