Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing times

Chapter 6: Is “Pro-Choice” What We Mean to Say?

99 Chapter 6 Is “Pro-Choice” What We Mean to Say? Abortion debates are unacknowledged debates about women and women’s sexuality. Gloria H. Albrecht1 Women have as much right as men to embrace their own well-being as a positive moral good and to be taken seriously in their process of decision-making. Beverly Wildung Harrison2 P regnancy happens. So does abortion. Worldwide, some 210 million women become pregnant each year. About six out of ten (63 percent) of these pregnancies result in live births, while more than two out of ten (22 percent) end in abortion and the remaining 15 percent in miscarriage. In the United States, about six million pregnancies occur annually, and half of these are unplanned. Of the total, nearly two-thirds result in live births, about one-fourth end in abortion, and the remainder end in miscarriage.3 Other statistics provide additional insight into contemporary patterns of pregnancy , childbirth, and pregnancy termination. Of the 64 million abortions that take place worldwide in a given year, at least one-third are illegal, usually clandestine, and often dangerous to women. Upwards of 20 percent of all maternal deaths occur as the result of unsafe abortion, and in some areas of the world, the toll is as many as half of all maternal deaths.4 By way of contrast, for most United States women with access to reproductive health care, their risk of health complications from abortion 100 | making love just is minimal, especially when the procedure is performed by a trained professional in an appropriately hygienic setting. Less than 1 percent of United States women experience health complications due to an abortion. In fact, the risk of death to women having abortions is less than one-tenth of the risk associated with childbirth.5 In terms of frequency, one in three United States women by age forty-five will have terminated a pregnancy, which means that abortion is commonplace in this society.6 By some estimates abortion ranks as the most common gynecological procedure that women elect. On the one hand, the fact that women, now as in the past, have sought to manage their fertility and relied on a variety of means, including abortion, to limit births is nothing new. On the other hand, as ethicist Beverly Harrison points out, the “public acknowledgment of the frequency with which women resort to abortion” is a “new social reality” that has “astonished and frightened many people.”7 It may also come as a surprise that nearly 80 percent of United States women who have an abortion report that they are religiously affiliated: 43 percent identify as Protestant, 27 percent as Catholic, and 8 percent as belonging to other faith traditions. Finally, contrary to anti-abortion polemics that caricature women who terminate their pregnancies as selfish and disinterested in children, six out of ten women having abortions are already mothers.8 More than half of these women say that they intend to become pregnant again and expect to have one or more children in the future.9 Therefore, there are not two distinct groups of women: women who have abortions and women who value children and choose to parent. Instead, large numbers of women in the United States (and worldwide) belong to both groups.10 n  “Birth by choice” as a historical watershed What statistics fail to capture is the lived reality of what a planned or unplanned pregnancy means to women and their partners. Pregnancy is always a life-altering experience. Historically speaking, women in every culture have sought to limit the number of births. The most common form of controlling family size has no doubt been infanticide, closely followed by child abandonment and the sale of children by desperately impoverished parents.11 What marks a historical watershed, with great potential to transform the quality of women’s lives, is the availability of medically safe and legal reproductive health services, including pregnancy terminations, along with the global movement for the social and economic empowerment of women. These two factors make it possible, though not inevitable, for women to direct their sexual and reproductive lives so that they may live without fear of frequent and unplanned pregnancy. The authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Boston-based women’s health collective, express the stakes this way: “Unless women can decide whether and when to have children, it is difficult for us to control our lives or to participate fully in society.”12 Therefore, making the conditions for procreative freedom...