Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood

...In fact, early in the book Luker points out Commonweal: 20 that the civic consensus on abortion prior to the sixties rested on false assumptions about what "everybody" believed about the fetus...

...There is room here for a few courageous politicians to focus our political attention on a consensus that // January 1985: 21 would begin to reduce the number of abortions...

...The stay-at-home mom is becoming a rare breed...

...But a very different movement may be taking shape, as last summer's pro-life convention in Kansas City tended to confirm: the pro-life agenda has in significant ways been incorporated into the political program of Protestant fundamentalists and rightwing politicians, both groups that diverge from grass-roots pro-lifers in significant ways...

...These conditions included a broad definition of the mother's health and fetal indications (such as the deforming effects of Rubella...

...One is that neither pro-life nor pro-choice activists represent the views of most Americans on the issue of abortion: most Americans (including Catholics) think at least some abortions should be legal and medically available, but there is no majority agreement on what constitutes a justifiable reason for abortion, except rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother...

...Present pro-life activists may not have a generation to follow them...

...Nor are there any judgments, even implicit ones, about who's right and who's wrong among the 212 California pro-life and pro-choice activists interviewed for this book...

...most pro-choice activists were college graduates, and 37 percent had post-graduate training...

...That is a bit of a surprise, since the book does not pretend to offer a political analysis, except in a final chapter discussing the future of the abortion debate...

...Family income is lower for pro-life activists than for prochoice — only partly a function of the fact that pro-choice activists are far more likely to work outside their homes than their pro-life counterparts...

...To prolife activists abortion "is a referendum on the place and meaning of motherhood...

...Margaret O'Brien Steiafels PERHAPS better than any other book, Kristen Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood illuminates the conundrum that the abortion issue has raised in American politics...

...Though I have strayed from Luker's argument, the spirit of her book and her own analysis in the final chapter point to some important lessons for everyone in this debate...

...Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment" formulation of a consistent ethic of life is one way in which to begin to rethink the question...

...reading a newspaper on January 23, 1973, was horrified as she began to comprehend (he implications of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that removed most legal restrictions on abortion...

...others,non-believers, Jews, and some Protestants, tended to assume that everyone shared their view that the question of humanncss and therefore full protection was ambiguous and certainly not an absolute when it came to the mother's health and well-being...

...Each view, as Luker's social profiles show, is accompanied by specific educational, cultural, social, religious, and economic characteristics...

...State legislatures were asked —Luker presents the case of California in depth —to clarify and enlarge the conditions for which physicians might legally perform abortions...

...The medical profession, unable to resolve under professional rubrics the obvious disparities between legal limits and the actual practice of many physicians who performed abortions for an increasingly broad number of indications, began a quiet effort to "reform" abortion law...

...it may mean that a long-term process of negotiating some limits on abortion (time, reasons, funding) could be initiated by liberals along with a tacit recognition among pro-life stalwarts that in this area law is an exceedingly blunt instrument for controlling behavior...

...Probably not...

...The social profiles Luker creates out of these interviews do go a long way, however, to explain (he passions (hat feed the abortion debate...

...This history provides background for Luker's analysis of the circumstances that reopened the question in the 1950s and 1960s...

...Pro-life activists are disproportionately Catholic...

...If this once was a way for Catholics to avoid the abortion issue, it is now quite clearly a mistake from which they must honestly take their distance...

...Interestingly, Luker's sample of pro-choice activists were also troubled by this issue, partly because they regard abortion as a step to be taken in extremis, and not as a routine method of birth control...

...One of the shocks of Roe v. Wade was that people found out that there was not an agreement on this central question...

...Their appropriation of the standard liberal view, "while personally opposed to abortion, 1 will not impose my views on others," has come to sound fairly hollow...

...Other means — social, educational, cultural, and moral — will have to be developed so that a pro-life decision becomes a willingly chosen one by more women in our society...

...To pro-choice activists abortion is a means of ensuring control of child-bearing so as to allow women the same freedom as men to control and plan their lives...

...New coalitions may be possible with other non-Catholic liberals troubled by the seemingly casual nature of many abortion decisions and the growing number of women who have repeat abortions...

