The Abortion Dilemma: Finding Common Ground

           

            When my brother was seven years old there was a decidedly vicious streak coiled  inside his pasty-freckle wrapping.  Even though it seemed only I could see it, it was definitely there: an avatar snake contained in the envelope of his adolescent body, a  perceptible sliver of reptilian breath leeching through his throat, scales occasionally regrouping in peristaltic waves of  amber, red and  indigo beneath semi-translucent skin.  He was a demon--a fact undeniable in his manifest power to confuse my parents, to mesmerize them with the flicking of his icy-tongue, to engorge them with the idea that not only was there nothing wrong with him, but that he was even (and I still feel bile in my throat) ”their little darling.”  I was fundamentally disoriented—how could  something that glowed so hotly with the fire of hell traipse so unopposed through my family’s  “leave-it-to-Beaver” home?  It was my first lesson (I thought) on the banality of evil; my first comprehension of the truth that cruelty could exist as easily as it did, and that I could expect no justice.  No abject revulsion for my brother by my parents, no expulsion for him to the fringes of the neighborhood play-circle, no hope of a sudden thunderclap and the sizzle of smoke-and-ash in a hole where his chair had been.

Which segues us now to the subject of abortion.  Nowhere in modern politics will you find a controversy more saturated with ill-will, nowhere will you find one more inclined to contort its participants in cramps of anger.  There is a belief among the sides in the abortion controversy that the opposite view embeds both boundless stupidity and bottomless malevolence.  In what has become nothing less than a polemical melee, each side condemns the other in intensifying cycles of derogation, cycles that  tighten so fitfully they begin to evoke hallucinations similar to those I had seen framed in the entity of my brother.  Those involved begin to think they sense a trace of evil in the other side, of demon-scales lying semi-opaque  beneath the white of the opposition’s skin, of a wisp of sulfur and half-rotted flesh in the oppositions breath, of  a red-gleam in the core of the other side’s narrowed eyes.  Contempt breeds contempt, and the argument spins in violent pirouettes until everyone is convinced that the gates of hell have opened, and that the demon Pithius has climbed up onto the surface of earth to contradict them—vocally, stridently and falsely.

In the chapter on abortion in Contemporary Moral Issues in a Diverse Society, editor Julie McDonald anthologizes a sampling of views that cohere around the phenomenon of human abortion.  In an attempt to clarify the core disagreements that form what has become one of our most powerful controversies, McDonald presents voices from each side, allowing them to alternate in a kind of see-saw juxtaposition of perspective.  If readers however begin with hope that such even-handed toggling of the arguments will allow them to determine a dialectical winner, they will ultimately be disappointed.  It turns out that the stew of fact, belief and emotion that perforate the cultural framework of abortion are far too complex to easily detangle--at least this is what seems to emerge as the fundamental epiphany of the text.  But it is a realization that need not, in the final analysis, arrive in the ashes of disappointment, because it forms what can only be seen as a sliver of common ground.  By comprehending and acknowledging the complexity and at least temporary intractability of the debate, all sides can find a theoretical starting point from which to speak to each other.  Because no matter how right each side believes itself to be, no matter how morally or logically superior, they can and should concede that the physical and spiritual nuances surrounding the abortion controversy are deeply layered.   In this, at least, they can chance giving a nod to their antagonists, finding in that a respectful edge from which they can quietly but persistently speak to each other.

In the first reading of the anthology, Abortion and the Concept of a Person, Jane English traces an argument that seems to adhere to just such a position of compromise.  The brunt of her argument burrows through the Byzantine complexity of the abortion question, adumbrating how each position seems solid enough at the outset but begins to fray and split into successively intricate layers of both physical and metaphysical contradiction.  Abortion, she shows, is not just one question and one dilemma, but rather a polemical peel of fundamental complexity:  is abortion OK?  Well, that depends on if it is killing.  But does it really?  Because killing is sometimes justified.  Or is it? And what about killing a human being?  But what is a human being?  And is even killing a human being always wrong?  English takes her reader on a dizzying ride through the loops of  moral reasoning (especially those pertaining to the “personhood” of a fetus) that saturate the abortion question, ultimately deciding that since there can be no clear coherent answer to a question that is itself not clearly coherent (at least in simple yes or no form) , the best we can do as human beings will have to be whatever it is that we end up doing—that is, we must ultimately quit pretending we can squeeze out an answer and finally set out to formulate a compromise.   We must in effect agree that both sides have been prosecuting an untenable polemic because, short of God (or an equivalent) appearing as big as the sky to clear it all up, rightness and wrongness on abortion may never be solidly comprehensible. 

