One thing that I appreciate about the political left is that it often does a better job than the right of understanding how systems and culture shape personal choices. Conservatives, for instance, tend to see poverty largely as a result of poor life choices, and liberals tend to understand that factors such as systemic discrimination, inequality and lack of educational opportunities strongly contribute to economic insecurity. It’s not that personal choices don’t matter, but systemic realities cut off certain choices and make others far easier. The left generally understands that choice doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that external factors, including culture and law, shape people, the choices available to them and what they find moral, practical or even possible.
But when it comes to abortion, the left can speak of personal choice in overly simplistic ways. As we recall the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this weekend, it’s worth asking what kind of world this decision helped create. What is often unacknowledged is that the widespread availability and at times encouragement of abortion creates systemic realities where abortion becomes the easier choice for women who have unintended pregnancies — to the extent where these women can feel that it is their only choice.
Carrying a human life to term and either raising a child or placing a child with an adoptive family are, in all circumstances, arduous goods — moral, spiritual and social goods that also carry significant difficulty and risk. The choice to do something that is good but hard seems more or less possible to us because of what the culture around us values, celebrates, supports and finds acceptable.
Let me offer an example that is far less controversial than abortion. Within my short lifetime of four decades, there was a time when making the choice to recycle was nigh unto impossible. In the early ’80s, throughout my home state, Texas, only those fringy do-gooders who were very committed to the environmental movement went through the effort to separate trash, load it up and take it to a recycling plant.
Over the past few decades, we as a culture decided protecting the planet is a social good and a moral obligation — perhaps even a sacred duty — so we spent money, effort and energy to put systems into place that make recycling an easier choice. Now, with curbside recycling, I simply leave my empty yogurt containers and aluminum cans on the curb on Wednesday. Far more Americans recycle now than did when I was born, but a personal commitment to recycling didn’t magically sweep the nation one day. In order for more people to choose to recycle, they needed both cultural encouragement that doing so is as a valuable and moral act, and systems that helped ease the burden it imposed. The individual choice to recycle was made easier by what our society valued and committed itself to.
Carrying a child to term will never be easy (and is, of course, more difficult than recycling). But a culture deciding that all life — including life in the womb — is valuable and worthy of protection would create systemic realities that open up ethical and practical possibilities for women.
In the same way, a culture that embraces abortion on demand will end up, however unintentionally, incentivizing that choice. This has downstream consequences for women deciding whether to continue with a pregnancy.
In extreme situations, employers have demanded that women have an abortion or lose their job. But the pressure to abort is often more subtle. When I worked in campus ministry, I met young women who told me that their student insurance covered abortion but not maternity care. College students told USA Today that when they became pregnant unexpectedly, their student health centers did not offer them information on what to do if they wanted to continue with the pregnancy. Universities rarely offer on-campus housing for students with children.
These systemic realities have touched my own life twice. In our first years of marriage, my husband and I were broke and had to buy health insurance. We could not get a family plan because no one would insure him because of his autoimmune disorder, and I could not find an individual plan in my state that covered maternity care. Because of this, we delayed having children and worried that if I became pregnant unexpectedly, it would be especially burdensome financially.
A decade later, my husband and I sat in an examination room with a panicky doctor. I was 13 weeks pregnant and an ultrasound revealed extreme fetal abnormalities. The doctor told us the news and rushed us to a genetic specialist to get a second sonogram. “What is the rush?,” I asked through tears. She told me that we should find out as soon as possible if the baby had a disorder in case we wanted to end the pregnancy. We assured her that whatever the results, we would not end the pregnancy. In pedantic tones she repeatedly told us, “You may change your mind.” We felt pressure from the medical community to abort, which is common.
As a female priest, I have met with several women to talk about regretted abortions. These women often remember what their child’s due date would have been and keep track of how old their son or daughter would be, year by year. What strikes me when I hear their stories is that they speak so little about their own desires when they chose an abortion. They talk about boyfriends, husbands, fathers or mothers who did not offer support or outrightly pressured them to abort. They talk about how they couldn’t afford to have a baby. They talk about how they were afraid that they couldn’t finish school, how they felt panicked, ashamed and alone.
I know this is not every woman’s experience of abortion. The women who ask to meet with me tend to be ones who are grieving their past choices. Still, these women do not tell stories of feeling empowered to make their ideal decision. They describe feeling cornered.
