Body Parts

What Is the Root of Barack Obama's Deep Commitment to Unlimited Abortion Rights for Women?

Obama's comments on the right of women to unlimited abortion are more than simply political, though obviously there is a lot of political appeal to women voters in his commitment. I sense in Obama a deep commitment based on personal experience. I believe that, as a young man, he probably had a girl friend with whom he initiated a pregnancy that was unwanted by him and was ended. Why do I believe this? I look at two matters.

First is his campaign remark, speaking of his daughters, "if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby." He could easily have put his commitment to abortion of unwanted babies in general terms, without mentioning his daughters and without the moral term, punished, to describe an unwanted baby. 

Second, though abortion is a right for women, interviews with women indicate that most women have abortions, not because they want them, but because men in their lives want them to have an abortion. In other words, abortion is a right for men that men largely exercise. This situation clearly fits Obama's remarks, where he is speaking as a man, his daughter's father, saying (as I read the comment's context) that he would want them to have an abortion if they became pregnant as unmarried minors.

What is the source of emotion behind these comments? The most likely source, easiest to hypothesize, is that, when he was a young man, a woman with whom he was having sex became pregnant. If she would not have had an abortion, he would face choices that could negatively influence his ambitions. He might have been forced into an unwanted marriage, or, if he rejected both marriage and the child, his future public reputation might have been damaged. So, presumably, an abortion was done and he was freed of choices and responsibilities he did not want.

As I said, this is all conjecture; but it is only conjecture that Obama was all too human. All too human: he raised what was convenient for him to a moral right.

Decline in Teen Sex and Birth Rate: Shifting Climate of Opinion

A recent study reports, on the basis of survey, that fewer teens are having sex and fewer teens are giving birth than the mid-1990s.  The articles reporting the study attribute the change to education and condoms; but what kind of education? No doubt liberal advocates of sex education in schools want to believe it is classroom instruction and access to birth control technology. But other forces are at work.

Since the 1990s there has been a national shift in general opinion away from liberal attitudes toward sex and illegitimate birth toward conservative values of self-restraint, conventional family formation, and personal responsibility. The change in the national welfare act in the mid-1990s was symbolic of, as well as instrumental in, that shift.

We may hope that further restraint of teen sex will occur. Other studies have shown that early sexual experience is almost always injurious to girls--also to boys for different reasons. Emotional growth, growth in personal self-confidence, and achievement of the social capability to support children occur years after teens have developed the biological capability and hormonal drive for sexual activity. From Victorian times, middle class American ethics wisely called for postponement of sexual initiation and parenthood. The middle class understood that postponement was crucial for healthy sexual activity in young adulthood, as well as for strong families and healthy children. This understanding was lost in the hormonal fury of the 1960s when personal liberation led to sexual promiscuity and political irresponsibility. The survey on teen sex is another indication that we are passing beyond the social chaos unleashed by that decade of mixed blessings.

State Funded Antiabortion Counselling

An article in the Los Angeles Times (Stephanie Simon, "States fund antiabortion advice", Sunday, February 11, 2007, A1) reviews the increasing efforts of some states to fund antiabortion counselling. Texas and Minnesota have recently begun to provide grants to groups for such counselling. Abortion rights supporters are alarmed, the reporter states, because they prefer that money be spent on family planning and birth control. (I suppose also that abortion rights groups would be also concerned that antiabortion counselling might weaken support for abortion as a right; but the article does not say this.) In view of the influence of boy friends, parents, and other persons on not-married women to have first-time abortions, it would seem necessary to provide antiabortion counselling for balance. Without balance, it would be difficult, especially for young women, to arrive at decisions that reflected their own interests, rather than the interests of others.

My Girl Friend's Abortion

Some thirty years ago, a girl friend and I got her pregnant. She had an abortion within several months of the onset of pregnancy. We parted a month or so after that. When I wrote the six-article series on abortion (starting here) in this blog in 2005, I did not have her (or my) experience of her abortion especially in mind. I seldom thought about her abortion in the intervening years and drew no lessons or wisdom from it. As I have written elsewhere in this blog, after 9/11 my values have shifted (or completed their shift) from liberalism to conservatism. Abortion is one of the issues about which I have become conservative.

I was then between marriages. I did not date frequently. My six-year old daughter lived with me and I devoted every minute I could get away from work to looking after her. I wanted her to know and feel that she had not been rejected by her mother's and my separation (and later divorce). The only way I could think to do that was by demonstrating my love for her through attentive parenting. I dated a few times on weekends when she was staying with her mother.

I knew B_, where I worked. She held a temporary appointment at my institution. She had come to Southern California with her boy friend, who took a position at a university in Los Angeles. Shortly after their arrival, he dumped her. She was bright, intellectually quick, and outspoken. She was a passionate feminist. I called myself a feminist, too. I was committed to the advancement and equality of women. B_ became a well-known personality in a short time. We noticed each other at meetings that we both attended. I do not recall how we got together. I don't remember having actual dates, such as going out to dinner or to movies. She made the first move. She was attracted to me. I enjoyed the attention and was attracted to her. I brought her to my home one evening. We sat on the living room floor, in front of large sliding glass windows that looked over a large, fenced, back yard. We talked. She said she wanted to have sex. I was 34 (she was 31, if I recall correctly). I had not had sex in months. Her sexual candor and her desire aroused me.