In Choosing Disability, Laura Hershey configures the abortion question as it pertains to our views on disability and congenital defect.  It turns out that groups opposing legalized abortion have generally (and falsely) assumed a sort of natural affinity of the disabled for their cause.  It is an assumption grounded in their belief that the disabled must at least share their horror for the termination of an anomalous or diseased fetus, since this is what many of the disabled had themselves once been.  This conclusion is simplistic, because as Hershey comments, although “some activists have accepted the anti-choice message because they find it consistent with the goals of the disability rights movement,” others like her “recoil at the ‘pro-life’ movement’s disregard for the lives an freedom of women.” (98) .  

Hershey’s text acknowledges in this a deep almost schizophrenic ambivalence in the minds of many of the disabled regarding abortion—although many resent the imposition of male-dominated cultural restrictions on their rights as women regarding pregnancy, they also abhor the culture’s easy acceptance of fetal disability as a valid and even recommended reason for abortion (when it is legally permitted).  She quotes for instance a 1992 CNN survey in which “70 percent of respondents favored abortion if a fetus was likely to be born deformed.” (98)  According to disability rights organizer Diane Coleman, in this statistic slithers the abhorrently pervasive “rejection of people with disabilities, and the conviction that it would be better if [they] were dead” (99).

At this point in the text Hershey launches into a diatribe on the validity of a disabled life that to be honest is also where she can begin to lose the reader.   Not that I deny or even doubt her point that “thousands of severely disabled people are surviving, working, loving and agitating for change” (98).  But when she claims that when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy “expressly to avoid giving birth to a disabled child, she is buying into obsolete assumptions about the child’s future,” that she is making a “statement about the desirability of the relative worth of such a child,” (99) I find myself feeling like I’ve been intellectually serenaded, only to be suddenly startled by the interjection of what seems like an atonal refrain.  Hershey has toggled her argument into two broad and irrational generalizations: the first being that because she is disabled, she understands what it is like for all those who are disabled, and that this understanding includes the omniscient certainty that all disabled lives are worthwhile and fulfilling.  In this she is implying that her particular disability somehow recapitulates or anticipates the experience of all human beings who are born with physical abnormalities, an implication I find hard to believe (there are for instance defects that are known to cause intense, debilitating and incessant pain).  Congenital defects occur in almost innumerable form and combination—simply because Hershey’s story is one of a satisfactory and even fulfilling life, it is teasing a bigoted view to claim that her experience is the norm or even common. 

The second doubtful generalization in Hershey’s argument is that a woman who chooses to abort a defective fetus is making a judgement-by-proxy on the worth of a disabled person’s life—a jump in logic so broad it seems to need no explication.  A woman’s reasons for abortion, even of a potentially disabled child, are multifarious and complex.  There are seemingly far more likely alternatives to the relatively bigoted reason posited by Hershey, such as  reasons based on the financial and emotional strain posed by a disabled child, a strain some women may simply know they cannot bear.   In making her claim, Hershey becomes guilty of the same error she accuses the non-disabled of committing—of simplistically assuming they know the details of another’s experience; they of the fundamental quality of a disabled life and she of the fundamental motivation in a woman who aborts a potentially disabled fetus.  

In the end, although Hershey makes lucid points about society’s relationship vis-à-vis the disabled, she seems to only dilute those points by forcing them into the framework of abortion—she seems, in doing this, to be plowing the wrong field.  The clarity of her feminist position on the abortion question seems to become muddled in such an endeavor, as Hershey herself admits when she says that “when we object to positions that implicitly doubt the humanity of children born disabled, we are accused of being anti-choice.”  Although she tries to dismiss this confusion by appending her rhetoric with the claim that “I wouldn’t deny any woman the right to chose abortion, but I would issue a challenge to all women making an abortion decision whether to give birth to a child who may have disabilities,” (103)  the effort feels limp.  Finally one is left feeling that Hershey would like to have her cake and eat it too—that as a feminist she wants no restrictions on abortion but as a disabled  person she wants to impose what can often be a far more potent influence on behavior—social disapprobation.

