Talking About Abortion
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Abstract
This essay examines the complex and contradictory nature of how the issue of abortion is discussed in the U.S. today. In political debate, on conservative news stations, and outside abortion clinics, abortion is regularly shouted about loudly and with great conviction by those who want to see the procedure recriminalized. Yet at the level of individual experience, abortion is rarely discussed, even among close friends and relatives. How is it that a medical procedure, legal since 1973, remains a source of shame and secrecy? To answer that question, this essay identifies the categories into which the subject of abortion commonly falls and argues that so many things in the U.S. are about abortion because abortion itself is about so many things: medicine, religion, rights, regulation, morality, sex, gender, families, and politics. There are complicated views toward abortion within each area, and they complications increase when one area intersects with another -- religion and law, politics and reproduction, the practice of medicine and the regulation of abortion. Disaggregating the many factors about which citizens have strong beliefs reveals how the subject of abortion is an opaque slate upon which concerns not just about fetal personhood but about states’ rights or teenage promiscuity or women’s power can also be inscribed. Talking more openly about abortion will help normalize a decision made by millions of women each year so that the decision can be made outside the parameters of shame and secrecy that so often now set the scene for women with unwanted pregnancies.