What would it take to eliminate abortion?

In my last post, I wrote about the political aspects of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, particularly in light of the possibility that the current Court might end up overturning it when they decide Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year. But there's another aspect of the abortion debate that I would like to consider. There are strong political forces in this country that say it is their goal to eliminate abortion. But what would it take to do that? Is it even possible?

Naturally it's possible to pass laws against abortion, and to define penalties for those who break the laws. That's the easy part. But surely everybody knows that merely passing laws won't actually eliminate abortions—they'll just happen illegally. In the same way that illegalizing drugs just drove the drug trade underground, so illegalizing abortions will—in the absence of any other changes—just drive the abortion trade underground. Anyone who considers the subject honestly knows this.

But wait. "In the absence of any other changes"? Is it possible that there are indirect ways to reduce or eliminate the number of abortions in the country, by eliminating the causes that create the demand for them? What would such an approach even look like?

What would it take to eliminate abortion?

According to nature

My thinking about this topic was inspired by Frederica Mathewes-Green, who wrote in a 2016 essay as follows:

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

Of course she's right. In a trivial sense, the only reason anyone chooses anything is that it looks better than the other options. As for her charge that many women feel trapped into having an abortion, I have no idea whether that's true or not. All I can say is that Frederica* has talked to a lot more women pre- and post-abortion than I have. So maybe provisionally I can take her word for it.

But I want to go back to one sentence that represents, for me, the key insight in this passage: You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” This is important. If we take Frederica's insight seriously, we have to conclude that something is badly wrong with the way we live.

You remember that the original point of this blog was to try to see the world "with classical eyes," and that this phrase implies in part a willingness "to accept that things have a nature, and that at least some things have a purpose." By these lights, there must be such a thing as "how we are meant to live by nature"; and abortion is so manifestly artificial an arrangement that it is very unlikely that abortion itself is by nature. (I mean medically-induced abortion here. There is a kind of abortion which is indeed by nature, but we call it miscarriage.) So if we find that there is currently a demand for medical abortions, there must be a reason. To put it broadly, we must be doing something wrong for such a demand to have arisen in the first place. In Frederica's terms, something must be really wrong in our environment.   

So when I ask whether abortion can be eliminated, I am really asking: What factors are causing this kind of stress in us, in the human animals? What's wrong with our environment that is pushing women to want access to abortions which presumably (in the absence of such stresses or other factors) they would not seek out in the same kinds of numbers? What would we have to change in our environment to eliminate that demand?

Why do women seek out abortions?

The first step is to inquire why women seek out abortions? Fortunately, it turns out there are studies on exactly this question. A quick Google search turns up three studies from different years, but their results are largely consistent. The studies are these:

• Biggs, M.A., Gould, H. & Foster, D.G. Understanding why women seek abortions in the US. BMC Women's Health 13, 29 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29   
• L.B. Finer, L.F. Frohwirth, L.A. Dauphinee, S. Singh and A.M. Moore, Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2005, 37(3):110–118. https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/3711005.pdf
• Dawn Stacey, Why Do People Have Abortions?, December 19, 2021. https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-for-abortion-906589

Collating the results from these three studies, the primary reasons that women have abortions are, in order from most to least common, as follows:

1. They can't afford a baby financially.
2. They can't afford the disruption a baby will cause to their lives at this time.
3. They don't have the support they need (unmarried, partner does not want baby, partner is abusive, etc.).
4. They need to focus on other children.
5. A baby will ruin their future opportunities (education, employment).
6. They don't want people to know they had sex or got pregnant.
7. They are not mentally or emotionally ready to be mothers.
8. Health-related reasons (baby will be damaged, baby will endanger their health).
9. They cannot provide a good life for the baby.
10. They don't want to give the baby up for adoption.
11. They were victims of rape or incest.

There were minor differences among the three lists, but no significant ones. And these eleven reasons pretty much sum up all the reasons that were listed. So now the question that I posed above can be reframed as: What is wrong with our social environment today that makes these reasons possible? 

Or, to put it another way: If we were living the way we were meant to live, would these reasons all go away? What are the changes or gaps between how we were meant to live and how we actually live that make these reasons happen? 

