The Abortion Myth

Leslie Cannold has written an extremely useful book in "The Abortion Myth." She seeks to put the ethics of abortion on new ground by looking at the experience of women who actually have abortions. According to Cannold, the usual rhetoric surrounding the abortion debate is unhelpful. The anti-abortion forces, she says can make their case "without once mentioning the pregnant woman, the woman who is nurturing the fetus in her body and who will be its mother once it is born. If we weren't so used to it, the side lining of women in the drama of pregnancy and birth, and the obliteration of the relationship between the woman and her fetus and could-be child, would be ludicrous. As it stands, we mostly tend not to notice." (p. 22) Conversely, she says that those on the pro-choice side unhelpfully make their case exclusively in terms of privacy and women's rights. This is unhelpful, she says, because "[r]ights are now seen as the absolute and private possession of individuals, who may wield them at whim, not at the discretion of the larger community. And because the rights of one person may clash with those of another (one person's right to free speech may conflict with another's right to privacy, for example) and because no one actually gets her rights until another person accepts the responsibility for delivering them, thinking about rights individualistically ultimately leads to deadlock- with each side asserting that their rights `trump' those held by others." (p. 27) The anti-abortion side ignores the problem of supporting the baby after birth, and the pro-choice side tends to ignore the fetus- indeed, many pro-choice advocates say that having an abortion is no different from any other surgical procedure. "While feminists had wisely realized that it was impossible for two sets of rights- the fetus's and the woman's- to be contained in one set of skin, they had not only rejected fetal rights, but the fetus itself (a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak). (p. 33) Cannold also explores the widespread anti-abortion tactics of "fetal flashing" and showing ultrasound pictures of fetuses in utero, and how it relates to the issue as a whole. With pictures and placards of dead fetuses, she says, the problem is not so much their goriness as the fact that they are unhinged from the context of the decision in the first place. "It is because the context is missing that the anti-choice movement gets away with flashing fetuses that in most cases are still-born, not aborted, and most likely have parents who would be both injured and outraged if they knew how their dead fetuses were being used." (p. 35) Regarding the pictures of fetuses in utero, she writes, "The fantastic images of fetuses in utero obtainable with high-tech photographic equipment, ultrasounds, and magnetic resonance imaging give the deceptive impression of the fetus as a cosmonaut, an independent and self-contained unit floating around in `space.' These technologies buil

Cannold does an excellent job reframing the abortion issue as one of morality rather than rights. She thinks that the pro-choice movement has taken the wrong direction in focusing on the rights of women, and has to a certain extent played into the hands of the anti-choice faction. She may well be right on this point. Cannold also thinks that the central point of disagreement between pro-choice and anti-choice women has more to do with why women should or should not be mothers than with the rights of the fetus. The book is a valuable addition to the abortion debate. It is certainly refreshing to hear from actual women about their views on abortion, and why they feel it is wrong or right. Indeed, one of the book's flaws is that it could have used far more quotes from its research subjects. Maybe the problem was that due to the small number of women interviewed, there just weren't enough interesting quotes. I would like to see a follow-up study with more participants. Cannold's book misses some important points relating to the abortion issue. In my opinion, it is morally acceptable to end the life of a human embryo or fetus to save other humans. That is exactly the situation we are in today. The earth cannot hold an infinite number of people. This is abundantly shown by the accumulating environmental problems we face, not to mention the declining standards of living in many countries, including the U.S. and Australia. We are exhausting the natural resources on which ALL human lives depend, very rapidly.(For more on this, I would suggest Diamond's book "Collapse" and Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency.") A stable population is an absolute necessity to get this situation under control. Population control is no liberal fad; on the contrary, it is deeply conservative. Given that we only have one planet to live on, we should be cautious about doing new things with it, including putting lots of new people on it. Whatever else you may say about abortion, it is an effective and inexpensive method of controlling the number of people. If you feel abortion is unethical, you still need to come up with a way to keep the population of the earth at a sustainable level. I don't see Christian churches ponying up the necessary money to pay for billions of people to learn and practice the rhythm method. This is condemning people--not fetuses, grown people--to death by war, disease, and ecological disaster. That doesn't strike me as genuine respect for human life. Cannold addresses the fact that the Bible says very little about abortion, and that disapproval of abortion by Christian churches is a relatively recent development in Christianity. I think this is very good. (Part of the problem I see in modern Christianity its that its most faithful adherents seem to know so little about the Bible.) I can certainly understand why a woman might feel abortion is morally wrong, even though I don't agree. While Cannold doesn't mention this, I also feel tha

Cannold does an excellent job of portraying the subjects of a study she completed in Australia that consisted of interviewing women, both pro and anti choice, about specific reproductive scenarios. But she went beyond just having subjects check boxes with answers to be tabulated and spit back out as percentages. She wanted to know WHY each woman made the hypothetical choices they made. In their answers are the reason why the struggle to keep abortion legal is a good one. Women choose to abort, Cannold found, because they take their responsibilities of motherhood so seriously that pro-choice women would rather abort a fetus than misraise, abuse, or neglect a child. Cannold found out that abortion enables women to eventually become mothers on their own terms, giving them not only freedom to be free of children, but free to start a family when they're ready to be good mothers. Cannold does an effective job of conveying the importance of motherhood and doing it right, even to a committed bachelorette such as myself. She also delves into the bond that pregnancy forges between the fetus and the woman who are about to become mother and child, and how that affects a woman's decision to abort rather than offer for adoption. As it turns out, even the anti-choice women in Cannold's study, some recalling past experiences, would not give a child up for adoption. Cannold's book consciously turns the abortion debate away from rights and towards a discussion of motherhood and whether the decision to become a mother can be forced on anyone, and whether anyone benefits from attempting to. Cannold's opening chapters' quotes and excerpts chillingly show the consequences should pro-choicers fail to put women in charge of their own pregnancies, motherhoods, and lives.I'm giving it four and not five stars because, quite frankly, I would have loved to read even more of her study's subjects' responses. They may not always match yours, but reading them is essential for anyone who wants to know why women will forcefully defend their right to choose an abortion, or try to take the right away.