Happy Abortions

Our Bodies in the Era of Choice

Erica Millar

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786991331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

'A provocative and important book that every pro-choice advocate should read.'
Sinéad Kennedy, Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment When it comes to abortion, today's liberal climate has produced a common sense that is both pro-choice and anti-abortion. The public are fed an unchanging version of what the abortion choice entails and how women experience it. While it would prove highly unpopular to insist that all pregnant women should carry their pregnancy to term, the idea that abortion could or should be a happy experience for women is virtually unspeakable. In this careful and intelligent work, Erica Millar shows how the emotions of abortion are constructed in sharp contrast to the emotional position occupied by motherhood – the unassailable placeholder for women's happiness. Through an exposition of the cultural and political forces that continue to influence the decisions women make about their pregnancies – forces that are synonymous with the rhetoric of choice – Millar argues for a radical reinterpretation of women's freedom.

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICS OF CHOICE

Abortion is sought as a drastic remedy, often in desperation and with distress, to an unwanted pregnancy … The Right to Life movement serves a valuable purpose raising public concern for the unborn, but without a balanced respect for the rights of others, [and] compassion for the desperate. (Claude Forell [1978], journalist for The Age, Melbourne)

In his weekly political column, entitled on this occasion ‘Abortion: Rights and Wrongs’, the Australian journalist Claude Forell summarised what was, at the time, a developing common sense on abortion. Forell ceded ideological terrain to the anti-abortion movement, using its language to describe the foetus as ‘the unborn’. He also framed the morality of abortion in gender-neutral terms, labelling abortion a ‘public’ issue, rather than one of particular relevance to women. Forell also, however, called for ‘compassion’ for the ‘desperate’ and distressed women forced to endure the ‘drastic remedy’ of abortion. In the pro-choice position Forell articulated, women did not have abortions willingly, but only in extraordinary circumstances, and abortion was a dramatic rather than routine or normal procedure. This was very different to the abortion politics of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), which viewed abortion as an act of self-determination, enabling women to escape the strictures of compulsory motherhood.

Forell’s comments came towards the end of a decade of significant worldwide change in the legal and cultural regulation of abortion. In the mid-1960s through the 1970s, abortion began to be discussed publically on a scale never before witnessed, and with these public articulations came new, and in-creasingly stylised, modes of representing abortion, which increasingly circumscribed the meanings ascribed to abortion and the women who had them. Several transnational abortion activist campaigns emerged or re-energised during this period; their political slogans reverberated across the globe, carrying divergent, sometimes antagonistic, messages about abortion. Popular slogans included: ‘Abortion—a right; Contraception—a responsibility’; ‘Abortion is a woman’s right’; and ‘Abortion: A Choice to Kill’. This chapter begins by examining how three large campaigns framed the issue of abortion and the women who had them: the civil liberties arguments for abortion forwarded by the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), the gender politics of WLM’s abortion campaign, and the foetal-rights agenda of Right to Life (RTL).1 I identify the cultural narratives and characterisations (Condit 1990: 13–14) that drove these three activist movements before examining their respective influence on the formal governing of abortion.

I argue that the choice of abortion was increasingly normalised during the 1970s. By the end of the decade, politicians and the general public largely accepted that women should have the choice of abortion in many instances, and abortion was widely available, virtually (if not lawfully) on request, at least in major metropolitan areas. The incorporation of the language of choice into public discourse on abortion coincided and did not conflict, however, with a morality that understood abortion to singularly entail the cessation of human life. Abortion was integrated into the discursive framing of pregnancy decision-making as an exceptional choice, and one absented from the radical gender politics of the WLM. The framing of abortion as an exceptional choice enabled, as Celeste Condit has argued, abortion to be constructed as a ‘problem without engaging the powerful value sets that surrounded it’; primary amongst these value sets were ideologies about sex and motherhood which, for nearly a century prior to this time, ‘had coded “abortion” as a subject that should not be articulated’ (1990: 23–24). The exceptionality of abortion recuperated abortion to the trope of motherhood; with motherhood restated as the norm for women generally, and pregnant women most acutely, abortion gained legitimacy, somewhat paradoxically, through its coding as a deviant choice. As we will see in further chapters, the incorporation of the ‘awfulisation’ of abortion into an ostensibly ‘pro-choice’ framework lay the groundwork for a contemporary paradox, where the abortion choices of women are simultaneously accepted as necessary and admonished as morally dubious (Pollitt 2014).

