Re-thinking Abortion

Psychology, Gender and the Law

Mary Boyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317725145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

Women have been able to have abortions legally for over 30 years. Yet few books have considered it as anything other than a health issue. Mary Boyle breaks this mould by considering the constructions of abortion in Western society. Drawing on ideas from sociology, politics, anthropology and law as well as psychology, she shows how abortion is linked to sexual behaviour and motherhood in the complex web of gender and power relations.
This book will be of interest to all those engaged with feminist thinking, whether as student, academic, or professional in practice.

1

INTRODUCTION

Psychology and abortion

In 1994, more than 166,000 women had legal abortions in England and Wales; the average figure for the years 1989–94 has been over 176,000¹ and around four million abortions have been carried out in England and Wales since the implementation of more liberal abortion legislation in 1968 (Office for National Statistics 1996a). In spite of the large number of women who have abortions, and men who experience it indirectly, British psychology has had little to say on the topic. For example, a search of the British Journal of Psychology and the British Journals of Clinical, Medical and Social Psychology, and all issues of Psychology and Health for 1981–1994, produced four papers. Similarly, an unselected sample of ten texts on health psychology published in the last eight years produced a total of less than half a page in one text and two lines in another. The Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, however, has produced one issue on the related topic of ‘fetal screening’.

The topic has received more attention from psychologists in the United States, where around 1.5 million abortions are performed each year (Hansen 1993). As well as a text on adolescent abortion (Melton 1986), there has been a special feature on adolescent abortion (American Psychologist 1987) and a journal issue devoted to psychological aspects of abortion (Journal of Social Issues 1992). But although the topic of abortion has been more visible in the US psychological literature, the number of journal articles is very small and abortion tends to be treated as a ‘special’ topic which is rarely mentioned, far less discussed in detail, in texts on social, clinical, health or life-span psychology. The major US review journal Psychological Bulletin has not published a paper on abortion in the last fifteen years.

One possible reason for this relative neglect of abortion, and for the failure to integrate it into the study of people's lives, is the extreme social and political sensitivity which surrounds the topic. Ronald Dworkin, for example, recently suggested that ‘the war between anti-abortion groups and their opponents is America's new version of the terrible seventeenth-century European civil wars of religion’ (1993: 4). A similar sentiment was expressed by a US anti-abortion campaigner who compared himself to a ‘soldier in a holy war’ (Connell 1994). Although abortion does not appear routinely to inspire such extreme sentiments in the UK and Europe, it remains a highly controversial issue. For example, there have been around twenty parliamentary attempts to restrict the law on abortion in Britain since it was liberalised in 1967, while abortion laws in Northern and Southern Ireland are amongst the most restrictive in the world. In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court barred a 14-year-old girl, who had been raped, from travelling to England for an abortion, although the injunction was later removed. The ban precipitated public protests in Britain and Ireland, with placards such as ‘Get your rosaries out of my ovaries’ and ‘If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrifice’. Hadley (1996) has argued that negotiations over abortion legislation created more difficulties than any other issue in the German reunification process.

Small wonder, perhaps, that an issue so obviously laden with moral, political and religious overtones has not been a very popular subject for psychological research and analysis. But is the undoubtedly contentious and sensitive nature of abortion an adequate explanation or justification of this neglect? Can we assume that psychology has little to contribute to an area that uses language and arguments derived from religion, morality and ideology, and which appears to make little use of what psychologists would think of as evidence? In fact, we might argue the opposite: that an issue which arouses such strong feelings and induces extremes of behaviour must have such significance in many people's lives that a discipline devoted to the study of human behaviour cannot afford to neglect it. And leaving aside the political controversy, the official statistics on abortion show that it directly touches the lives of a considerable number of people. A more informal survey in New Woman magazine in April 1993 found that almost a quarter of its respondents who were thirty or over had had an abortion. There is also good evidence that when abortion is not legally available, women will often resort to illegal abortion even at considerable risk to their health (Callahan 1970; Brooks 1988; NIALRA 1989). Indeed, Faludi (1992) has claimed that women have been terminating about one in three pregnancies, legally or illegally, for at least the last century. It seems difficult, then, to justify psychology's relative neglect of abortion simply in terms of the socially controversial nature of the topic, although I shall argue that this certainly helps to account for the neglect. But to seek to account for why psychology should pay so little attention to abortion is only part of the story because our attention is not then directed to the ways in which psychology does attend to the topic. For example, Smetana and Adler suggested in 1979 that psychological and psychiatric research on abortion tended to emphasise the (negative) characteristics of women seeking abortion and its possible negative effects on women. Adler et al.'s 1992 review suggests that the situation has not significantly changed, although there is now less emphasis on the psychological characteristics of women who seek abortion. However, the emphasis on the negative effects of abortion on women remains.