In the third essay, Why Abortion is Immoral, Professor Don Marquis of the University of Kansas prosecutes an argument against abortion based on the concept of equivalency—that is, that abortion shares equivalency with what are already considered prima facie abhorrent behaviors (such as murder) in what amounts to its eventual effect: the thwarting of a human future.  His argument formed an interesting nexus for me personally, since it traced a perspective I had already once held and then abandoned a few years ago.    “What is the difference,” I would tell my friends, ”between me killing you now, or inventing a time machine, going back to the time you were a fetus, and convincing your mother to abort you—in the end I have achieved the same thing, namely that you at a point one hour from now no longer exist.  In this abortion is the same as murder.”  But there are potent contradictions in this view that eventually led me to abandon it —most powerful of which is the recognition that it becomes a slippery slope of regressing first causes.  By this I mean that I realized if I could say that abortion was equivalent to murder in its denial of a realized human future, than I could also say that convincing a mother to use contraception amounted to the same thing.  And if that was equivalent to murder, so was preventing parents from meeting, or preventing them from being born, or their parents and so on ad infinitum.  Although the argument against abortion framed in the “depriving” of a human future seems initially compelling, especially in its ability to disassociate the abortion debate from its most confusing element (that concerning the personhood of a fetus), it seems to naturally dissolve into ridiculous permutations concerning when such a “depriving” could theoretically take place. 

I wondered if  Marquis might manage to logically dismantle (at least for me) the recursive logic that seems to plague the “depriving of a future” argument against abortion, especially that which seems to make even contraception equivalent to murder.  It turns out my anticipation was misplaced--although Marquis acknowledges the recursion, he dismisses it with a perplexing wave of his hand:  “The ethics of killing in this essay would entail that contraception is wrong only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception,”….(and now the dismissive shrug)…”nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception, however” (115).  The statement seems to appear out of nowhere, and frustratingly, the text continues with only a hurried, semantically convoluted “clarification” of why this is so, one that ultimately feels forced.  Its as if Marquis recognizes the problem with his view’s illogical expansion, but instead of reconfiguring his view to deal with it, he generates a desperate a priori decision to simply not allow contraception to be considered the same way.  Tellingly, my copy of the anthology containing Marquis’ essay is a resale, and I was not surprised to see that a previous student had also been taken back by the suddenness of the forced logic: there, inscribed in the margins of my copy, is the definite semi-circle and subordinate period of a hurriedly scribbled question mark.  It seems that more than one of us responded to the professor’s argument with an irresistible and inquisitive “huh?”

In a quick aside, it is important to note that this was not the only destabilizing leg of Marquis’ argument--only the most salient one.  There is also a problem enmeshed in his other a priori assumption that by terminating a pregnancy, you are depriving a human being of a future of value:  “The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities , projects, experiences and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life…therefore when I die, I am deprived of all the value of my future” (108).   By doing this, he is burrowing (inadvertently I think) beyond his own argument on abortion and into what amounts to a metaphysical claim as well:  he is assuming that death itself is the termination of a “future.” It is a claim that, though seemingly obvious, that has never been proven.  Regardless of his view on the existence or not of a human soul, on the truth or not of an eternal spiritual existence (one that might theoretically be better than this one ), his argument embeds the assumption that it is only this future, the one he and the reader can see, that exists and has value.  It is an assumption many would deny (including Socrates, who ridiculed his enemies for assuming he would be afraid of death: “To fear death, gentleman, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know…there is good hope that death is a blessing" (Apology)).   I am not arguing of course that Marquis cannot ground his argument in such an assumption, but he should, at least for the sake of logical rigor, concede that he is doing so. 

In Feminism and Abortion, the next essay in the anthology, Sally Markowitz develops an argument on abortion that expands its scope, moving outside the question of the rights of a fetus to delve into the rights of the women who carry that fetus.  Moral purists may resist the attempt to frame questions of right and wrong, murder and autonomy, beyond simple and immediate definitions—if a fetus is a living human being (whatever we decide that means), killing it is murder, if not, well then it is not.  In this view, the morality of the practice could never have anything to do with the social framework in which it occurs.  Markowitz however makes a compelling and highly pragmatic argument: even if we ultimately decide a fetus is a “person,” there will remain a fundamental tension between its rights and the rights of the woman whose body it inhabits, especially in a society which misogynistically frames women’s rights as  subordinate to those of men.  In a sense, Markowitz is challenging all those who are opposed to abortion to put their money where their mouth is, to make the radical social changes necessary to free women and thus make abortion not just morally wrong but practically unnecessary.  “I hope my discussion brings to light,” she opines, “a dimension of the abortion issue too often ignored by philosophers: the relationship between reproductive practices and the liberation (or oppression) of women” (125).  “If we sincerely believe,” she goes on to say, “that abortion is at least prima facie wrong because it violates an overriding right of the fetus, our views should provide all the more incentive to change society so that women are no longer oppressed” (125).