We discussed birth control. I do not recall whether I offered to use condoms, or said that I did not have any. She said that she went off the pill the previous month, that she had been on it mainly for her ex-boy friend. He was gone, so that was that. She said she did not think she could get pregnant so soon. She wanted me, regardless. So we had sex. She became pregnant.

Certainly, I knew that pregnancy was a possibility. I had used condoms before my first marriage and occasionally during that marriage. I could have declined intercourse, but I did not. So we got her pregnant. After she became pregnant, we continued to have sex, now without worrying about protection. We became abandoned to our passion for each other. She was inventive in bed, I was fascinated by her. But we were not in love and we knew it. What should we do about the pregnancy?

I was not interested in marrying her. I thought there was a possibility that love might grow between us. If it did, then I could envision marrying her; but this eventuality was in a future disconnected from the fact of her pregnancy. She was involved and concerned about her pregnancy, but it was not obvious to me that she wanted to have the baby. She had many thoughts about the pregnancy, only a few, I am sure, that she shared with me. She said she was Catholic. She did not say she was raised Catholic or that she had left her Catholic faith behind her. I understood it to be an issue for her. She was also a feminist. She said she was in control of her body and what to do with the pregnancy was her decision.

My interest in deepening my relationship with B_ had outside considerations. I was a single parent. My daughter eventually met B_  and instantly disliked her. B_ was not particularly interested in my daughter, either. She did not ask after her and did not express a desire to know her. I knew that if I married B_, the relationship between my daughter and her would be an issue. This knowledge dampened my interest in proceeding with the affair.

Several months into the pregnancy, I told B_ that I thought love might develop for us, but the pregnancy was not going to help. I lied to her. By that time, I knew I would not fall in love with her and I doubted that she would with me. I wanted her to have an abortion, because it would free me of her. She was ambivalent, but eventually she decided to have the abortion. I told her I would go with her to the clinic. She said she did not want me to do that; she got herself into this mess, she would get herself out.

The abortion was not easy for her. She said that when she went to the clinic, provided by Big Industrial Health Care Provider, she was nearly in tears and so distressed that she could not talk to the receptionist. She had to write on a piece of paper that she wanted an abortion. She handed the paper to the clerk. Arrangements were made to see a physician and she had the abortion. The D&C did not go well. As the surgeon said, she was a "bleeder". One or several blood vessels would not stop bleeding. Several return trips to the clinic were required to stop the hemorrhaging. The abortion was traumatic for her.

Our relationship ended shortly thereafter. B_ told me--something to the effect--that, once I got a good look at her, I ran the away as fast as I could. She repeated this comment to a mutual friend, who then reported it to me. I interpreted her comment to mean that her agonizing over the abortion and indecisiveness about what she wanted of me alienated me, that our relationship ended because she appeared unattractive in this situation. I do not  recall that was how it happened. I do remember that the ending of her pregnancy did not deepen my emotions for her.

In this entire proceeding, I did not have a second thought about the baby that was aborted. I was a committed liberal. I thought of abortion as a privilege our society extended to women to enable them to take control of their lives. B_'s pregnancy and the baby growing inside her were inconvenient for me; removing inconvenience was what the Second Wave of the Women's Movement was all about. I was aware that my girl friend was ambivalent about the abortion, perhaps even emotionally distressed about it. I was not, however, concerned enough for her to marry her and have the baby. It did not occur to me that she might have the child outside of marriage with me--that possibility was a stage in women's emancipation that the women's movement would reach in the next decade.

A few months after we parted, I met another woman, with whom I would fall in love, marry, and have a child. I did not look back upon my relationship with B_ with regret or misgivings. She shortly left the institution where I worked and returned to the Eastern US where she pursued her career. We had no contact with each other.

The episode reinforced my deep aversion to the life of the single man and dating. I did not like the risks and deceptions that came with being single and having casual sex. I knew that for me personally marriage is the context within which I wanted to have sex. I could feel good about sex within marriage, because it could be a relationship of trust. My wife and I could deal together with whatever consequences our sexual love brought.  Being single, it seemed to me, inevitably places sex within a context of dishonesty and distrust. I did not come out of my affair with B_ thinking well of myself.

As I mentioned at the outset of this reminiscence, I have become conservative on the issue of abortion. My focus of attention has shifted to the baby and our obligations to the baby.  This perspective changed my philosophical and political understanding of the issue (see here and here ).

Contents

1. Devaluing Women
2. Who Gets Abortions
3. Why Women Get Abortions
4. Decision Context
5. The Wanted Child
6. Family Formation
7. My Girl Friend's Abortion

The table of contents follows each article.

All Dr. Suk's Stem Cell Lines Are Fake

The Lost Angeles Times carries the story of the end of the tawdry tale of fraud. South Korean investigators have announced that all of Dr. Suk's stem cell lines are fake. But the fakery does not stop with the personal failings of Dr. Suk, despite the efforts of the scientific-medical research establishment and the Liberal MSM to spin the story that way. The scientific-medical research establishment is caught up in a fraudulent public relations campaign to present stem cell research as a historic advance promising great medical breakthroughs. This campaign is based on no substantial medical successes. It springs out of an opportunistic junction of the scientific-medical research community's materialist ideology--ultimately a rendition of Marxist Lysenko-ism--of the complete plasticity of the embryological building blocks of the human being, and plain old research avarice. The researchers smell tons of public and private money for them and their research. Finally, embryonic stem cell research also provides a potent political argument with which the Liberal scientific establishment can oppose the increasing shift of the American people against elective abortion.  Someone needs to expose the fraud in all its scope and scale.

