Roe v. Wade, Then and Now
An entire generation of women have now lived their reproductive lives in the era of Roe v. Wade; a girl who turned 13 in 1973, when the Supreme Court decision came down, is now 46. During those years, 35 million women have had abortions, notes the Rev. Debra W. Haffner, who runs a think tank called the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. "The majority of these women think this has been the right experience for them," she says. But these women "also have a lifelong memory of the experience. It's not a casual thing you did when you were 22. It's part who you are."
Most of those women -- most women, period -- have also had other experiences. They may have had babies, miscarriages, fertility problems. They may have gone around the world to adopt a child, white-knuckled their way through prenatal tests, raised sons and daughters who are now, in turn, hormone-fueled teenage accidents waiting to happen.
"When I was 20 and trained as a pregnancy counselor, I believed it when they told me it was a 'product of conceptus' in there," says Haffner, who is now 52 and has two children, 13 and 21. "It was startling for some women of our generation, when we had our wanted pregnancies, to develop a relationship with a fetus really early on. That experience is very different." That distinction is part of what Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice was contemplating in an essay in Conscience that drew press attention when it was published in late 2004. Abortion-rights activists should think about "the value of fetal life," she wrote, even while championing the right to end it. "Why should we allow this value to be owned by those opposed to abortion? Are we not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, of valuing life and respecting women's rights?"
Kissling and others point to the enormous changes in women's lives since the Court made abortion legal nationwide. In 1970, the average age of marriage for women was almost 21, and the average age when a woman had her first baby, just over 21. The pill had been widely available for only a decade. Divorce often meant a plunge into poverty; single mothers were seen as either morally deficient or dangerous. There was, of course, no Internet -- no sites like GirlMom.com, a "radically pro-choice" site for teenagers who abort or who decide to become parents, or I'mNotSorry.net, for women recounting their positive experiences with abortion. Lennart Nilsson's photos of fetuses floating in the amnion, sucking their thumbs, had been published, but they were not yet ubiquitous; people didn't name their babies before birth (and without prenatal testing didn't know whether they were expecting a Gerald or a Genevieve anyway).
The Personal Behind the Political
Yet amid all the changes, abortion rhetoric seemed to stay suspended in time -- coat hanger symbols, "Keep Your Laws Off My Body" buttons -- all of it conveying a single-minded defiance. "I remember going to the last big [pro-choice] march in Washington," in 2004, Johnston notes. "And it was just odd how all the slogans were the same. Something seemed to be strangely missing," she says: the experiences of women for whom abortion is not an abstract right but an urgent and often wrenching decision. "Every day I talk to people who have always been against abortion, who never imagined that it would happen to them, and who are having an abortion. Or I talk to people who are pro-choice, but who are unexpectedly freaked out by [having an abortion]. My patients are a microcosm of society."
Here are some interesting numbers:
- About half of all American women have had an unintended pregnancy by their 45th birthday; more than one-third of those had an abortion.
- More than 60 percent of abortions are done for women who already have children.
- Pregnancies among women over 40 are almost as likely to end in abortion as those among adolescents.
- Of women getting abortions, 27 percent say they're Catholic.
We've really been witnessing two kinds of abortion debate: The kind that typically plays out in political campaigns and the media, and the kind that millions of women have with themselves and their families when confronting an unwanted pregnancy. In politics, it's all black and white; "choice" and "empowerment" on one side, "murder" and "sin" on the other. In real life, every decision is a shade of gray; political slogans often feel empty or two-dimensional.
Charlotte Taft, a former director of a Dallas clinic who has wrestled with these complexities, says, "No woman ever had an abortion because it was a right. No one ever came into my office saying, 'Yay! I get to exercise my right today.'"
Why don't we hear leaders of pro-choice organizations, or politicians, talk like this? Because, in a nutshell, they're terrified. "It's interesting how the movement has reacted to women who raise any kind of ambivalence," Kissling says. "Often, those women are greeted with suspicion and anger. It's as if when we are not absolutely, firmly uncritical, we are giving ground to the enemy."
