What women have lost
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
What women have lost Liberty and Sexuality is a work of history. It chronicles a period of time when many of us were around, out and about, having a life. Mr. Garrow's book is described as...
...Garrow's book is described as monumental in Kristin Luker's New York Times review (February 20, 1994), and certainly it is a big book...
...Perhaps the most vivid stories I heard were from a college friend, also Catholic, doing a medical internship at one of New York City's large hospitals...
...Abortion is the litmus test for women in national politics...
...It has liberated at least some men from a sense of responsibility, from the pull of social bonds and the push of social pressures...
...Where I once peripherally saw the need for reform, I now see the consequences of repeal...
...And that without placing an undue burden on the women, the state could act in ways that preferred childbirth to abortion...
...I have a friend who teaches in a college with a large minority and working-class student body...
...I thought abortion was wrong, that it meant the taking of a human life...
...Where once there was a broad and open concern for a variety of issues, there is now virtually a single cause...
...In subsequent Court decisions and in the heat of political battle, discourse about the right to abortion made it ever more basic and ever more fundamental...
...His book, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality, was published in 1970...
...and the moral claims of the fetus were lost to public consideration and to legal protection...
...and sometimes of their opponents...
...But this is the one choice she really doesn't have...
...Like many of my fellow citizens, my attention was focused elsewhere, on Vietnam, on school reform in New York City, on my children...
...This line of argument was congenial to a certain liberal Catholic outlook, which Mr...
...It is principally the story of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that repealed the abortion laws of fifty states...
...It argued that more permissive laws, that is less restrictive ones, rather than repeal of the laws would balance the need for reform while acknowledging the moral status of fetal life...
...Inevitably she finds herself in conversation, sought out for advice on these matters...
...Liberty and Sexuality does not, indeed, cannot tell the whole story, the story of those who were not engaged by the struggle to reform abortion laws or to oppose that reform...
...From the perspective of twenty years that repeal has reshaped and deformed many of the other issues that loomed so large on my political and moral horizon back in 1973...
...a snowstorm forced the forum's cancellation...
...Or she can have the baby and lose her partner...
...Reform meant abortion available early in pregnancy, and abortion contained within certain limits: life of the mother, rape, and health of the mother broadly defined...
...I continue to think so...
...It does not tell the story of the vast middle, the muddled middle some call it...
...Abortion has become a litmus test for the women's movement...
...At times, the woman's real desire is to have the baby, to keep it, to settle down, to get married, to have a family, to raise children...
...It was for repeal...
...The woman's right became absolute...
...That breakdown has hit the poorest people the hardest, but it is working its way up the social class ladder...
...In his rotation through the emergency room, he had seen the consequences of incomplete or selfinduced abortions and told me about them...
...And that decision has shaped the political, legal, and moral battles that we have witnessed for the last twenty years...
...Some were indifferent, some mildly interested, some had their civic eyes focused elsewhere— on Vietnam, on the civil rights movement and the black power movement, on day care and other rights for women, on the 1972 election and then Watergate...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS This reflection was prepared for a public forum (which also included David Garrow) on Liberty and Sexuality at the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...
...For Roe has liberated men as well as women...
...And in some cases, both happen, because coerced into an abortion however subtly, a woman cannot but help looking at her partner in a new and more brutal light...
...The federal ban on public funding for abortion, while paying for childbirth is perhaps the most notable example...
...Garrow takes note of in his book, and I suspect Callahan's book was very influential in shaping it: that is, a moral position among Catholics as well as others that recognizes the fetus as protectable human life could not be fully embodied in civil law, especially laws that made no exceptions for even the hardest cases...
...In that sense, Webster and Casey—the Court's most recent decisions—seem to me to have taken up the strand the Court dropped during the seventies, that is, that the state did have an interest in protecting and even promoting fetal life...
...She's on her own...
...When the consequences of all of this is finally and fully apparent, above all to women, I think Roe will be seen for the mistake it was...
...From what she tells me, I conclude that real choice is very often the last thing her students have in deciding about abortion...
...Dan Callahan, our friend and one of my predecessors at Commonweal, was working on a massive study of therapeutic abortions, as they were then called, and abortion laws around the world...
...A woman can have an abortion or she can lose her partner...
...But we can also examine the way in which Roe and the unconstrained right to abortion has become such a weighty factor in the social and sexual calculus of our society, that at times the woman's own conscience is violated...
...Back in the late sixties when people I knew talked about abortion, they were talking about an end to such scenes...
...In the late sixties and early seventies, abortion reform was there along with many issues, issues that in a reforming era looked like they needed reforming...
...We can say that that's one of the consequences of individual autonomy, of liberty, and of the right to choose...
...The language of informed consent, of moral decision making, of the exercise of conscience, and the tragedy of such a choice receded in favor of language that cast the right to abortion as a women's most fundamental right, the right to decide whether or not to bear a child, and the right upon which all other rights and liberties seemed to rest...
...no women's political caucus or funding group will support a woman who has doubts or reservations about Roe...
...But beyond the legal and constitutional questions, abortion has over the last twenty years altered the political landscape, especially where I have always felt at home, the liberal/left landscape...
...But when Roe v. Wade appeared in 1973, the decision was not for reform...
...But more important, because more devastating, Roe, I have become convinced, is one of the constitutive factors in the disarray that we see around us in the breakdown of social ties, social customs, social patterns, and social pressures that once surrounded, contained, humanized sex, sexuality, dating, courtships, and patterns of family formation...
...But of necessity it tells only part of the story, mostly that of activists...
Vol. 121 • October 1994 • No. 18