Abortion and Totalitarianism

The political situation of surgical abortion in the U.S. exemplifies a social thesis about the rise of totalitarianism developed by conservative political theorists over the past two generations. Their thesis is stated in many works, but I will draw upon a classic, early statement by Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (1953). The argument is that democracy based on the political theory of Rousseau and the politics of the French Revolution destroyed social and cultural community and the individualism rooted in that community, substituting in its place a different kind of individualism created and protected by the political state.

For ease of reference, let us call individualism based on the person's membership in the social and cultural community, "conservative individualism". We shall call individualism based on political membership in the state, that is, the political community, "radical individualism."

According to the conservative political thesis, conservative individualism was defined by obligations to the social and cultural groups in which the person lived, as well as by rights. Such groups included the family and its kin, local villages and neighborhoods, fraternal organizations, trade and craft associations, and  local church congregations (for example). Needless to say, in such a community, the liberty of conduct that comes from privacy was restricted in conservative individualism, though certainly not absent.

The historical shift to radical individualism came when the state, using its power, granted rights and liberties to persons which unencumbered them of the restraints of the groups to which they belonged and of their mutual obligations. The great social and geographical mobility brought by the dramatic economic changes of the nineteenth century facilitated this growth of liberty. Persons freed from their local communities still wanted the spirit of belonging to community, however; the state provided this sense of belong increasingly by incorporating them into a political community. The state also came to provide the economic and social benefits previously provided by the local communities.

Once the shift to radical individualism was underway, historically, it was difficult to halt it. Individuals did not have the support of the local community, organizations, and customs and traditions they would need to break their increasing reliance upon the state, to replace the political community, and to resist the power of the state. The end result of the shift is the nation state in which the only community to which persons belong is the political community created and maintained by the state.

Nisbet concluded:

"We may regard totalitarianism as a process of annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community." (P. 201.)

Let us see how this shift to radical individualism is re-enacted in the lives of women who choose to abort their pregnancies. We want to focus on one group of such women in particular: the single, young, college woman ending her first pregnancy. Such women constitute the largest single social grouping of women who have abortions.  Their situation begins with leaving their family and local community to attend college. In public colleges and universities and in the elite private (secular) institutions today, the women are plunged into relative anonymity, unrelieved privacy, and complete liberty made possible by lack of regulation and oversight of the lives of college students by the schools. The women quickly live, by choice or not, radical individualism.

Their radical individualism is constructed by the college, which is a mini-state created by the laws of the nation-state as those laws, whether by legislation or through the courts, have gradually restricted the ability of states to require public colleges to oversee the lives of their students. The women have sex; some women become pregnant. (We shall set aside the issue of why they decide to have an abortion. In the majority of cases, it is because of pressure from boy friends or because the women don't want the young men involved in their lives. Nothing clarifies character like consequences).

The right of abortion is granted, along with the complete liberty of behavior that led their pregnancies, by the nation-state acting through its federal courts. As they consider abortion, the women complete their transition from their background of family and local community involvement, into radical individualism. They become bereft of any real community, protected and sponsored only by the nation state, which put them in the situation they are in. The women testify to this situation by the loneliness of their decision to abort and the abortion experience itself, which they are lucky to be able to share with one or two friends.

The abortion situation of the women represents totalitarianism as conservatives have long defined total political control. And the college women generally respond exactly as the totalitarian state desires: by defending that state with all their political energy. College women are the strongest supporters of the pro-abortion position. They usually are Democrats, if they are politically affiliated. The political wisdom is that vulnerable persons are most likely to drift to the Democratic Party. In the situation of the young women, it is the ideology and the policies of that party that made them vulnerable by stripping them of the comforts and protection of social and customary community. As a totalitarian-tending party, Democrats respond to their vulnerability by inducting the women into their lock-down political community.

As conservatives have feared, protecting the right to abortion requires the state (or the political party sponsoring the right to abortion) to deny any limits on abortion and to radicalize other forms of individualism, such as homosexuality. This is the engine that pushes the political abortion community toward totalitarianism: no other political positions can be tolerated.

The only way to stop the lock-step march into political totalitarianism is to reconstruct social community, custom, and rights, that is, to reconstruct conservative individualism. Some people say that you can't turn history back, which is nonsense. Social values, customs, and institutions swing back and forth over history; they can do so again. Legislation and court decisions that chip away at unlimited abortion rights, for instance, by requiring notification of parents in the case of abortion by minors, are important. Requiring colleges and universities to assume responsibility for adult students in their charge is also important. These and similar moves are not sufficient, however.

We must re-embed the abortion decision in the social community of custom and tradition. This could be done voluntarily by providing all women who are thinking about having an abortion with social, economic, and psychological support to complete their pregnancy. I am not referring to providing adoption services. It is not enough by itself to offer to adopt the child. The mother with the child must be adopted by a community. Social re-attachment should be the guideline for a new generation of opposition to abortion.