The organising principle of this chapter is choice rather than, as with subsequent chapters, particular emotions. While, as other chapters detail, emotions saturate abortion politics today, anti- and pro-abortion discourses of the 1970s rarely cited women’s experiences of abortion as a rationale for their political positions; following this, abortion politics were not, as a rule, articulated alongside any particular emotional framework. I do, however, highlight an emotional register that was important to each of the examined movements and continues to resonate within abortion activism today. This will start us thinking about how particular emotions can inflect or bend the meaning of abortion choice and represent the women who have abortions in particular ways.

THE CHOICE OF ILLEGAL ABORTION

By the reforms at the turn of the 1970s, abortion had only been illegal for about one hundred years in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The official morality coded in the law never predominated in the larger population, however, where there existed, in US historian Leslie Reagan’s words, an ‘unarticulated, alternative, popular morality, which supported women who had abortions’ (1997: 6—for contexts other than the USA, see Brookes 1988; Finch and Stratton 1988; McCulloch 2013: 146; McLaren and McLaren 1997: 32–44). Abortion was an ‘open secret’ that was widely practiced in underground medical practices or female networks of provision; yet it was rarely prosecuted and seldom spoken about in public forums, largely because it was illegal, and partly because it was excised from the public domain, relegated instead to the private world of women. The reluctance to talk about abortion in public forums also related to a taboo on dis-cussing issues relating to sex and the strong attachment of women’s sexuality to reproduction. Women were expected to remain celibate until marriage and then dedicate married life to bearing and raising children. Against this normative life trajectory, women who had abortions were frequently stereotyped as sexually immoral, hedonistic, and selfish, refusing their maternal instinct as well as their duty to reproduce citizens for the nation (Chapter 5). The women who received sympathy in public texts (such as popular fiction) were considered to be victims of male licentiousness or poverty. If they were single, depictions of their vulnerability to male sexual coercion could provide some excuse for their transgression; if married with several children, their poverty could provide a rationale for not wanting further children (Baird 1998b; Moore 1996, 2001).

Because cultural understandings of abortion were enmeshed with norms pertaining to femininity and sex, abortion activism entailed normative claims across these domains. The abortion politics of early reformers in the UK and other contexts, including Canada and the USA, were embedded in a broader gender politics, which celebrated women’s sexuality and critiqued the regime of compulsory motherhood (Brookes 1988: 83, 121; McLaren and McLaren 1997: 69, 75; Roberts 1997: 56). The Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in the UK, for example, was established in 1936 by radical women who fought for abortion law reform on the grounds that it was ‘the right of every woman … to decide what should happen to her body’ (cited in Brookes 1988: 95).

The Thalidomide crisis of the early 1960s, which affected much of the Western world, reinvigorated movements for abortion law reform. The association of the sedative, used to treat morning sickness amongst other conditions, with birth defects reinvigorated abortion activism in many countries, lending abortion an air of respectability because, in part, it was recognised that middle-class, married women sometimes terminated wanted pregnancies. Abortion was thereby removed from its association with sexual immorality and placed within the domain of public health (Condit 1990: 28–31; Hindell and Simms 1971: 111–112; Nelson 2003: 11–12).

Within this context, ALRA dampened its radical, woman-centred approach to emphasise instead the deleterious public health impact of illegal abortions, the important role medical doctors played in offering safe abortions and the class-based inequities of access to safe, medically performed abortions. The framing of abortion as a medical issue intensified when the British Medical Association officially supported law reform on the grounds that the law should not interfere with a medical doctor’s judgement about a medical decision and procedure (Brookes 1988: 154–155). The public health approach to abortion, which permitted doctors to perform abortions for reasons of psychological and physical health, was also the dominant strand of activism in the USA, embedded in the American Law Institute’s model for law reform (Reagan 1997: 221), as well as in Australia (Petersen 1993), Canada (Tatalovich 1997: 31–34) and New Zealand (Leslie 2010).

