wrr: women's reproductive freedom

The defeat in Oregon of Measure 43, which would have required parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion, and the repeal in South Dakota of the law allowing for abortion only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, both mark modest defeats for those opposed to women’s reproductive freedom. But in the campaigns around these measures, the rhetoric of anti-choice advocates has increasingly adopted the argument that abortion should be banned because it harms women.

Like the groups trying to suppress multicultural education in the name of academic freedom, or to disrupt the teaching of evolution in the name of scientific debate, many anti-choice advocates have been appropriating the language of their more progressive opponents.

We can see some of this in the career of Eric Keroack, recently appointed by George W. Bush to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, a position that oversees a number of Health and Human Services programs, including the Office of Family Planning.

Until recently, Keroack was medical director for a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers” called A Woman’s Concern, which use a variety of techniques, including deception, to pressure pregnant women to continue their pregnancies, avoid contraception, and remain abstinent until marriage. His career has been dissected and his arguments refuted on the website talk2action.org, as well as a number of other venues.

For instance, the idea that it’s concern for women that’s expresessed by A Woman’s Concern when they try to encourage women to continue unwanted pregnancies is refuted by the American Psychological Association’s statement that

research shows that the ability of women to make decisions about their own childbearing (including timing) is a necessary condition for their health and mental health, as well as for their families. Abortion is a safe medical procedure that carries relatively few physical or psychological risks and that yields positive outcomes when the alternative is unwanted pregnancy.

In an article in the American Prospect, reposted on AlterNet, Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain have noted that all of that evidence and argument was rejected by the South Dakota legislature and the document on which they based their decision,

a 70-page set of findings contained in the “Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion” -- by far the most comprehensive government account of the arguments and evidence for protecting women from abortion.

South Dakota’s official endorsement of these arguments gives them more validity than ever and virtually assures that they will be employed to justify abortion restrictions across the nation.

The task force’s report … argued that the state needed a ban because of the epidemic overriding pressures on women to abort -- from a family member, a husband or boyfriend, or an abortion clinic -- that make extra protection from abortion necessary. Finally, to make credible its claims about women’s health and women’s choices, the task force made repeated claims about women’s nature. It asserted that women would never freely choose an abortion -- even absent outside pressures -- because doing so would violate “the mother’s fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child.” The task force took as a statement of biological and psychological fact that a mother’s connection to her unborn baby was more authentic than her own statement of desire not to be pregnant. These gender-role convictions are at the heart of the movement’s claim that the nation must now combat an epidemic of dangerous and coerced abortions.

The legislature also heard testimony from women who said that their experiences of legal abortion had caused them psychological trauma.

The task force argues that abortion causes symptoms of what it calls Post-Abortion Syndrome (or PAS) because abortion violates women’s nature: “It is simply unrealistic to expect that a pregnant mother is capable of being involved in the termination of the life of her own child without risk of suffering significant psychological trauma and distress. To do so is beyond the normal, natural, and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.”

In July, Democratic Congressman Henry A. Waxman released a report on the “False and Misleading Health Information provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers.” These anti-abortion and “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), according to a March report in The Washington Post based on a review of federal records, received more than $60 million in federal funds between 2001 and 2005 and represent a small fraction of the more than 3,000 centers in North America. According to Waxman’s report, the centers provided “false and misleading” information about a link between abortion and breast cancer, the effect of abortion on future fertility, and the mental-health effects of abortion. Indeed, Waxman’s report details the major government and professional studies that discredit PAS.

Which is why the stories of women are so important. What the PAS movement lacks in scientific credibility, it makes up for with dramatic and often touching stories of individual women who feel it is legal abortion that allowed them to be coerced into giving up pregnancies they wanted to continue. Crisis Pregnancy Centers (or CPCs) help women understand that feelings of loss and self-destructive conduct can be traced to unacknowledged guilt over past abortions. In offering suffering women this relief, the CPCs produce meaning. In the process, abortion comes to symbolize women’s disempowerment -- and its prohibition promises women healing, protection, maternal recognition, and freedom.

The predicament of women who grieve their abortions raises questions about the counseling and social supports available to women facing unintended pregnancies.

But criminalizing abortion is not a response. It would not only force motherhood on women who would choose to terminate their pregnancy under any conditions, but it would do nothing to

address the needs of women who seek an abortion because they lacked contraception or were raped or are living in an abusive relationship, or will have to drop out of work or school to raise a child alone, or are stretched so thin that they cannot emotionally or financially provide for their other children.

There is a cautionary message in all this, as well, to supporters of choice … who in recent years have embraced a vocabulary of grief around abortion. There is an ocean of difference between “safe, legal, and rare,” as Bill Clinton put it, and criminal, as in South Dakota. But it is plain that the [liberal] emphasis on abortion-as-tragedy will feed right into the woman-protective frame unless the pro-choice camp anticipates its opponents’ arguments and grounds the case for abortion rights in ... a broader agenda of progressive family values.

But beyond the claims of Siegel and Blustain, progressives might also want to clarify the real causes of women’s disempowerment, and call again for the real conditions of our freedom.