Thinking About Abortion (6) Family Formation

The politics of the abortion debate are in a stalemate.* The pro-life groups have reduced public support for all and any abortions, over the past generation, by focusing on late-term and partial-birth abortions.

Seeing support diminish for the right to abortion as an absolute position, pro-choice groups think about compromise in terms of reducing the number of abortions by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies through contraception and parenthood planning.

The pro-choice political hope is, I think, that if the number of abortions would be voluntarily  reduced to be closer the absolute minimum of those abortions required to save the life of the mother and resolve other extreme problems in a pregnancy (about 7% of abortions), the absolute right of abortion would be protected.

Liberal, pro-choice proposals for early sexual education and distribution of contraceptives are based on an instinctual theory of human nature (the sex instinct is natural and cannot be suppressed at any age) and on the belief that individual liberty of sexual expression is a basic value - indeed, a constitutional right (based in privacy) - that must be preserved at all costs.

Conservative, pro-life groups respond that individual sexual liberty is an extreme value and a false right. They observe, accurately, I believe, that extreme sexual liberty is a symptom of the societal abandonment of the traditional family as a basic social arrangement. They fear that early sexual education in schools and distribution of contraceptives promote acceptance of early sexual activity. They also fear that courts will require instruction about homosexuality and its normalization in the educational context, further reducing support for the traditional family.

Is there any way to get past this stalemate? Several social facts offer possibilities. One fact is that women do a better job of contraception after they have had a child or an abortion. Most women who have an abortion do not go on to have a second abortion. Another fact is that there is no social necessity to have zero population growth. Having babies and increasing our population through reproduction (and not simply by immigration) are positive goods. We don't need to kill babies to save American society.

These social facts focus the issue of  abortion, for  most women and most abortions, on the first pregnancy. Recall that the majority of women who have abortions have never been married (66% - 78% depending upon year and group). With this fact in mind, let's re-conceptualize the problem of abortion of first pregnancy as a problem of family formation.

As an issue of family formation, we could approach abortion by assisting and motivating women to get married and have their baby within marriage, rather than having an abortion and not getting married. At first glance, this seems like making the problem of reducing the number of abortions even more difficult to solve. But it does not. Remember than many women, probably half, maybe seventy-five percent, want to have their baby. They are persuaded or coerced to have an abortion, because they or their partner or parents are not ready for them to get married and form a family.

I have suggested several ideas for making marriage easier. These ideas are counter-intuitive; but thinking about them can be helpful.

Make fourteen years the age of adulthood. End compulsory schooling at fourteen years of age. Have every woman over six months pregnant be  married. If no marriage mate can be found for her, declare her married but abandoned. Support her family. Train her and her husband to be a family. Help this family to plan, support, and raise more children. Putting young women and men in  marriage would also put issues of sexual behavior in a framework more amenable, I believe, to conscience and to personal responsibility.

Social experimentation would be useful to find the more effective and morally acceptable ways of promoting family formation. It is exactly these kinds  of experimentation that should go on at the state governmental level and by the many private religious and secular institutions around the nation.

If we do this, I am confident that the rates of unplanned pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births would decline dramatically; and, with these declines, the number of abortions. If the number of abortions were reduced from 1 millionm (or so) a year to less than 100,000, the political issue of abortion would be transformed. Even cutting the number of abortions in half, to 400,000 or 500,000, would restore civility to public debate, by demonstrating that the abortion problem is not intractable and the decline of the conjugal family not inevitable.

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* I recognize and understand religious support for the pro-life position, but I am not discussing the doctrinal issues themselves. I also am not discussing the pro-choice theory of human nature.

Contents

1. Devaluing Women
2. Who Gets Abortions
3. Why Women Get Abortions
4. Decision Context
5. The Wanted Child
6. Family Formation
7. My Girl Friend's Abortion

The table of contents follows each article.

Thinking About Abortion (5) The Wanted Child

Abortion is a social act. It occurs within a legally constructed, politically maintained, social situation. Each abortion also has relations to a community, because the pregnant woman draws upon supportive values and networks and also encounters oppositional values and expression.

We have seen that a significant percentage of women have abortions because they are persuaded or compelled to have them, against their wishes or their dis-inclinations. This point is important. Some analyses of abortion assume that the aborted child is unwanted by the mother. The analyses calculate the costs and benefits of abortion against the costs and benefits of bringing unwanted children into the world. Well, I think this assumption is wrong for most women. I think most women who have abortions want to have their children. In a more humane social world, in a supportive community, they would have their children.*

Reducing the number of  abortions should be seen as bringing  more wanted children into the world - wanted by their mothers, wanted by their fathers, wanted by their communities. What might society at large and individual communities do to help women not elect abortion and have wanted children? Communities already reach out to pregnant women through consultation, education, and offers of assistance and protection. Could communities do more?

I assume that, as a nation, America would be better off with more children and a rising fertility rate, rather than a stagnant population. I state this, because I think much ideological passion has supported abortion on the notion that Planet Earth is headed for a Malthusian tragedy. This notion is a mistake. We have plenty of agricultural and industrial productivity to support an increasing population. It is okay to want more children.

