Lately these kind of questions have surfaced in a new way in the controversies over transgenderism, and especially over the practice of medically suspending a different biological transformation — not pregnancy but puberty itself. On that question feminism seems more doubtful and divided than about abortion. But there are currents linking the two debates, and where there are reasonable feminist doubts about adolescent transgender interventions, there might also be reasonable doubts that a right to abortion is the essential solution to the physical and psychological burdens of unintended pregnancy — as opposed to a right to receive care and support, with an ultimate goal of reconciliation.
The Burden and the Gift
From the perspective of Shane’s essay, of course, the idea that a woman might be reconciled to the burdens of an unsought pregnancy is just the same oppression with a velvet glove. But in actual experience such reconciliation happens all the time — which raises the second issue with the depiction that Shane and others offer of the pregnant woman’s predicament. Their argument deliberately isolates the traumatic aspects of childbearing, the better to cast them as a disease or a form of trauma, from the radical gift that pregnancy provides.
This gift is not just a human life in isolation but the most intimate form of human relationship. One that’s unchosen in cases of unintended pregnancy — but no more unchosen than other primal relationships that help define a human life. One that is sought desperately in many contexts, as no disease or trauma ever would be. And one that even in those situations where pregnancy is greeted fearfully might be welcomed and desired with adequate reassurance, protection and support. The first shocks of puberty are not the end of the adult female story; the placenta’s impositions are not the end of my wife’s book; and the full reality of pregnancy is not distilled by its traumatic elements.
For evidence of this reality, it’s worth taking up a work that’s often cited in pro-choice argument, a research project and 2020 book called “The Turnaway Study,” which tried to compare the life experiences of women who wanted an abortion but were denied one, because of legal cutoff dates, with those of women who obtained one.
The findings that the pro-choice side highlights include a relative absence of regret among women who had abortions, on the one hand, and the physical burdens and socioeconomic challenges borne by women who carried their pregnancies to term on the other. On the first point, a frequent pro-life rejoinder is that there was considerable attrition in the study and that women who regretted their abortions may have been more likely to drop out. On the second point, the study’s finding seems undeniable: For individual women, bearing and rearing children creates real physical risks and imposes real financial costs. (How much legal abortion reduces such risks in the aggregate, across society as a whole, is a question the last column in this series will take up.)
But the other notable finding from the project is the absence of long-term psychological trauma among most of the women who were denied an abortion. As the author, Diana Greene Foster, writes, there is initial distress when the abortion can’t be obtained, but not thereafter:
… once the pregnancy was announced, the baby born, and the unknown fears and expectations realized or overcome, the trajectory of mental health symptoms seems to return to what it would have been if the woman had received an abortion. I admit I was surprised about this finding. I expected that raising a child one wasn’t planning to have might be associated with depression or anxiety. But this is not what we found over the long run. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term was not associated with mental health harm.
The absence of such distress doesn’t prove anything about the rights or wrongs of abortion itself. But it undermines the claim that the harms from undesired pregnancy are so absolute as to simply settle the abortion debate. If enduring an unwanted pregnancy were a form of state-imposed brutality so severe that it automatically legitimated abortion no matter what the moral status of the fetus, you would expect that extremity to have far more significant psychological effects.
And the absence of those effects, even to the surprise of the study’s firmly pro-choice author, suggests that the gifts of pregnancy have their place in any analysis of what’s being asked of women confronted with its burdens. As does the equally notable way that women’s preferences shift as they pass through the experience: One week after the abortion denial, 65 percent of the women still wished that they could have had the abortion; after the child’s birth, it was 12 percent; five years later, it was 4 percent.