More abortions, please!
ROCCA, FRANCIS X.
For. the Love of Abortions Janet Hadley Pleads for More By Francis X. Rocca Janet Hadley is not "pro-choice," she is pro-abortion. In Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity, her survey of...
...To get to that she must first consider the philosophical case of her opponents...
...But there's an irony here: Hadley is so sure that the moral questions of abortion have been settled that she feels free to highlight the least appealing aspects of the procedure she exalts...
...It's the rarity that bothers her, for it means that a stress on contraception has left a "stigma" on abortion...
...Pro-life conservatives should ponder such cases as they take on the problems of illegitimacy and welfare dependency, lest easy solutions bring unintended consequences...
...Having thus disposed of the moral case against abortion, Hadley lays out her abortion manifesto...
...For this country, Hadley's vision of routine, unregulated abortion seems no more likely than a full ban...
...Such use of abortion, Hadley admits, poses a dilemma for feminists, who seemingly must choose between women's freedom and women's survival...
...In Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity, her survey of abortion law and practice around the world, she scorns talk of necessary evils and last resorts...
...Shocking as Hadley's own reporting is, none of it leads her to question the morality of abortion per se...
...The result is a pro-abortion book that will harden the convictions of pro-lifers...
...She sees, for example, the eugenic implications of genetic screening, which doctors now tout as a "responsible" precaution for any pregnant woman...
...Under the right conditions, it is safer and more comfortable than many other kinds of birth control...
...Hadley also invokes Rosalind Petch-esky's theory that it is the pregnant woman who, in growing aware of her relationship to her fetus, bestows per-sonhood on it...
...Hadley's field observations lead to her larger project: a positive defense of abortion, in effect a governing philosophy for the abortion culture...
...draws the following vignette: "Boy or girl...
...Once Hadley has established that proposition, she can dismiss pro-life warnings of a "slippery slope" to infanticide as quibbles...
...We tell you with 100 per cent accuracy," proclaims the roadside poster outside Ludhiana, in the northern state of Punjab...
...The health argument—that prohibition will not stop abortion, but only lead to an "epidemic" of back-alley deaths—has proved more politically effective, but Hadley distrusts it, too...
...She worries that framing abortion as a health matter takes authority away from women and hands it to physicians, who might not always agree with their patients on the status of fetal life...
...It may even convince others that the reality behind "pro-choice" sloganeering is grisly and barbaric beyond their worst imaginings...
...Turning to the developed world, Hadley is unflinching in her descriptions of abortion practice...
...Her worries, rather, tend to be over such issues as the "stigmatizing" effect on those who slip through genetic screening...
...Save 50,000 rupees later by spending 500 rupees now...
...Even a supposedly conservative institution may routinely offer women incentives to abort...
...The ability to prevent imperfect children is quickly evolving into an obligation, so that in Britain today, 92 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome get aborted...
...But for now, Hadley thinks, to outlaw abortion under any circumstance or for any reason would be to give ground in an all-out war...
...Technical viability is irrelevant when the real point is the "social sustainability" of life...
...All over India, there are clinics performing amnio-centesis and ultrasound scans, even in districts too poor to afford supplies of clean drinking water...
...Hadley, a British journalist and abortion activist, is dissatisfied even with the Netherlands, where abortion is safe, legal, and rare...
...China, where the notorious one-child policy has meant forced abortions and sterilizations for women and a steep drop in the female birthrate, provides an even more clear-cut case for Hadley's feminist critique...
...Instead, Hadley casts about for a "feminist morality of abortion...
...Hadley is willing to state categorically: "It is surely as outrageous to abort a female fetus, following prenatal diagnosis, as to practice female infanticide...
...This "allows for the possibility of including the late fetus and the newborn within the moral framework," which seems to mean that a given abortion could actually be wrong...
...She finds the notion of rights inadequate to the task, not least because it follows from "the male-dominated western tradition of individualism and property rights...
...And there are doctors making a mint...
...From the Harvard "difference feminist" Carol Gilligan she borrows the idea of an "'ethic of care,' rooted in the concerns of daily life rather than in abstract universal axioms," whereby a woman may put her responsibilities to others, or even to herself, ahead of those to her unborn child...
...Every day an estimated 3,000 female fetuses are aborted...
...But of that only the woman herself, due to her "unique relationship to the fetus," can be the judge...
...Until recently, pregnant women in the British military had to choose between abortion and discharge...
...Most Americans do not believe that killing a two-week-old embryo is murder, but neither are they comfortable with crushing the skull and sucking out the brains of a nearly born baby, even one with "defects...
...Hadley also notes the tendency of population-control propagandists to target racial and ethnic minorities...
...But Hadley thinks women have few choices in any male-dominated society, and India, where families must pay ruinous dowries to marry off their daughters, is harder on women than most...
...Ending a pregnancy should not require the excuse of rape or contraceptive failure...
...Someday, once gender inequalities are gone, it might be safe to reopen the question of when abortion is right or wrong, and "to bring the political and the moral closer together...
...Moreover, the debate between a "right to choose" and a "right to life" yields a draw at best...
...Janet Hadley's enlightening and repugnant book reminds us of what is at stake, no less than the clinic-picketing "fanatics" she so despises...
...Abortion is an essential means of freeing women from "male-supremacist society...
...With proper counseling, it can even be a "self-affirming" and "tremendously positive experience...
...Their opposition to abortion stems from nothing but a desire to quash female sexual freedom and uphold patriarchy...
...Yet she would not forbid even this...
...In Hadley's view, _ questions of abortion's rightness or wrongness should now be giving way to strategies for maximizing its practice...
...Hadley lays out the pro-life side fairly enough, but her reading of the mentality behind it is a slanderous caricature...
...Pro-lifers are "God's bullies," who have followed up their victories in Reagan's America by undoing decades of progress in the former Soviet bloc...
...To arguments on the grounds of fetal personhood, she replies that person-hood is "a social construct," inapplicable to the pre- (and even the recently post-) natal...
...And yet, if the only voices were those of compromise, it would be too easy to forget what we are really talking about when we talk about abortion...
...From India, for example, Hadley Francis X. Rocca is a contributing writer for the American Spectator...
Vol. 2 • March 1997 • No. 24