To explore the dimensions of re-framing abortion within a community context, I propose hypothetical ideas. I do not endorse any of the following ideas. I do not suggest the ideas make a lot of sense. I am not sure I would support them after thinking more about them. I am simply using the hypotheses to provoke thought about social innovations that might lead women voluntarily to choose to give birth to the children most of them want, rather than  have abortions. In the discussions below, I have in mind mostly young women, under twenty-five years of age, because they have most of the abortions; but of course women and families of any age should be involved, if they are contemplating abortion.

(I should say as a preface that I am not  a student of social policy. I am unfamiliar with all  the ideas, policies, and  programs that  might be under consideration or under way in America today to convince women not to have abortions. I am unfamiliar with programs of the Catholic Church and other religious organizations to encourage women not to have abortions and to assist those women who choose not to have them.)

(I am aware that there many state social welfare programs for poor mothers and children. I am, however, interested in ideas that involve removing women, children, and families from direct dependence on the state and placing them in private communities. Probably some of my ideas are already tried and tested, rejected or being used. Perhaps readers will be able to steer me to useful information about any of these proposals that would help me development my thinking.)

Here we go**:

Pay the pregnant woman to have her baby and raise it. How would the abortion dynamic be altered if we offered every pregnant woman, regardless of marital status or age, $50,000 (or some effective sum) in tax-free cash, to have and raise her child?

Of course, this is, in effect,  what welfare does. Nonetheless, many women decide to have abortions anyway. What if we separated the subsidy from the welfare system and AFDC, had no means test, and made it a childbearing and parenting cash incentive? Some nations pay an annual subsidy per child. Why shouldn't we?

Require all unmarried pregnant women, who are at  least fourteen years of age, to be married to a man who is also at least fourteen years of age and to have and raise her baby. If there no one whom  the woman desires to marry or who wants  to marry the woman, we should pay a man to marry the woman.

Why should we assume that socially arranged marriage is unacceptable? Because it might be compulsory? Many persons marry for reasons other than perfect compatible love.

Okay, don't make it compulsory; pay them enough and they will marry.

We should get rid of the notion that "girls" of fourteen are not women and shouldn't be having children. Nature enables them to be pregnant. Let's stop thinking of such girls as children having children. As long as their bodies are healthy and they are not harmed medically by pregnancy and childbirth, let's get over the fetish that only legal  adults, eighteen  years and  older, should have children.

Subsidize older, successful families to take in socially arranged marital families of teens or young adults (if a teen or young adult would not elect abortion). This arrangement might be called "family apprenticing".

It sounds quite odd; nonetheless, for most of American history it was common for families to double up in a dwelling, because housing was often in short supply. Before the 1950s, families often rented a room  or  rooms to earn  extra income. We should not doubt that occasionally the permanent family in  the home was able  to assist and counsel the renting family. This arrangement might work as an arrangement to assist teens in family formation  and child-rearing.

Such arrangements are already done on an ad hoc family by family basis, when, e.g., grandparents take in a not-married daughter with a child. I can count two such arrangements in  my immediate neighborhood. A similar arrangement could work for whole families.

Pay cash to women (or men) to stay at home and raise children, if they are married.

We do this for children in foster care. Why not for every child?

Have every male register for the draft at fourteen years of age, instead of at eighteen, and take mandatory courses and/or training in preparation to be a working, family-responsible adult.

I know that this sounds like the youth programs of totalitarian societies and such associations are a worry. Nonetheless, such programs are a traditional part of the voluntary YMCA and YMHA summer camps, private preparatory school, and religious schools. Thirteen and fourteen years of age are traditional years for religious coming of age. The notion of compulsory registration gives one pause; but we require registration at eighteen. Why not at fourteen?

Have such programs separate from public schools and compulsory education.

Have every neighborhood adopt, sponsor, and support a home for a family which elects not to have an  abortion.

The dwelling (house or condo or apartment) could be owned and maintained by a private charitable association of the neighborhood. I presume suburb, city residential block, village, and rural crossroads would sponsor at least one home. Families would stay as long as needed to get on their feet.

Before the New Deal, many cities had community settlements. The settlements sponsored shelters for women and children, found and subsidized housing for families, sponsored laying in hospitals, and provided vocational training and education, visiting nurse programs, and other focused social work. The federal and state governments took over  much of this function after 1933. Settlements provide a model, however, for such private social assistance.

Rehabilitate America's rural and agricultural communities and small villages to host small numbers of families in sponsored homes. Associate work relief with such settlements.

The current practice of welfare assumes that state assistance is most efficiently delivered in the central city. The assumptions behind this practice do not necessarily pertain to private charity.

Why not sponsor five families in a small Ohio village? Train the families to do carpentry, drive tractors, cook meals, patch plaster, sew dresses, give first aid, and so  on, as they raise their families. Do this all over America in 10,000 villages and rural crossroads.

There is much about these ideas that bothers me. What about  individual moral responsibility? What about self-reliance? What about accepting the consequences for our choices?  Wouldn't the suggested programs encourage premarital sex? Shouldn't we teach young persons to be sexually responsible? What about cost? Don't these ideas require expanding the roles of the state and federal governments? Don't such ideas detract from a conservative vision of society?

Next post: general political, ideological, and social considerations about such ideas.