Psychology, then, has approached abortion largely as a health or ‘well-being’ issue and has tended to focus on individual women. This might seem reasonable: after all, abortion is a health issue insofar as it is performed by doctors on women within a health system. It will also have particular effects, positive or negative, on individual women. It might also seem that, in an area fraught with controversy, psychology can adopt a neutral stance by concentrating on the physical and psychological health of women who have abortions, rather than becoming embroiled in issues which are well beyond its scientific remit. One of the major themes of this book, however, is that psychology is already embroiled in abortion, whether or not it intends or is aware of it, and that its relationship to abortion is not neutral in terms either of its relative neglect of the topic or the kind of research it has generated. The less visible aspects of psychology's relationship to abortion will be discussed in later chapters, but if we look for the moment at its visible relationship through published research, we can identify three main characteristics. The first is the search for an objective and scientific approach to the study of abortion which circumvents its value-laden nature. Adler (1992: 19), for example, has argued that, ‘The scientific study of abortion has been burdened by the fact that it is a procedure about which individuals have strong feelings’. In a review of ‘psychological factors in abortion’, Adler et al. also stated that ‘it was recognized that differing moral, ethical and religious perspectives impinge on how abortion is perceived. Our mission, however, was not to assess values, but to consider the best available scientific evidence on psychological responses to abortion’ (1992: 1194). The second characteristic is the focus on individual women. This often takes the form of the quantitative study of women's responses to abortion, often using standard scales of assumed intrapsychic states such as depression or anxiety. Finally, psychological research on abortion is characterised by a neglect of gender, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of research participants are women. These features, however, are not simply characteristic of research on abortion or a result of the special nature of this topic; they are characteristic of psychology's general approach to its subject matter. We can therefore better understand why the psychological study of abortion should have taken this form, and why it is so problematic and limiting, by looking at the nature of psychology as a discipline and the nature of the subject matter it has set for itself.

PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Psychology clearly sees itself as a science. For example, a report on the profession of clinical psychology claimed that ‘Scientific method and systematic enquiry determine the way they practice’ (MPAG 1990). Reviewers for a major learned journal are told that the primary consideration in considering papers is that they should ‘advance scientific knowledge’. Psychology's perception of itself as a science is based on its having publicly adopted both the methods and rhetoric of the natural sciences. In this the discipline has followed the mid-nineteenth century positivist doctrine of Auguste Comte, that the systematic study of society and of humans is possible only by applying the methods of the natural sciences. Comte believed that such methods led to the discovery of secure and irrefutable knowledge. The methods adopted by psychology involved a strong reliance on experimentation, the extensive use of quantification and measurement, the separation of phenomena of interest from their contexts and their study under controlled conditions, and, finally, a commitment to the creation of general laws of behaviour. This latter commitment has led to an emphasis on the form of behaviour, or general features common across groups, rather than on its specific content or social and personal meaning. Psychology's adoption of natural science methods, and of the assumptions underlying them, has been accompanied by what might be called a rhetoric of justification which depicts such methods as neutral, objective, value-free and rational (Venn 1984; Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1988; Harding 1986, 1991). There are a number of problems with the extension of the methods and rhetoric of the natural sciences to the study of humans, but two of the major ones concern the nature of scientific method and its assumed neutrality.

The adoption of natural science methods for the study of behaviour and experience appears to be based on the idea that there exist methods which are intrinsically scientific, which result in secure knowledge, and with which aspiring scientific disciplines can compare themselves. It is an appealing and comforting idea, but it has proved remarkably difficult to substantiate. There has never been an agreed definition of ‘science’ (Medawar 1984; Chalmers 1990) and philosophers of science have disagreed about what it is that natural scientists actually do (see, for example, Lakatos and Musgrave 1970; Feyerabend 1978). Medawar (1984) has argued that science should not be thought of as the application of an essential method, but as attempts to solve problems using whatever methods appear to produce reliable and useful results. Chalmers (1990) has supported this view, arguing that we underestimate the extent to which methods and standards in the natural sciences have changed – and are still changing – not in pursuit of the scientific method, but pragmatically, to suit the circumstances of the time. As Chalmers points out, the fact that the natural sciences have developed methods to suit their subject matter means that the achievements of, say, physics will not tell us how to solve the problems studied by psychologists or sociologists. Scientists do not apply quantification to decontextualised objects in laboratories because to do so is intrinsically scientific, but because they can make useful statements about objects by doing so. These objects have no social life, culture or language; whether studying decontextualised individuals who have all three will enable us to make useful statements about people, is another matter entirely. Similarly, the success of quantification in the natural sciences does not guarantee that it will be equally successful when applied to human behaviour and experience.

The second problem of transferring natural science methods to the study of humans concerns their assumed neutrality or objectivity. The rhetoric of objectivity functions to confer authority, status and trust. It has also, however, absolved psychology of responsibility for examining the value systems which influence choice of research questions, methods and theories, as well as attempts to put theories into practice. Psychology's preoccupation with objectivity has also resulted in a relative neglect of topics which are socially and politically sensitive but which are arguably central to people's lives, such as sexual and racial discrimination, sexual objectification, racial and sexual violence, women's domestic labour and, of course, abortion.

