That's a bizarre article whose bizarreness is shaped and hidden by the completely toxic political situation in this country. Because we're dealing with nutcase religious fundamentalists on the other side, we now can't admit that maybe, just maybe, ending a potential human life has just a tiny bit more moral weight than having a tooth pulled.
The first rule of Abortion Club is you don't talk about Abortion Club.
maybe, just maybe, ending a potential human life has just a tiny bit more moral weight than having a tooth pulled
Emphasis on the maybe. The entire point is that it doesn't feel that way for a lot of women.
1: Somewhat agree, but the challenges for progressives to resist unilaterally disarming during the "Which side are you on?" phase of political issues is hardly limited to abortion.
All your reasonable philosophy is target for you're enemies!
I'm not disagreeing that it can be 100% and clearly the right decision, and in that sense not difficult at all. And I understand that politically you can't concede anything. But, just among us folks, aborting a fetus isn't the same as taking out the trash, or whatever inappropriate analogy you'd prefer.
Given how many fertilized eggs the body ends up getting rid of on its own (how many? pretty impossible to measure, but some not-negligible percentage), I'm just not sold on the necessity of it being that big of a thing. I'll grant that the potential of being a human life makes it different that getting your tooth / mole / appendix removed, but I'm not willing to say the difference is one of moral weight.
I have to say that getting pregnant has made me feel much more pro-choice than ever: those first few weeks (of a very wanted pregnancy!) didn't feel like there were two people in the equation; it really feels like a potential rather than an actual person. A higher-than-before likelihood that another person will eventually exist.
As for controversial fb posts, I have a fb friend who has surprised me by posting a string of pro-Israel articles, and while I haven't commented (because a public flame-up with a former parishioner seems suboptimal), my opinion of them has dropped quite a bit. FB is such a weird medium for interaction.
I'm with Blume. I can picture tons of situations where getting rid of a fertilized egg would be just about the same as getting rid of the unfertilized egg, which women do every single month, and many women are quite relieved to get their period.
"Difficult" is covering two different things here:
There's 'hard to evaluate the outcomes of the available choices' because they are nearly equivalent or have such different trade-offs that they can't be measured against each other or because there's a lot of uncertainty in some of the outcomes.
There is also 'being sad afterwards because there were no only-good choices available'.
Getting an abortion may be neither, either or both to the decider, but saying it is difficult doesn't say which difficulty a pregnant person faces.
That does [as per 7.1] seem like one of those situations where the felt impact on the woman is likely to be highly sensitive to how far along the pregnancy is.
Yeah, no one every frames it as win-win.
Someone said it better than I could: what Blume said.
I only sympathize with the language because for me it would be a very difficult decision. I've had two major pregnancy scares, once at 18 and once at like 25, and in the latter case I was drinking really heavily and on a lot of dope. both times I was saved by the magic of super-early miscarriage, but I was going to find it pretty fucking hard to impossible to get an abortion. I was on long-term relationships with men--boys really? I loved a lot, and in both cases I walked around looking at every flower in the margin of a sidewalk, or cloud over a marsh, or pattern of green-black oaks on the gold hills of california and thinking: my baby will never see this. our baby will never see this. and when my husband and I talked about finding out about our wanted baby possibly having down's syndrome, he said 'obviously we'd abort' and my heart just sank like a stone. obviously? this baby we were trying to have on purpose?
BUT I know not every woman feels this way, and they shouldn't be made to if they don't, and conceding the moral high ground to st. saletan of the wringing hands is counter-productive (and also fuck him with a piece of cedar driftwood.) OTOH given that so many women do feel this way perhaps there is some rhetorical benefit to pro-choice organization's referring to the choice as difficult? the women who had unproblematic, fine abortions because it would fuck up heir life generally don't tell you unless you know them well, so while I have the sense that the majority of abortion-getters find it a difficult choice, this may be a manufactured impression.
when my husband and I talked about finding out about our wanted baby possibly having down's syndrome, he said 'obviously we'd abort' and my heart just sank like a stone. obviously? this baby we were trying to have on purpose?
This is completely different, of course - when the pregnancy is desired.
so while I have the sense that the majority of abortion-getters find it a difficult choice, this may be a manufactured impression.
And the article says that upwards of 80% of women who get abortions are very confident in their decision. Obviously "very confident" is not the opposite of "difficult" but it's still informative.
If the difficulty is post-decision sadness (not saying it would be), then the discussion is kinda dumb, because the only-good option is magically not-have-gotten-pregnant-in-the-first-place. If you need a magic option to not be sad, then your circumstances suck, but the decision is not the source of the sadness.