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*See the review of Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep (University of California  Press) by Kay Hymowitz, "The Meaning of Their Motherhood," Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2005), D10. I read the review after I posted this article;  but the work under review supports my contention for lower class women. Here are some quotations from Hymowitz's review:

"That [old] wisdom had it had unmarried poor women got pregnant either because they were unable to get hold of birth control or [were] ignorant of its use or because they viewed a welfare check as a substitute for an in-house father. Not so, find Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas: Young women, even those pregnant as young as 14, simply want to have babies."

The reviewer, Kay Hymowitz, also makes pertinent remarks about  the problem of women  having wanted babies but outside of marriage.

** After I wrote this article, I read Kathy Rudy, "Thinking Through the Ethics of Abortion," Theology Today (July 1994). (The article is  online but must be accessed through the archive index. Go to the month and year, then click the article title in the table of contents for the issue.) Rudy suggests that congregations adopt the pregnancy of members considering abortion, and act as a community of faith to remove  all obstacles to the woman having the baby. The similarities to my suggestions are evident in this quotation.

Rather than blaming the woman for her choice of abortion, or the father for his part, I suggest that we restructure the event so that the congregation members hold themselves responsible for the things that block this woman from having a child. In meetings and through negotiations with the pastor, the congregation should attempt to remove the obstacles that keep this woman or this couple from having this baby. If the woman is afraid that she will be expelled from her high school or Christian college or will lose her scholarship if the university finds out she is pregnant, the church should picket the school until policy is changed. If the woman is afraid she will lose her job, the parish should exert pressure on that workplace to change its rules and should strive to provide the woman with an equivalent job. If the woman is afraid to raise the baby, the congregation should step in and offer anything that is needed, including housing, support, even another family to raise the baby. Even if a woman decides that she must choose abortion, the congregation should still attempt to make the world a safer place for her to have a baby, because in so doing, the world might be made safer for the next woman with an unwanted pregnancy in that community. Whatever any woman would lose for carrying her baby to term should be redressed and supplied by her church. (p. 246.)

Contents

1. Devaluing Women
2. Who Gets Abortions
3. Why Women Get Abortions
4. Decision Context
5. The Wanted Child
6. Family Formation
7. My Girl Friend's Abortion

The table of contents follows each article.

(Revised.)

Thinking About Abortion (4) Decision Context

I thank a reader, Peter, for suggesting that I look at the influence of boy friends on women's decisions to have abortion and for recommending the web site, After Abortion.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute publication, "Reasons Why Women Have Abortions,"/1 provides a comparative statistical examination of motivations of women to have abortions in twenty-seven countries. (We are, however, discussing only abortions in the United States.) The research provides two categories of reasons relevant to the influence of other persons on the woman's abortion decision. One category, "Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy," points to boy friends. The other category, "Too young; parent(s) or other(s) object to pregnancy," points obviously to parents, but also to brothers and sisters.

The percentage of women who declared these reasons were:

• Relationship problem/partner objects: 14.1%
• Too young / parents or others object: 12.2%

As we shall see, however, women have multiple, sometimes conflicting, motivations. When a women is interviewed at a clinic, she has to choose from among her many motivations to respond to the interviewer with a specific reason. The artificial situation of the interview leads to some women masking the influence of others.

The leading reasons for having an abortion do not, apparently, point to the influence of others. They are:

• Desire to postpone childbearing: 25.5%
• Cannot afford a child now: 21.3%

These leading motivations certainly do not, however, necessarily exclude the influence of boy friends and/or parents to compel a woman to have an abortion.

There is much self-reporting testimony to the effect that the leading reasons stated by women at clinics are often simply the reasons presented by boy friends or parents without the women mentioning that the boy friends or parents had pushed the reasons on them.

If we combine these statistical categories, we obtain, speculatively, the largest possible estimate of the influence of other persons on the woman's decision.

• Largest possible estimate of women subject to overwhelming influence of other persons on their decisions to have abortions:  73.1%

Supporting this large estimate are several considerations. Most abortions are by women who are unmarried. Most abortions are by women who are under 25 years of age. Surely, these women are those most vulnerable to pressure by others.

Narrative testimony quickly takes us into the dense thickets of personal psychology within which women make abortion decisions. There are many personal stories about abortion on the Web. I am selecting two to illustrate the influence of boy friends and parents on the girl's/young woman's decision. (I have added testimony about my own experience, here.) The first-person voices are those of the women who had the abortions.

In the following quoted selections from a young woman's pro-choice blog, notice how the boy friend responds to the news that his girl friend is pregnant. He supports her, but then raises reasons why having a baby at this time (in the blog's chronology) is not advisable.

If it's possible, I love him more now than I did before I got us into this.

He has been as supportive as anyone can ask for in this situation. We spent hours together, talking about our future together, our hopes for each other, our hopes for our family... And his support for me now.

It was difficult, at first, to get him to go beyond the expected "I will be there for you no matter what." I know that it's true, but I didn't want him to harbor any resentment toward me for being the one with the power to make the final decision. I asked him late that night what he wanted me to do. "I want you to do what's best for you, and what's best for us."

"Do you want me to have this baby?" I asked. There was no tiptoe-ing around it. I felt that it was necessary to ask this question. I would respect his decision, and perhaps change my decision for him, if he felt strongly enough.