Also, Can we go back? Can these reasons be eliminated? What would it take?

What do we have to change?

If we look at each of the eleven reasons in the list, our first question should be: What is the fundamental assumption behind each of these in turn that makes it a reason to abort one's child? Let me explain what I mean by giving an example. The first reason listed is, "They [the mothers] can't afford a baby financially." One assumption which makes that into a reason to abort is, "The mother has to bear the financial costs of the baby." Do you see what I mean? If that assumption were false—in other words, if mothers never had to bear the costs of their babies—then limited financial resources would no longer be a reason to abort a child. 

Note that when I say this, I'm not making any argument for or against a particular way of doing things. I'm not making an argument about who should bear the costs of babies. I'm just trying to explain what I mean by "finding the assumption behind a reason that makes it a reason." And the example I give doesn't have to be the only one. Maybe you can find another assumption too, that works the same way. This is just an example.

In fact, the list of fundamental assumptions behind these reasons is a lot shorter than the list of reasons itself. I think it's possible to write a minimal list of fundamental assumptions as follows:

• Nuclear families: We assume that mothers (and their partners, if any) are solely responsible for the care, nurturing, and expenses of their children OR ELSE they have to give up those children completely to someone else, in another nuclear family, who will accept that responsibility. (This covers reasons #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10.) 
• Sexual propriety: We assume certain kinds of rules around what constitutes decent or proper sexual behavior, with the result that women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. (This covers reason #6.)
• Health: We assume that it is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother. (This covers reason #8.)
• Rape and incest: We assume that it is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived. (This covers reason #11.)

That's just four basic assumptions. What would it take to reverse them?

1. Nuclear families

This is the big one. Mothers are solely responsible for their children, OR ELSE they have to give up the children completely to somebody else. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

Note, by the way, that the assumption has two parts to it. The first part says we assume that mothers are responsible for their children.** At this point it is easy to object, "But what about all those wonderful families waiting to adopt? If a mother can't take care of her own child, why can't she give him or her to a family who can provide a better life?" But that is just the second half of the same assumption. Underlying it all is the clear assumption that somebody—some one, identifiable, nameable person!—has to be responsible for the child, and also that people are naturally organized into households which contain either solitary adults or else nuclear families. Therefore, if a mother cannot take on the heavy and expensive responsibility to be that unique caregiver, she has to let someone else do it; and "letting someone else do it" means she will never see her baby again.

This is a lot to ask. Even mothers who know that they can't undertake the responsibility for their children don't want to give their babies up. In fact, the 2005 study identified above specifically discusses attitudes towards adoption (p. 117) and remarks: "While fewer than 1% of women in the quantitative survey volunteered that they would not consider or did not favor having a baby and giving it up for adoption, more than one-third of interview respondents said they had considered adoption and concluded that it was a morally unconscionable option because giving one’s child away is wrong." [Emphasis added.] In other words, more than a third of the women interviewed concluded that giving their child away for adoption was morally worse than aborting him or her.

This is the time that someone should object, "But what are the other alternatives? Surely either you look after your child or someone else does—right? Are there really any other choices?"

Of course there are other choices. Just not here and now.

• In an earlier day, the extended family offered an alternative. Especially if many members of the family lived all together (or at any rate very close by), there would have been any number of sisters and aunts and cousins to help raise one's child. Other people could share the work, other people could share the expense, and one wouldn't have to give up him or her completely.
  
  
• More fundamentally, if (as I have suggested earlier) "we were meant to live [tribally] in immediate-return foraging communities," children would have been raised by the whole tribe. Mothers would never have to give them up completely, but at the same time they would not have had to shoulder the awesome burden of sole responsibility that faces them today.

In other words, the first unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic is the nuclear family.

2. Sexual propriety

What's next? Because of our social rules of sexual propriety, women (or at least some women) will be shamed or punished if other people find out that they had sex or got pregnant. What would it take to undo this assumption, or to make it false?

