Abortion Positions--So Who's the Radical?

What service does abortion serve in our society? It eliminates an obstacle to a freer mobility of certain women within it. The letters were full of outraged detail about just how much of a social and economic disaster an unplanned pregnancy can be for a woman--particularly a woman alone, particularly a woman trying to break out of the old wife-mother role she has been reaised to fit into. To me this is all evidence that our social order is organized inhumanely, that it excludes as well as the nonwhite, the poor, the aged and others, pregnant mothers and the unborn.

It is enough of a struggle to raise wanted children adequately if you are not affluent; to try to do it alone, and while pursuing a vocation, is extremely difficult. It is not hard to see why, as one writer put it, a woman could feel "She has a right to decide against physical pain, discomfort and disfigurement; she has a right to decide against rearing a fatherless child; she has the right to decide against assuming ultimate responsibility for another human being; she has the right to decide against the physical and emotional drains of child-rearing. She has the right to decide for autonomy; she has a right to decide for satisfaction in work and fulfillment in non-biological creation; she has a right to decide in favor of that freedom traditionally granted man, namely, to pursue truth or folly, unfettered, unencumbered, nurtured instead of nurturing, encouraged rather than encouraging, comforted as opposed to giving comfort, mobile, not static, moving forward as a whole, free, growing organism."

If a decision to abort means a choice between these options, it is hardly surprising that many women would choose the abortion.

But why couldn't women faced with such a repugnant choice perceive abortion as a radicalizing experience, an ordeal into which they are coerced by an inhuman social order, and through which they could better be able to see its inhumanity? Why couldn't that experience be seen the way submitting to the draft and serving in Vietnam has been by so many GIs--as a situation in which they are coerced into participating in the immoral destruction of life, and which left them full of rage at those who put them in it?

The answer appears to be the acceptance of the fetus-as-nonhuman argument. Militant feminists have felt it necessary, as part of their campaign to get restrictive abortion laws repealed, to insist that the act is of no moral weight whatever. As one writer insisted to me, "including the unborn in the question of abortion is absurd. . . . The carrying of this unwanted tissue can be compared to having an incurable cancer in your body. What morals are involved in removing a tumor, after all it is also an unwanted mass of tissue that the body has created?"

There are, as many of us have read elsewhere, weighty theological figures ready to agree, among them none more forthright than Professor Joseph Fletcher, who wrote to me, "A fetus is a parasite, tolerable ethically only when welcome to its hostess. If a woman doesn't want a fetus to remain growing in her body she should be free to rid herself of the unwanted intruder."

To me this is a tragic mistake; and the sanction given it by the use in the Supreme Court's decision of a concept of "viability" is the weakest part of Justice Blackmun's opinion. I have examined carefully every rationale for such a position, and have found none that is not shot through with internal inconsistencies and contradictions. Most boil down to the proposition that a fetus is not human if someone else, usually the mother, chooses not to regard it as human, a standard we would not permit to be applied to any other form of human life, potential or realized.

But the point to keep before us is that the source of most "unwantedness" is institutional. It is the present social order, and the attitudes that sustain it, which will not accept and make provision for "unwanted" pregnancies (that is, pregnancies not supported by the options of affluence) and the women who carry them. This "unwantedness" is enforced on women through a frightening panoply of sanctions.

Many of the letters insisted that as a male I could not possibly have any understanding of what a woman faced with an unplanned pregnancy had to deal with. Yet I think that most of my generation faced a situation which, viewed from the angle I have just suggested, is in many ways analogous.

I am speaking of the draft. It served the function of providing the manpower for our war machine, a function that in our time has been seen widely as morally repugnant. It came upon us individually, in isolation, with demands for a substantial chunk of our time (much more than a pregnancy incidentally), and possibly our lives. Great institutional forces came with it to enforce its demands upon us. In this situation each of us had to make hard choices, moral choices, choices which made a great deal of difference in our lives.

The point of the analogy is that for many men, in many ways, the draft became the occasion of consciousness-raising and then resistance, a resistance from which a movement among them and many others grew. And now that the battle over legalities seems to have taken a decisive turn, why could not the women's movement come to regard unplanned pregnancies as occasions for resistance and mutual support because the preservation and potential of life was involved

Such a perspective would, I believe, take it in significantly different and more promising directions than the present disregard of fetal humanity and the moral weight of abortion decisions can. If it is unacceptable for a society to treat people of color or people without money as less than human and not entitled to a fair share of the fruits of that society, how can we be ready to permit individuals to make such judgments independently of moral considerations?

A radical understanding of the meaning and value of life, in my view, must be, in fundamental opposition to that of our established order, as broad and nearly absolute as possible, both horizontally--including all manner and condition of people--and vertically, from the moment life can be detected until the moment it ends. We should work to build a society that embodies this view as closely as possible; and where the forces of the status quo deny it, even and particularly in its beginning, that is where the making of a revolution should start.

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