...prochoice activists tend to claim no religion or to consider themselves vaguely Protestant (however, 20 percent said they were raised Catholics, 42 percent Protestant, and 15 percent Jewish...

...Most Catholics tended to assume that everyone shared their view that the fetus was a human being deserving of full protection...

...Not surprisingly these contrasting views also color attitudes and expectations about husbands, sex, marriage, contraception, and gender role expectations...

...In their judgment abortion degrades the idea of motherhood and the social value of mothering...

...Are prolife activists, and the grass-roots movement they founded, an endangered species...

...The book's scrupulous fairness must be unique for writing on this topic...

...I think Luker avoids that danger by scrupulously setting forth and taking seriously the moral, philosophical, and religious views people say they hold on this issue, and by carefully attending to the differing views people have on the moral standing of the fetus — what constitutes protectable human life...

...In this sample 60 percent of pro-life activists finished college...

...she provides a model for any group that wants to begin settling this issue — a settlement that will satisfy neither group of activists, but may actually begin to deal with realistic policy options for resolving a tragedy whose origins lie as much in sociological, cultural, and sexist practices as in moral confusion and obfuscalion...

...It is a punlc why the Democratic party can't seem to absorb that fact...

...Motherhood is not unimportant to pro-choice activists, but it is only one of the roles that they see themselves filling in the course of their lives...

...Though Luker's sample is drawn from California, she argues on the basis of additional sampling she did elsewhere and of work done by others that these contrasting characteristics are not unrepresentative of pro-life, pro-choice activists throughout the country...

...Pro-life activists tend to have larger families...

...As Luker shows, the force of that political passion is fed not simply by a public policy allowing abortion-on-demand and by the disagreement over the moral status of the fetus, but also by the way that abortion has called into question the social importance of motherhood...

...The second lesson Luker offers is her impressive cmpathic powers and the ability to convey with deep sympathy the views of radically opposed groups...

...For pro-life activists motherhood is the most important role a woman can have, so much so that they think that "any woman who cannot commit herself fully to it should avoid it entirely...

...This does not mean that there is likely to be any rush to support a constitutional ban on abortions...

...Docs that mean the end of the pro-life movement...

...Luker, a sociologist at the University of California, begins by providing a richly detailed description of the historical circumstances that have formed and forced the terms of the debate...

...fewer and fewer families can afford to have a non-incomc-producing wife at home...

...Perhaps as a result of this past summer's imbroglio between Governor Mario Cuomo and Archbishop John O'Connor, liberal and left Catholics may have the opportunity to work at a new political formulation...

...But as wives, mothers, and full-time participants in the labor market, they have far less time to devote to "voluntary activities...

...In fact, prochoice activists in Luker's sample are significantly less active in their "cause" then their pro-life counterparts, in pan, of course, because their views are already embodied in the law...

...Luker's social profiles do raise a perplexing question, however...

...Single-parent and two-income families arc becoming the norm in our society...

...More permissive laws in New York and California (where the modified reform bill was signed by then-Governor Reagan), were barely in place when the 1973 Supreme Court decision overturned the tightly balanced efforts of abortion reformers to write laws that provided specific strictures while permitting relatively easy access to early abortions...

...The pro-life agenda seems to have acquired a staying power beyond that of the distinctive group of activists who founded and sustained it over the past decade...

...There is a danger in this form of sociological analysis of reducing what pro-life people see as a major moral problem to class issues — education, income, social status...

...prochoice smaller families...

...By this reading the Supreme Court decision probably did more than anything else to set off the political battle that has raged over the abortion issue for the last twelve years...

...As she shows, these statc-bystate efforts met an elite opposition that had little impact on the grass-roots Catholics who were ultimately mobilized by Roe v. Wade and organized the pro-life movement as we have come to know it...

...She covers the territory from the physicians in the nineteenth century who first sought legal regulation of abortion as a matter of professional jurisdiction, to abortion reformers in the 1960s who provided referrals and counseling as a form of civil disobedience, to the Catholic mother and housewife who...