I think the relief trumps the sadness for many, many women.
Megan's point is what I was getting at: there are two sense of difficult, but the link only deals with one, because to concede the other kind of difficulty is giving an inch to the abortion foes.
The article is saying that often abortion is not a difficult decision in any sense of the word. Easy to conclude, no sadness, please get this fucking invasive thing out of me ASAP thank you.
Right, but that's just an attempt to promulgate dogma. It is difficult for plenty of people, and that's quite understandable.
My impression is that framing abortion as a universally "difficult choice" is a bit like framing birth control as something a lot of women use to treat acne, endometriosis, etc: this is of course true for some people, but it hides/ignores the fact that many women don't find it a difficult decision/most women take bc because they don't want to get pregnant. (Or, say, explaining that we should be nice to lgbt folk because "it's not a choice" - so what if it IS a choice?) Just because a particular line of argumentation makes it easier or more palatable to make a political point doesn't mean it's necessarily the right drum to beat all the time.
Please get this fucking invasive thing out of me ASAP thank you.
We just linked the clip from V a couple threads ago.
20: Yeah, I don't agree. There seems to be no narrative that abortion can be emotionally easy-peasy and a relief. It's not acknowledged as a common path (among many).
Aside from the egregious analogy violations in 21, I agree with it.
I love, love, love the article. It is exactly what my problem is with NARAL and PP. Stop apologizing.
The woman gets to decide whether it is difficult or not. I know a lot of women for whom it wasn't difficult.
(Also I see what you did in 7. Formal congratulations!! When are you due?)
As for the analogies in 21, I left them in because I think it's not just about analogies: these are all connected issues, and the "progressive" side seems to fall into a similar trap each time of opting for a more palatable/middle-of-the-road argument. And in each case, the chosen argument is at least partially true: there are many women for whom abortion is a difficult choice, etc. But by locking ourselves into this "tidier" argument, we ignore a wide variety of cases where this is not true, and that ends up weakening our case.
Right, but that's just an attempt to promulgate dogma. It is difficult for plenty of people, and that's quite understandable.
I think you're getting the point of the article backwards. No one is saying that all women sail through their abortions without a second thought. The point is that the prevailing narratives don't acknowledge that any women do. (As heebie pointed out already in 23.)
My sense is that there is a narative in the pro-life movement that there are some women for whom abortion is easy-peasy and non-problematic and they have them routinely because they are too impulsive and thoughtless to use birth control regularly. And, of course, those women are moral monsters.
And its my sense that the "difficult decision" narrative promoted by the pro-choice movement is designed to fight against that story.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article on this exact subject, but I can't look for a reference. If it were in the 80s it'd be collected in The Worst Years Of Our Lives
Is is possible the phrase might originally have been can be a difficult... and got flattened to is?
I don't know if it's practical, or ever was, to make that distinction, but it seems it would be useful for some if it could.
just maybe, ending a potential human life has just a tiny bit more moral weight than having a tooth pulled.
But that tooth is also full of cells that are "potential human life" - with the full human genetic code. We are now in the age of Dolly the Sheep and all that.
And indeed, that pulled tooth has many more individuals in it than a blastocyst. Yet the government, quite sensibly, has decided that we aren't going to try to save each of those individuals.
Nobody of any consequence cares about all of the potential human lives that are destroyed by in vitro fertilization. There's a reason for this.
But, just among us folks, aborting a fetus isn't the same as taking out the trash, or whatever inappropriate analogy you'd prefer.
Sure, the consequences of aborting a late-term fetus must be more significant, if only because everybody says so. That certainly isn't contradicted in any way by the linked article - except to the extent that the article isn't about that topic.
Not every article on abortion has to be about that topic - which is more or less the point of the article.
will, of course, gets it right:
The woman gets to decide whether it is difficult or not.
Congrats, parodie.
I agree with heebie's 23 & will's 25.2. I think assuming it always is a difficult decision is a rhetorical concession that works reasonably well, but I suspect that most women who have an abortion make the decision pretty quickly, have the procedure, and move on to the rest of their lives.
Of course the most difficult part of an abortion decision for many women is the knowledge that they will have to navigate the obstacles and potential shaming of the intolerant. (License plate tracking article at TPM today.)
"The first rule of Abortion Club is you don't talk about Abortion Club."
This is certainly the case here in Northwest Arkansas, and (IMO) this creates part of the problem.
Y'all may remember the fraught class I had last year, teaching Women's Lit, when the Pro-Life [Pro-Forced-Birth] student gave her sweet little presentation on how wicked both contraception and abortion were, AND THEN it developed that a couple of women in the class had actually had abortions.