Stories abound of women who say that having an abortion is what allowed them to go on to a successful career. But these stories tacitly acknowledge that abortion on demand has created a culture where the social status of women depends on us making one, and only one, choice when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Abortion is cast as the price of entry for women’s equality. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many European countries have far more restrictive abortion laws and lower abortion rates than the United States without curtailing the advancement of women. As Ross Douthat wrote in his Times column, “Is it really necessary to found equality for one group of human beings on legal violence toward another, entirely voiceless group?”
Instead of building the equality of women on our actual flourishing, we as a culture predicate gender equality on a technological intervention that denies what female bodies actually are and what they do.
“Rather than challenge workplace norms head-on,” wrote Erika Bachiochi in National Review, “the decades-long quest for unfettered abortion feeds into the model of the ideal male worker who is beholden to no one but his boss. If abortion is what enables women to participate in the workplace, then perhaps costly accommodations, flexible work schedules, and part-time-pay equity are not so necessary.”
Women feeling that they must extinguish life in their womb in order to be admitted into the world of success, career advancement and equality with men is a reality shaped more by sexual double standards and male-centric acquisitive capitalism than by valuing women’s choices, bodies and desires. This allows a still-patriarchal society to not invest in systems that make childbearing an easier choice: a more just work culture like Bachiochi suggests, but also paid parental leave, widespread availability of lactation rooms, better access to maternity care, affordable health care for children and government-subsidized child care.
Abortion is often seen as a needed safety net for poverty, but this leaves the root causes of poverty, especially female poverty, unaddressed. We do not have policies in place like a living wage or effective child support laws that help single mothers stay financially afloat.
Recent Gallup data shows that a majority of people (53 percent) who make under $40,000 per year identify as “pro-life” (as opposed to pro-choice). Increase in income level correlates with supporting abortion, with the wealthiest Americans least likely to identify as pro-life. Yet about half of women who get abortions live in poverty.
In an article in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Michelle Oberman, a Santa Clara University law school professor, writes, “What one learns from reckoning with the reasons women seek abortions is that poverty circumscribes the choices available to poor women.”
“What we learn from those who seek abortions,” she concludes, “is that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is not so much a choice as a response to the ways in which poverty inscribes itself onto our bodies.”
Unless we as a culture are committed to the arduous good of protecting all life, it is always easier and less costly (at least in terms of sheer dollars) to consign the poor to abortion, rather than find lasting solutions to poverty.
The anti-abortion movement is often accused of being “pro-life” only from conception until birth. I think this criticism can sometimes be overblown, particularly given the rise of the whole-life movement, but it is clearly true that the Republican Party often uses abortion as a political tool to win elections but does little to put policies in place or build a culture that supports women and children. It may care about protecting unborn lives but does not work to make facing an unplanned pregnancy or raising a child any easier.
At the same time, I believe that many who support abortion rights are genuinely committed to the idea of women’s free choice. They don’t want women to feel forced into an abortion or pregnant women to feel unsupported if they want to continue with a pregnancy. But abortion rights advocates often fail to reckon with how a widespread societal reliance on abortion can push women toward that choice and make the decision to keep a baby more difficult.
The left advocates crucial social policies like parental leave and affordable health care that help ease the burden of having children. Yet, the constant messaging that women need abortion to be successful tells young women facing an unexpected pregnancy that they cannot have a baby and still finish school, progress in a career and have a fulfilling life. I don’t see the same outrage from abortion rights advocates when college students don’t have access to on-campus family housing as I do at the idea that they won’t have access to an abortion at 18 weeks of pregnancy.
Framing the continuation of a pregnancy as sheerly an individual’s personal preference allows a woman’s sexual partner, family members and community to deny their responsibility to support a mother and her children. The fact that we as a culture don’t see protecting life as an absolute value encourages us to use abortion as a fallback mechanism for social ills, which gives employers and politicians (regardless of party) an excuse to not make maternal policies their most urgent priority.
When it comes to abortion, both the right and the left converge on an individualistic and reductive view of choice. This has fostered a culture where women who are facing an unexpected pregnancy too often feel left on their own. But to be empowered to make a more difficult choice, women who want to continue with a pregnancy need to feel that their sacrifices are seen, valued, applauded and supported in practical ways. They need advocates to help foster a society where women do not feel they need abortion for financial security, opportunity or equality.
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
