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From: saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Abortion (continued..)
Message-ID: <6951@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-Feb-84 01:08:52 EST
Article-I.D.: watmath.6951
Posted: Mon Feb 20 01:08:52 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 20-Feb-84 08:40:08 EST
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 121


Abortion: Part 4

     In the last article, I concentrated my attention  on  fetuses  in
the abortion debate.  In this one I will look mainly at mothers.

     Some people would allow women who get pregnant  as  a  result  of
rape  to have abortions if they so desire but not other women.  Let us
look at the possible motives for such a decision:

     1 - A fetus conceived from an act of  rape  is  less  human  than
another  fetus,  or  a  fetus conceived in such a way can be killed to
"pay for its father's crime" or something equivalent.  These positions
are  clearly  non-sensical.  A rapist's fetus is in no way responsible
for its father's crime, and it would be criminal to punish the  father
via  his  fetus.  Therefore the reason for allowing the mother of this
fetus is not related to the nature of this fetus, but to the nature of
the mother.

     2 - A woman who has been raped is more likely to suffer extremely
from  the  rape, and the existence of this fetus would be a daily rem-
inder of this horrible experience.  The child born will very likely be
given  up  for adoption or grow up unloved.  While adopted children do
not necessarily end up suffering too much because  of  this  fact,  it
still remains that they are at a disadvantage from the moment of their
birth because of our society's emphasis on the importance  of  "blood"
relations,  and  because of the fact that no matter how unimportant it
might be, it is never nice to feel unwanted by one's own parents.

     While it is probably true that the mother and  child  in  a  rape
conception  have  a  greater  chance  of suffering as a result of this
rape,  suffering is not limited to women who have been raped.   It  is
quite  conceivable  that  a  raped  woman might suffer less than other
women as a result of being pregnant.  For example, it is quite  common
for wife-batterers to start battering their wives as they are pregnant
(why this is so, I do not know); continuing  such  a  pregnancy  would
make  the  wife  and child even more vulnerable to battering as a wife
usually depends more on her husband the more children she  has,  since
she  needs more economic help to support herself and the children then
she would just to support herself;  For this reason, she may decide to
stay with him, something she would not have done if it hadn't been for
the existence of the child;  the suffering will probably not  be  lim-
ited  to  the mother: in many wife-battering situations, children also
end up being battered (by either the father or the mother).

     Therefore, if the reason for allowing abortions to women who have
been raped is to alleviate hers and the child's suffering, we must, if
we want to be fair, allow it to other women who would also suffer  "as
much"  from  their  pregnancy.   This  involves  being  able to assess
suffering.  Suffering, however is highly subjective, and  even  if  it
wasn't  and  it was possible to determine a measure of suffering, this
could only be done with present suffering.  Some of the suffering con-
sidered  in  making a decision as to whether or not one should have an
abortion is actually present such as the physical  and  emotional  and
economical  discomforts  of  being pregnant, but most of the suffering
being assessed is future suffering, what effect the  child's  presence
will have on our lives as well as what effect our rejection partial or
total, physical or emotional of that child will have on him/her.  This
is  something which can only be guessed, and the persons who can guess
best are the ones directly involved: the mother, the child,  and  more
remotely the father, or the families of the parents.

     The idea of letting people so  closely  involved  determine  what
amount  of  suffering is tolerable for them repels many people because
they are afraid that this concept might  be  abused,  and  that  women
might  decide  on  the  whim  of  the moment not to have a child, even
though the presence of that child would not disturb  them  very  much,
and  use  the excuse that only they know how much they will suffer, to
get rid of it.

     While this is a very valid point theoretically, and  while  there
might  actually  be cases where this might happen, the reality is that
abortions are not trivial processes emotionally  and  involve  a  fair
amount of suffering from the mother's part (and hopefully as little as
possible from the fetus' part).  To find  out  about  this,  one  only
needs to ask women who have gone through one.

     Some of this suffering is brought upon by society's insistence on
inducing  guilt on a mother who has decided that having an abortion is
the best solution for herself, but some of it also seems to be  simply
caused  by  the  abortion  itself in the sense that the mother feels a
real loss when she is not pregnant anymore and sometimes goes  into  a
period of mourning.  The loss felt varies greatly with each woman, but
for most it is definitely there.  Not only is the loss felt after  the
abortion,  but many women (most of the ones I know) realise before the
abortion, or before even getting pregnant that they would feel such  a
loss.  Most women I know who support abortion on demand also feel that
even though their position is clear on their right to have an abortion
is  they  so  desire, they are not as sure about whether they would be
able to stand such a loss if they were faced with having to  make that
decision  themselves.   I do not have any data on this, but my impres-
sion is that most women do realise  beforehand  that  some  amount  of
suffering  is  involved in having an abortion, and do make their deci-
sions with this knowledge in mind.

     This point will be fairly obvious to most women, I  believe,  but
it  is something which many men are not aware of, this is why it needs
to be made.  Many people like to depict women choosing to  have  abor-
tions  as heartless creatures who have no concern for the suffering of
others.  Of course, some are like that, but my  feeling  about  it  is
that  most of these women do have some concern over others' suffering,
but it is a more complex concern than the  simple  "I  will  not  kill
because  that's  bad"  concern  that the people criticising them have.
The only evidence I have supporting this point of  view  is  from  the
people  I have known or heard of.  It is not good enough to be "signi-
ficant" in a statistical sense, but the evidence  that  has  been  put
forth so far by people disagreeing with me on the matter has been even
less significant: none of them ever bothered  speaking  to  the  women
they were accusing of being insensitive.

     To recapitulate what has just been said, if women who  are  raped
are allowed abortions so as to alleviate some of their suffering, oth-
ers who would also suffer should also be allowed abortions.  Therefore
if abortions are allowed only to women who have been raped, the reason
for allowing such abortion must  be  other  than  to  alleviate  their
suffering.   It  is  those  reasons  that  I  will analyse in the next
chapter.


                                Sophie Quigley
                                watmath!saquigley