St. Augustine on Abortion, or Walking on By

The other night I walked out of a panel on the RHPAA at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South to be met by two men (skeevy, skeevy men) who had been lying in wait for two hours to badger the women and men leaving the meeting. Inside the panel, I had witnessed a dude who sallied his way forth through many of the women standing around commenting how “I, as a man, just remember the tears in my girlfriend’s eyes after her abortion, and so I just can’t support this…” This of course leads us back to one of my essentials: do not dare to universalize your own experience and assume that all women, (who, such arguments presumably assume, must be cut from the same cloth), will have the same experience. This is why we speak of Choice, a woman’s Choice– and for some women that may mean giving birth to a baby, and for some women that may mean exercising their right to abort. By the way, this incident reminded me of one of the better articles on the Gonzales vs. Carhart decision, written by the ever-brilliant Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, regarding the arcane, “fatherly” concern that Justice Kennedy exhibited by his decision to “protect the Inconstant Women.” Check it out.

Outside, however, one of these men held a large picture showing what could only be a one-year-old child sleeping peacefully, if unorthodoxly, in a womb and the other, in the most cowardly of ways, muttered under his breath “Baby killer. Sure, go ahead, you wanna kill babies. Killin’ babies. Baby killers.” It nearly made me laugh, except I was slightly shaken, especially realizing what it must be like for women going to abortion clinics being hassled by a throng of such obnoxious ranters.

Which makes me ask, How dare they? Who do they think they are? What drives these people who would stand out on a cold early March day just to wave a piece of propaganda around and slur asinine phrases at a bunch of people affirming the right of women to make decisions regarding the course of their lives? My understanding is that much of it is religiously or ‘morally’ based, and some of it stems from a very base notion that women should not have control over their own bodies.

Such arguments, which do not make room for the economic concerns of those who cannot afford to have a child, which do not acknowledge that contemporary social norms accept that a woman will have a career and an independent life, which do not make exception for risks to a woman’s health, are fundamentally anchored in the notion that abortion, timelessly, has and always will be immoral, and that a woman’s body, eternal, must accept the fate pregnancy has given it.

Interestingly, if you look historically at the stance of the Catholic Church towards abortion, you will find that before the nineteenth century, the fetus was not considered to have a soul until forty or eighty days after conception (depending on whether the fetus was male or female). This attitude followed on Aristotelian and Augustine theories on the nature of the soul. Thus, it was perfectly acceptable under church canon law to prematurely abort the fetus. Of course, they would never have used such terms, but instead might have said that they were merely expelling the “fruit.” It was only with the beginnings of the scientization of reproduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the findings of embryology convinced the church that the fetus did in fact have a soul at conception (Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany. New York, 2007. p. 7) .

Nonetheless, even if the Church had changed its stance on the constitution of abortion, the average working class woman often did not view an early abortion as such. Instead, for example, Weimar proletarian women regarded these procedures as attempts to initiate the course of a “blocked menses,” and in abortion trials often did not reference “fetus” or “abortion,” because, in their perspective, they had not actually committed an abortion (Usborne, 147). As Cornelie Usborne, an historian of Weimar abortion culture teaching at Roehampton University, London, writes “there is a close connection between women’s choice to reproduce or not to reproduce and their social, political and cultural situation. Abortion is not a timeless phenomenon but one that differed greatly according to gender, age, class, occupational and educational background, geographical area and period” (Usborne, 11).

The “body eternal” is in fact transient; the very meaning of pregnancy and abortion has changed over time and place, thus making the application of inert meaning or morality untenable.

As Cambridge historian, Quentin Skinner, writes in regards to the study of philosophy, “There are only individual answers to individual questions, and potentially as many different questions as there are questioners… [To recognize] that our own society is no different from any other in having its own local beliefs and arrangements of social and political life is already to reach a quite different and, I should wish to argue, a much more salutary point of vantage.” (Quentin Skinner. Visions of Politics. Volume I: Regarding Method. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 88.)

Our life philosophy is much different than those that came before us. No longer do we track the days toward ensoulment, and no longer would most women consider an early abortion merely an operation to unblock the menses. Therefore, instead of assuming an eternal question of the body, we must address the issues in our own day which would make reproductive choice an evident right.

Firstly, our sexual mores have changed in such a way that it is acknowledged, and in some social realms, taken for granted, that women will become sexually active before they are ready or willing to have children.

Secondly, we give the highest valuation to the mother, so that if her life or health is at risk, the fetus may be aborted. Given our medical knowledge, we also recognize that it is only right, and humane, to abort a fetus if that fetus is unlikely to survive outside the mother.

Thirdly, we recognize the bodily sovereignty of the woman, thus allowing for abortion (currently up to the point of viability) for any reason that the woman finds suitable to her situation. We recognize that women are not universal vehicles for the birthing of children, but have individual circumstances, including age, economic and social situations, career, etc., which may make pregnancy and a child unfeasible. The pluralizing of history has neatly mimicked our recognition of the pluralism of our own society. Given this pluralism, it is a foolish proposition to suggest that all women must be constrained to the non-choice of giving birth if they become pregnant.

This is why I ask, how dare these men try to place their own assumptions and beliefs on the lives of individual women, how dare they be so cowardly as to harass women who have exercised their rights and their choice. It was easy for me, on a cold March night, not personally facing such a reproductive choice, to walk right on by, down 4th St., to get on with my life. I cannot imagine that it is always so easy for a woman to walk right on by when her choice is so egregiously attacked.