The Political Geographies of Pregnancy

4. Abortion Politics: Discourses on Lives

82 4 Abortion Politics: Discourses on Lives In its ability to embody the union of science and nature, the embryo might be described as a cyborg kinship entity. —Sarah Franklin, “Making Representations” In many domains in contemporary European and U.S. cultures, the fetus functions as a kind of metonym, seed crystal, or icon for configurations of person, family, nation , origin, choice, life, and future. . . . The fetus as sacrum is the repository of heterogeneous people’s stories , hopes, and imprecations. —Donna Haraway, Modest-Witness@SecondMillennium .FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™ Abortion’s nitroglycerine political controversy has affected birth control, family planning, and women’s health politics deeply. Abortion ’s public political emergence in the 1960s, as Donald Critchlow puts it, “transformed the politics of population and family planning policy” (1999: 113). Fetuses as metonyms take on powerful symbolic forms in our culture. The status of the fetus stands in for the problems independent, demanding, sexually active women allegedly cause in our society. They want “abortion on demand,” for instance, while not accepting responsibility for becoming pregnant in the first place. Legal abortion distills many perceived social problems onto misbehaving women. One dimension of abortion politics that sets the scene for policy recommendations and rhetoric on rights is the framing of the topic as if it were simply a forty-week time frame focusing on whether to terminate Abortion Politics 83 a pregnancy (Sprague and Greer, 1998: 59). According to Joey Sprague and Margaret Greer, this is partly explained by the “contemporary discourse on abortion” that revolves around four themes: “(1) a narrow construction of reproduction as an issue; (2) a reliance on logical dichotomy and decontextualized abstraction in talking about the issue; (3) a tendency to construct justifications using an individualistic language of rights; and (4) an orientation that is confrontative and dominating” (1998: 58–59). Central in abortion politics is the agency of women to construct their own reproductive lives and choose their own forms of sexual activity. Instead, the gender issues at the heart of abortion politics are often masked politically . If we honestly discussed abortion within the territory of gender politics and women’s rights and health instead of centering on fetal life, we would have to answer questions about how abortion is singled out for special regulations that presume incompetent, selfish, misinformed female decision making instead of simply regulating abortion with the same health and safety provisions for other medical procedures (see also Jaggar, 1998: 351). Debates on which women might be “worthy” of a legal , safe abortion since they are innocently pregnant (i.e., through no fault of their own) highlight this position. Exceptions for victims of rape or incest from restrictive abortion efforts are based on an idea that all the other unwanted pregnancies are the “sexual fault” of the women (Siegel, 1992: 361). Anti-abortion adherents, Catharine MacKinnon observes, “make exceptions for those special occasions during which they presume women did not control sex,” which assumes that women significantly do control sex (1987: 94). A study of women’s abortion reasonings and decision making found that the views of anti-abortion women depended on the circumstances of the situation, including the motives and intentions of aborting women. The researcher found the difference between “pro- and anti-choice women’s abortion morality . . . was their different perspective on the trustworthiness of women” (Cannold, 2000: 95). Genetic counseling, prenatal diagnosis, and genetic testing are all intertwined with the politics of abortion. Aborting defective, disabled, genetically troublesome fetuses is problematic to many, as discussed in the previous chapter. However, as Ruth Cowan reports, feminist ethicists who have studied the decision making of women choosing abortion find little to fear “as long as individual women are left in control of their own reproduction. For when left free to decide, most women decide to abort for reasons that have to do with their sense of good nurturance: for example , when they feel either that this is not a time when they can nurture a child properly or this is not the fetus that will grow into a child whom they can nurture properly. Why fear a future in which ever more 84 The Political Geographies of Pregnancy children will be ever more wanted by their mothers?” (1992: 262). Women make ethical, rational decisions regarding the continuation of their pregnancies and, out of an ethic of care, decide what would be best for them and their families (Cannold, 2000). Governmental...