The arguments leading to law reform at the turn of the 1970s were not premised on the idea that abortion was a social good or routine experience. Reformers argued instead that abortion was an inevitable consequence of a range of factors, including poverty and inadequate access to effective contraceptive devices. Rather than being unregulated and dangerous, campaigners argued that abortions should be safe and monitored by medical doctors (Gregory 2005: 132–137). These campaigns and their consequent reforms led to an intense politicisation of abortion, where, for the first time, a broad range of social actors—including politicians, journalists, churchmen, activists and doctors—were granted an enhanced capacity to speak openly about the practice. With this public articulation came new ways of thinking about abortion. The rest of this chapter examines the prominent narratives and character types to emerge during in this era.

FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE

A prominent argument in support of liberal abortion legislation focused not on the women who needed abortions so much as the moral status of foetal life. In Australia, this position was articulated most strongly by ALRA, which emerged in several states following the Abortion Act 1967 (UK) and continued to campaign for further reforms after many states changed their laws at the turn of the 1970s.

Like strands of abortion activism elsewhere (Nelson 2013: 12; Hindell and Simms 1971), ALRA drew on liberal political philosophy to argue that legal prohibitions on abortion represented an unwarranted incursion of the state into the individual consciences of its citizens. ALRA (1970c) framed abortion as a moral issue relating to foetal life—‘[t]he most complex and emotive aspect of the abortion reform debate’; it contested claims that the foetus was objectively knowable, by religious tenet or scientific fact, arguing instead that one’s ‘personal values and beliefs’ determined their opinion regarding foetal life. Abortion morality was therefore variable and subjective, and restrictive abortion laws unjustly imposed a minority, Catholic morality onto the entire population. ALRA initially emphasised the consciences of doctors, whose medical judgement was obstructed in laws that set guidelines as to when abortions could be performed. From 1972, the association began placing equal emphasis on women’s consciences and changed its name from the Abortion Law Reform Association to the Abortion Law Repeal Association to reflect its new campaign for the complete repeal of statute laws criminalising abortion (ALRA 1972a).

A striking aspect of ALRA’s politics was its depiction of abortion as ‘unpleasant’ (McMichael 1972b), and the recurring idea that, in the words of one of the association’s presidents, ‘[n]o-one actually likes the idea of terminating pregnancies’ because of ‘a natural respect for life in any form’ (McMichael 1972a: 5). As noted above, abortion law reform had not been achieved in Australia, or elsewhere, through presenting abortion as a social or moral good. Reformers argued instead that regulated medical abortion presented the better alternative to illegal, unregulated ‘backyard’ operations. ALRA continued to rationalise abortion by presenting it on a sliding scale of desirable options. Abortion, it argued, was more desirable than the birth of unwanted children—‘every child should be a wanted child’, so a leading slogan exclaimed. The association reproduced scientific studies demonstrating that unwanted children experienced greater levels of emotional and physical abuse than wanted children and frequently became ‘social misfits’, ‘inadequate parents’ and ‘deprived and inadequate citizens’ (ALRA 1970b; 1970d; 1970c). Support for abortion on the basis of the poor quality of children born from unwanted pregnancies was the closest ALRA came to advocating for abortion on eugenic grounds, a rationale that plagued the transnational birth control movement through the first half of the twentieth century (Ziegler 2013). Although more desirable than the birth of unwanted children or unsafe ‘backyard’ operations, ALRA asserted that abortion was less desirable than other modes of contraception and placed a moral obligation on women to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Its leading slogan in the early 1970s was ‘Abortion—a right; Contraception—a responsibility’. This slogan differentiated abortion from other modes of contraception and clearly presented abortion as the ‘second best’ (McMichael 1972a) method of birth control and ‘the last resort’ (ALRA 1972b) after other contraceptives had failed. The framing of abortion as an issue involving the status of foetal life, which s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. An Emotional Choice
• Chapter 1. The Politics of Choice
• Chapter 2. Happy Choices
• Chapter 3. The Grief of Choice
• Chapter 4. Shameful Choices
• Chapter 5. The Nation's Choice?
• Conclusion: A Viable Abortion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Zed End Papers