He thought for a moment. "I would like this baby, actually. Very much so. But at the same time, I know that we don't have what it takes to be good parents right now. We both have a lot of debt, we're still in school, and we don't have any jobs lined up yet. I don't want this baby being born into a family that's not able to take care of it the way it deserves to be taken care of."

I cannot bear the thought of my child being born into this world without any sort of security from the parents. And to give the child away?

It is selfish. This decision is wholly, entirely, relentlessly, unforgivably selfish. We know that.

Months later, after her abortion, the young woman reflects about her life, the abortion, and the reasons for the abortion. Notice in the following passage, how the choice has become hers, not that of her boy friend. Notice also that the reasons are those he presented to her.

It has been almost two months since I elected to have the abortion, and not a day goes by when I don't think about how thankful I am to have been able to make that choice for myself.

I visited my friends and their new month-old baby (not the same friend who did IVF), and it was a joy to see them all: mom, dad, and baby daughter, all so happy to be with each other. It didn't hurt, nor did it make me regret my decision to terminate my pregnancy. I had known from the beginning that I wanted to be a mother, but not under current circumstances. I want stability and security for my children, and by that, I don't mean that I want to have kids only when I've earned enough money to buy a house in California (which is a monstrous amount of money by most standards). I mean that I want both my partner and myself to have a stable living when we make the decision to start a family. One can argue that nothing is predictable, and that the future is uncertain, but I want to make sure that the odds are in our favor at the moment in time when we decide to have children. That's the least I can do for everyone involved.

Finally, in this quotation, the woman states that she wants to be a mother; but, just not now. It is difficult to resist the impression that, had her boy friend said that he wanted her to have their baby and opposed an abortion, she would now - in her blog - be saying it was her decision not to have an abortion and to start parenthood at once.

Let's turn to a second story, this one illustrating the influence of parents.

I got pregnant the usual way: strict parents, a crummy boyfriend, some major stupidity paired with limited access to, and information about, contraception. I kept it to myself, too, for a month and a half or so, first suspecting I was pregnant, then sure, then trying to figure out what to do. Telling my parents was the worst thing I've ever had to do -- not getting ready to tell them, because honestly, I didn't expect them to react the way they did, but actually telling them. My mother was quietly furious. My father acted like looking at me made him sick, and I think it probably did. I hadn't been ashamed, before -- worried, yes, scared, yes, maybe even a little excited, but not ashamed. It's amazing how quickly you learn to be ashamed, though.

My parents gave me options: abortion or adoption. I said no, I want to keep the baby. They said that was not an option. I said I'd move out. They said they'd report me as a runaway and have me hauled back. I said I'd get emancipated. They said they would never agree. I didn't know anything about my legal rights -- I thought I might have some, but at almost two months pregnant, getting up every day and making it through school took all the energy I had. I came home every day and went to sleep; got up for dinner; went back to sleep. I tried calling some kind of pregnancy hotline, once; it was busy, and I didn't try again. I talked to a school counselor, who seemed concerned until she learned my parents were involved, and then lost interest. Cthulu was the only person I had to talk to. He didn't have any more answers than I did. This was before the internet, and neither of us had cars, and information was impossible to come by.

I wanted the baby. I didn't like being pregnant, and I knew my boyfriend at the time was a major dick, but I wanted the pregnancy. I wanted to give birth. I knew it would be hard, although I probably had no idea how hard, or how very much it would change my life, but I knew I didn't want to give up the child I would have. But it wasn't an option, and I was so tired -- so tired of the way my parents acted around me, and the way my asshole boyfriend started treating me once I was pregnant, and of thinking about what it would be like if my parents were right, if they really could stop me from keeping the baby. The only thing I could imagine that would be harder than an abortion was having a baby I wanted, and nourished with my body, and waited for for nine months, taken from me after I had given birth to it.

So I had the abortion. My mother drove me seventy miles to the nearest clinic.

In our second narrative, the young woman ends up bitter at having had an abortion, angry at her parents. Reflecting on her abortion experience a decade later (the blog is a retrospective story, not a diary), she argues:

We have to stop this. We have to stop telling young women, I know better than you, who have to live in that body, what you should do with it. We have to stop telling them that what happens to them is shameful, or intolerable, or secret. When young women come into our lives, we have to support them better than this, whether we like their choices or not.

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/1. "Reasons Why Women Have Induced Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries," by Akinrinola Bankole, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas. International Family Planning Perspectives (Alan Guttmacher Institute publication), Volume 24, No. 3, August 1998. Table 2.

Contents

1. Devaluing Women
2. Who Gets Abortions
3. Why Women Get Abortions
4. Decision Context
5. The Wanted Child
6. Family Formation
7. My Girl Friend's Abortion

The table of contents follows each article.

Revised. September 28, 2006.

Thinking About Abortion (3) Why Women Get Abortions

The reasons why women obtain legal induced abortion can be obtained from several sources. The women can be asked. Researchers have done this on numerous occasions in many countries. The Alan Guttmacher Institute surveys and Planned Parenthood organization surveys are the most frequently cited sources for the self-reported reasons of women in the U.S.