It had never occurred to this innocent young woman that the other women around her, women she spoke to and knew were decent women (not whores and demons and godless heathens) could have had abortions. It didn't occur to her because women don't talk about their abortions -- at least not here, in this town, in this culture.
To co-opt a metaphor, maybe we should come out of the closet on this one.
I'm with Heebie and the rest on this. Sure, abortion can be a difficult decision. But the standard public framing is that it is necessarily a difficult decision, and that is nonsense, and erases the experience of women like me for whom it wasn't. And we're either a majority or a very sizable minority.
I'd draw a sharp distinction between difficult decision and difficult experience, also. I never had a moment of doubt about what I was going to do -- the decision was easy. The experience had moments of sadness and of the kind of stupid quasi-guilt you feel when you're doing something that many, many people think is a bad thing to do, even if they're wrong. But the experience being kind of emotional didn't make the decision even a little difficult.
Agreed with 36 and others above.
I love how the same people who claim that women suffer so much after an abortion are the same people trying to shame those same women.
I am slightly obnoxious. So, the other day at a farmer's market, a Crisis Pregnancy Center had a booth with signs about how they counseling women on all of the options. I might have been less than kind in pointing out their lies. F them and their shame and bad treatment of pregnant women.
IF MEN COULD GET PREGNANT, ABORTION WOULD BE A SACRAMENT.
"ending a potential human life has just a tiny bit more moral weight than having a tooth pulled"
Every time you use a condom you're ending a potential human life.
The experience had moments of sadness and of the kind of stupid quasi-guilt you feel when you're doing something that many, many people think is a bad thing to do, even if they're wrong.
This was my experience with the termination of my then-girlfriend's pregnancy. Neither one of us was ready, it would have been a disaster for both of us and the kid (we were only marginally compatible but stayed together in large part because the sexual connection was off the hook - not exactly the basis for a great parenting setup).
Every time you don't reply on OK Cupid you're ending a potential human life.
OPINIONATED GLORIA STEINEM
Is there any other kind?
Not just one! Countless generations of human lives. An exponential abortion.
An exponential abortion.
Why do I suspect that's your band name? (Also, to Eggplant and Witt and NickS, the red panda we saw in DC died recently, but leaves behind three presumably adorable baby red pandas.)
36: they've been running a campaign in London on this subject - lots of ads saying "one in three women has an abortion at some point in her life, so chances are you know quite a few women who have had one" or words to that effect. (they=Marie Stopes, IIRC)
I found the Ehrenreich piece I mentioned above last night. It was in The Worst Years Of Our Lives under the title Their Dilemma and Mine, originally appeared under that title in the NYT in 1985, about 30 years ago. Makes all the same points as the OP. It may be in the NYT archives but I won't be searching for a link.
Both the title of the piece, with its Podhoretzian echoes, and the title of the collection, which references a great movie from the 40s which was remarkably frank for its day in confronting inter alia the gender conflicts of WWII and after, would be considered obsolete or obscure cultural references today but wouldn't have been then.
Abortion can be a difficult decision in a practical sense. It's a medical procedure that goes from very easy to fairly difficult to generally-illegal to impossible in eight-ish months. That sounds like a lot of time to schedule things in, but if you didn't decide on the abortion right away, you might have two weeks of vacation planned, and then it's a holiday so the doctor isn't available, you might be into the "fairly difficult" stage. That might lengthen recovery time, which means more time off work...
But regardless, I agree with the OP and the article overall - just because abortion can be a difficult decision in some sense, doesn't mean it is a difficult decision in the moralizing, slut-shaming sense. I bring up the practical concern partly just to nitpick, and partly as an argument for better regulations of medical leave or whatever. But it's what comes to mind on this subject.
What Heebie, the OP, and opinionated Gloria Steinem said. (That Steinem essay still rocks)
My sister (hardly the only woman I know whose had an abortion, but the one to whom I'm closest) had an abortion in her late teens. The only difficulty then, or now, she experienced was that the only clinic within bus-rides of her (no car, no money) was closed due to threats the first *two* times she went, and the third she had a fever so it had to be rescheduled, all of which then meant endangering her already sucky job (b/c exceeding 'sick days') and a more medically time-consuming and tricky procedure. She absolutely made the right decision, with no hint of sadness, and good for her. Now, many years later, she is the parent of beloved child, in economically stable circumstances, employed doing something she loves and that enormously benefits the world (involves helping at risk teenagers). Fuck anyone who says or implies that the decision to have an abortion should have been, in any way, a difficult one for her.