In the next essay in the Contemporary Moral Issues anthology, Susan Sherwin argues that the feminist framing of the abortion question into the context of a broader cultural misogyny are too simplistic, as is also the alternative pro-choice insistence that abortion rights are only a question of personal autonomy.   In Feminist Analysis of Women and Abortion,  the professor of philosophy and women’s studies at Dalhousie University claims that what is needed is what Kathleen McDonnell called an implicitly “feminist morality” of abortion, one rooted in a “deep appreciation of the complexities of life, the refusal to polarize and adopt simplistic formulas” (127).  In service of this goal, Sherwin dissects the tangled relationship that exists in the singular phenomenon formed by a woman and her fetus.  In her adumbration, there is a pathology injected into the abortion debate on the one hand by a  culture that sees the “fetus as distinct individuals who are physically, ontologically and socially separate from the women whose bodies they inhabit,” (131) and on the other hand by the inclination of some feminists to feel “pushed to reject claims of fetal value, in order to protect women’s needs” (132).  Both positions are too simple, the first because “efforts to speak of the fetus itself, as if it were not inseparable from the woman in whom it develops, are distorting and dishonest” (133), the second because the fetus does exist as a relational being, even if only in the context of its relationship with its own mother: “A fetus has a primary and particularly intimate sort of “relationship” with the woman in whose womb it develops” (133).   This forms a two-pronged epiphany in the construct of Sherwin’s argument.  First that society, especially a male-dominated one, should never demand aegis over the fate of any individual pregnancy, since it could never comprehend the tangled relationship constructed inside of it.  And second, that feminists should never “deny that fetuses have value,” but should insist instead that “fetuses be recognized as existing within women’s pregnancies and not as separate isolated entities” (137). 

At the beginning of this essay,  I related the story of my strained relationship with my brother, one that probably seemed like a strange and desultory tangent--the subject is after all abortion, not the vagaries of familial tension.  But by evoking the subjectively tortuous dynamic of my sibling relationship, I was indeed attempting something relevant.  (If you are expecting a dark punch-line about abortion and wistful fratricide, that is not where I am going).  The gist is this: my brother and I highlight an ominous propensity of our race—the bent we have as human beings for inflating the significance of every “pinkie-finger” insult, for framing every conflict in cosmic terms and every contradictory opinion as malevolent, daemonic and threatening.  In a world where undiluted evil is just as illusory as undiluted good, we seem (even from our youth) damnably determined to pretend like we see both everywhere.

I could try to argue a position in the abortion controversy, but I don’t see the point.  If this review of a sampling of the opposing arguments has taught me anything, its that they embed a complexity of perspective that is not ever likely to be overcome.  In short, I’m convinced the dilemma can never surmount its fundamental nature as a cyclic and frustrating recursion of he-said/she-said.  But if we are ever to find a stone of an answer resting at the center of the abortion question, we must at least let go the disdain that infects the argument.  We must admit to the complexity of the dilemma over what constitutes human life and death, and suffocate our reflex for excoriating those who, embracing different nuances than us, form our opposition.   Because in our anger what we seek is an epiphany, a revelation of the truth embedded in all the nuances of what it means to be human and what it means to kill, and no side can ever own such an epiphany.  This is the understanding that must become our common ground—that the abortion question is stunningly complex, perhaps as nuanced as any human issue had ever been, tunneling as it does through almost every mystery of the cosmic condition.  What is life?  What is a human being?  And what exactly does it mean to be such a thing?  What, in a word, is everything?  Our common ground needs to be this recognition, and our response must eventually rest in nothing more ambitious than a considerate yet bold compromise.    

As a postscript, I would like to note that in the years since we were children, my brother has come to abdicate his inheritance as scion of Satan.  We still fight, but our  words fall more lightly, and there is the wisp of a hint of a smile at the edge of both our lips.  So fundamental has  the change been that last month we even went on vacation together--voluntarily, without parents to separate us to either side of an imaginary line running across the perpendicular center of the taxi’s backseat.  He may have even rolled his butt once or twice to my side, or even turned his head in my direction.  If he did, I can’t say I even noticed.