To undo this assumption means eliminating the situation where any women are shamed or punished for having sex: to cover all the bases, let me clarify that this means for having sex at all, and for having sex at the wrong time, and for having sex with the wrong person. I insist on all those variants, because any one of them might result in a pregnancy that a woman would want to hide or make go away. 

Now clearly there are at least two ways to avoid that any woman ever fears shame or punishment for one of these things. One way is if she never has the wrong kind of sex. The other way is if she won't get punished for any kind of sex, regardless. In principle either approach would achieve the goal. But I consider that it is impossible to guarantee the first one. Therefore if we want to adjust society in order to eliminate this cause for abortions, we have to go after the second.

That is, the second thing that makes our environment so toxic are all our ideals of sexual propriety, including in particular: virginity, chastity, and monogamy. In saying this, I am not saying that everyone should live in a riotous carouse at all times. Do not misunderstand me. There are a lot of good things to be said in favor of monogamy and the rest. But to make them ideals or principles, whereby people who fail to live up to them are shamed or punished—well, the data show that doing so causes (a certain number of) abortions. 

In other words, holding up those ideals is the second unnatural stress that makes the environment in our "nature preserve" so toxic.

3. Health

Our third fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child whose health will be fundamentally damaged from birth OR to continue a pregnancy which might kill the mother.

This one is more difficult. In the case where a pregnancy might actually kill the mother, I think I have to agree with Florence King: the mother was there first, so if it really is a strict choice between them, then she takes priority. In other cases of severe health risk, it is possible that better availability of health care might help sometimes. It is also true that some children born with severe health problems might well die young. Of the four fundamental assumptions supporting abortion, I think this is the hardest one to eliminate completely.*** So even if we eliminate all other causes, I think there would likely still be a small number of abortions resulting from health-related problems.

4. Rape and incest

The last fundamental assumption is this one: It is bad to bear a child that you will always hate and resent because you hate how he or she was conceived.

I admit I don't know what to say about this case. I have not known anyone personally who has had to face this situation, and in the absence of such personal acquaintance I would feel presumptuous laying down the law about a situation so intimate and so painful. It is possible that some of the pain could be alleviated if the child were able to fade back into the rest of the community or the tribe—not given away, exactly, but allowed to spend more and more time with other people, and therefore not posing the same kind of lifelong reminder to the mother. But I might be wrong. I am willing to listen to suggestions from someone else. For what it is worth, all three studies that I reference above list this as the cause of only a very small percentage of abortions.

My conclusion is that yes, if we pursue Frederica's thought-experiment, we can identify toxic stressors in our environment that push women to abort their unborn children. What is more, nine of the eleven regularly identified causes—accounting, cumulatively, for over 85% of all abortions****—can be traced to just two assumptions in our society. These two fundamental assumptions, these two "toxic stressors," are: 

• the nuclear family
• the ideals of virginity, chastity, and monogamy

Maybe these won't be so easy to eliminate. But that means maybe it won't be so easy to eliminate abortion. 

I have speculated before that we were meant to live in the way described by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá—and also, be it noted, by the divine Plato. It is worth observing that such a life would indeed avoid all these toxins. So perhaps it is fair to say that the fundamental reason so many women seek out abortions is that our lives are out of joint. We are not living as we should live, or as we were made to live, and the resulting stress is making us do crazy things.

The sad part is that, as I discuss in the earlier article, we may not be able to get back there from here. Still, it's nice to understand, at least. 

__________

* I will refer to Ms. Mathewes-Green consistently by her first name, because that's the name of her blog and how she refers to herself. This does not mean that I know her personally, more's the pity.   

** Naturally if the mother has a husband or other partner who is supportive and willing to share the burden and the expense, that's great. But all too often she doesn't (reason #3), or even if she does they just don't have the money (reason #1) or something like that. To keep the discussion simpler, I will say "mothers are solely responsible for their children" even though I recognize that these other cases exist.   

*** Not that any of them is easy. Eliminating the nuclear family, or all our ideals about sexual propriety? Good luck with that. 

**** Nearly all the rest are health-related. The number of abortions resulting from rape or incest add to less than 1.5% of the total.