Women's intentions can be inferred from statistical analysis of biographical and clinical information about the women obtaining abortions, the timing and circumstances of the abortions, and the quality of the aborted fetuses/babies. More of this kind of research appears to have been done than direct interview surveys. The US Center for Disease Control annual abortion surveillance report provides extensive statistical data.

All abortions as a group

We will approach the reasons from the broadest to the most specific. We are looking only at women in the US. First, most women obtain an abortion because they want to end a normal pregnancy. Few abortions (1%) are obtained because the pregnancy was initiated by rape or incest./1 Few abortions are obtained because the fetus is unhealthy or at risk (3.3%), or because the pregnancy is not healthy (2.8%)./2

Second, half of women obtain an abortion apparently because the contraceptive methods they were used failed to prevent pregnancy./1  The majority of abortions are to young women under the age of 25 years, who are not married, and a third of abortions are to college students./3

From the profile of the majority of abortion seekers, we can infer that the women were inexperienced in preventing pregnancy by contraception. They were in the beginning years (from a lifetime perspective) of their sexual activity. Their inexperience probably contributed to their misjudgments concerning the risks of pregnancy involved in timing and type of sexual activity.

Let us now turn to specific reasons why women decide to end a normal, albeit unplanned, pregnancy. These are summarized by the Heartlink article/3 as:

• Can't afford the baby right now
• Not ready for the responsibility of parenthood
• Concern about how a baby would change their lives
• Problems with relationship/desire to avoid single parenthood
• Too young, or not mature enough to have a child

I would lump these specific reasons together under the two general headings, inconvenient and difficult. The women have abortions, because it would be inconvenient to them to be parents or difficult for them to be parents. Twenty-five percent of American women state their reason for an abortion as a desire to postpone having children, rather than not having children, ever, at all. This is the most frequently cited, specific reason for an abortion./2

Given the sexual inexperience and life inexperience of the women obtaining the abortions, the inconvenience and/or difficulty of having unplanned parenthood with an unwanted child, while they are still in a preparatory stage of their own life, must loom psychologically large. Since abortion is legal and socially acceptable in large segments of American population, abortion is the simplest and comparatively easiest way to solve the women's problem.

Repeat abortions, as distinct from first abortions

What the general characterization and statistics I have presented so far do not address is the issue of repeat abortions, which are nearly half of all abortions in the U.S., as we mentioned the previous article in this series. A woman who has had one abortion could no longer be characterized as inexperienced sexually or inexperienced in life. She certainly would not be naive about the risks of sexual activity.

It makes sense to describe two separate motivational schemes in analyzing why women choose abortion - one scheme for women seeking their first abortion, and one scheme for women seeking a repeat abortion.

All of the specific reasons that a woman might seek abortion might be the same for a first-time abortion and for a repeat abortion, but how we understand those reasons would surely be different. We might say of a woman seeking a repeat abortion, she should have known better. It is this difference that might lead someone to say a woman having a repeat abortion is simply using abortion as a means of birth control, at variance with the legally intended use of abortion.

Nonetheless, the situation is too complicated to permit this conclusion easily. A recent study of Canadian women who have had repeat abortions (including women who were having their first abortions, as a control) concluded that physical abuse is involved. Women seeking repeat abortions were more likely to have been physically and sexually abused than women seeking their first abortions./4

On average, for all women (first abortion and repeat abortion) 25% to 30% of women reported some kind of conflict, physical abuse, or sexual abuse with their sexual partner. But when we separate first abortion from repeat abortion, the percentages are signficantly different. For example, 22% of first abortion women report sexual abuse (not described), whereas 35% of second abortion women and 45% of third abortion women report sexual abuse.(Table 1, source 4.)

In the pregnant woman's eyes, sexual abuse would probably taint the father of their child as a potential parent. This negative evaluation could be lumped in the category of difficult parenthood; but it is a qualitatively different kind of difficulty than simply, for instance, the management difficulty of working at a wage job and raising an infant at the same time.

The study specifically examined the issue whether the women seeking repeat abortions were using abortion as a method of birth control. The researchers concluded they were not.

ADDED NOTE. September 28, 2006. I continue the discussion of why women obtain abortions in my article, "Decision Context" (the next article in this series), looking at the role of boy friends in convincing women to end pregnancies.

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/1. "Reasons Women Choose Abortion." WebMD. (Sources cited in article.)

/2. "Reasons Why Women Have Induced Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries," by Akinrinola Bankole, Susheela Singh and Taylor Haas. International Family Planning Perspectives (Alan Guttmacher Institute publication), Volume 24, No. 3, August 1998. Table 2.

/3. "Abortion Statistics: Who and Why." Heartlink. (Alan Guttmacher Institute sources cited in article.)

/4. "Characteristics of women undergoing repeat induced abortion," by William A. Fisher, Sukhbir S. Singh, Paul A. Shuper, Mark Carey, Felicia Otchet, Deborah MacLean-Brine, Diane Dal Bello and Jennifer Gunter, eCMAJ/JAMCe, March 1, 2005.

Contents

1. Devaluing Women
2. Who Gets Abortions
3. Why Women Get Abortions
4. Decision Context
5. The Wanted Child
6. Family Formation
7. My Girl Friend's Abortion

The table of contents follows each article.

Revised. September 28, 2006.