Psychological research on abortion, however, has been characterised not only by its sparseness but also by its emphasis on individual women. The individual has, of course, been psychology's traditional object of study. It is not that this is unreasonable in principle, the problem lies in how we conceptualise the individual and the relationship of individual behaviour and experience to its social context. It is assumed, for example, that individuals carry with them attributes and processes which can be studied independently of the social world – personality, intelligence, aptitude, depression, anxiety, dysfunctional cognitions, attitudes, and so on. Psychology has taken account of social variables such as ‘class’ and marital status, but these are often conceptualised as separate and discrete entities ‘out there’ whose impact on internal psychological attributes can be expressed numerically. Even studies of social internction, as Henriques et al. (1984) have noted, tend to assume a dualistic relationship between the individual and the social with a pre-given individual subject, on whom the social world impinges, taken for granted.

This approach treats the psychological object of study, the individual, as unproblematic and self-evident. It seriously underestimates the extent to which psychology has not simply studied but constructed the individual, as well as the extent to which that construction has been influenced by social and cultural values. Venn (1984) and Rose (1989), for example, have argued strongly that neither psychology's focus on the individual, nor the particular construction of the individual which emerged, was the result of epistemological factors; rather, they were at least partly the result of an intense focus on the utility of the individual which accompanied industrialisation. As Rose points out, for a domain to be governable, we not only need a language in which to speak about it, we also need information about it. It was the mental sciences – psychology and psychiatry – which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, provided both the language and the means for the collection of information about people. And the questions to which scientists directed their attention reflected current social and political concerns. Which children would not benefit from education? Which men would not stand up to the rigours of war? Which workers would be most productive? Which indigents should be excused the workhouse on the grounds of insanity? Mental scientists did not reframe these questions by asking, for example, how we could develop an educational system which would be of some benefit to all children or why so many wars and so much loss of life seemed necessary? Instead, they constructed individuals who possessed important attributes in amounts not easily discernible to the naked eye and developed tests and diagnostic criteria to measure them. Howard (1985) has pointed out that if researchers hold certain models of humans as basic to their understandings of the meaning of their research, then they will accumulate evidence which appears to support these models. They will do this, at least partly, because they will cease to ask questions from outside these models. Thus, notions of the subject matter of psychology and of the nature of the individual come to be taken for granted, to be naturalised, when they are actually historically specific. The fact that the use of techniques for studying individuals, for identifying and measuring their attributes, and for examining the effects of external events on these attributes, have come to seem to be amongst the most important activities of psychology has happened only because we take for granted particular constructions of the individual and of their relationship to the social world.

The intense study of the individual, the construction of individuals as possessing attributes which can be studied without reference to a social context, and the use of a rhetoric of objectivity, function to protect psychology from ‘contamination’ by the social and ideological, and thus from accusations of bias. Applied to abortion, these ideas help to account both for psychology's neglect of a topic where the social, ideological, political and moral threaten constantly to intrude, and also for its ‘neutral’ construction of abortion primarily as a health issue, or as one amongst many potentially stressful procedures with objectively measurable effects on individuals who just happen to be women. In this book I shall move away from this traditional framework in order to place the topic of abortion and women's experience of it firmly within a social context. It is important that this is done, not only to provide a fuller account of psychology's relationship to the topic, but also because, whether or not we intend it, psychological research constructs the phenomena on which it focuses: it tells people how to think about themselves, about others and about particular experiences. And whether we intend it or not, research informs social policy and is linked in often subtle ways to social regulation. In using a wider framework than that traditionally adopted by psychology, I aim to make these processes highly visible and to provide an account which offers greater choice in constructions of abortion than is currently available in psychology. Two areas traditionally absent from psychological theories – gender and power – will be central to the discussions. Their relevance to abortion and the ways in which they will inform the arguments developed in the book will be briefly discussed in the next section.

ABORTION, GENDER AND POWER

Only women can have abortions, but access to abortion – or at least to legal abortion – is controlled largely by men. In Britain, for example, around 90 per cent of Members of Parliament, who develop abortion legislation, are male;² over 80 per cent of gynaecologists, who perform abortions, are male, as are around 75 per cent of general practitioners, who may be approached first by women seeking abortions. A participant in a 1984 debate in the Northern Irish Assembly on whether the 1967 British legislation should be extended to Northern Ireland, regretted that debates on abortion Very often take place when no women are present’ (NIALRA 1989: 26). In addition, Lipman-Blumen (1994) and Faludi (1992) have drawn attention to the fact that, at least in the US, the leaders of the anti-abortion movement are predominantly male. The implications of this gender imbalance for the development and implementation of legislation and for women's experience of abortion have been almost entirely neglected by psychological research, as if the gender relations implicit in abortion were simply an artefact of no theoretical or practical interest.

One way of thinking about the relationship of gender to abortion is through abortion's strong and obvious links with female sexuality and motherhood. Control of the procedure can therefore be seen as part of a larger pattern of control of female sexuality and reproduction. French, ...