from Talk to Action

In The New Republic, Christine Stansell writes on "Partial Law: A Lost History of Abortion."

"Thank God for President Bush, and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito," intoned Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention last week, after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, the so-called partial-birth abortion case. But Land also should have thanked Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose majority opinion dangerously reframes the abortion debate.

Kennedy ... reasons that the ban on D&X procedures--the medical name for what the anti-choice movement calls partial-birth abortions--should be permitted because it is meant to protect women from making a choice that goes against their nature. "Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," Kennedy declares. Concerned that women may learn the details of how the procedure is performed only after the fact, he writes, "The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed."
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In Kennedy's words, one hears the echo of the anti-choice movement's new emphasis on abortion as a de facto violation of something at the very core of women's being. Medical technicalities take up the bulk of the Court's majority opinion, but the reasoning concerns the nature of women and the integrity of their moral choices--an implicit rejection of the most mainstream tenets of modern feminism.

An implicit rejection of women's moral capacity or authority, an echo from the past — and a recapitulation of the arguments that made abortion illegal over a hundred years ago.

"Abortion hurts women" is a religious right mantra that fuels anti-abortion legislation in statehouses around the country, with varying degrees of success. Stansell correctly credits the religious right for promoting a strategy that, in defiance of legitimate and recognized medical opinion, casts abortion as deleterious to women's health while ignoring everything we ought to remember about a past in which abortion was a crime.

The Catholic Church was the first to attack abortion: Even before Roe, the Church hierarchy coordinated a parish-by-parish effort to stop any sort of reform bill, including those for therapeutic abortions. This predominantly Catholic movement didn't broaden into the more ecumenical one we know until the late '70s and early '80s, when Protestant evangelicals first joined in. In 1978, Jerry Falwell preached his first sermon on abortion; a year later, the newly formed Moral Majority put abortion at the top of its list of secular humanist scourges.

After the country recoiled from the wave of terrorism that followed such inflammatory and condemnatory calls to action — and from a so-called "pro-life" movement that seemed, then and now, complicit by its uncharacteristic silence — the religious right realized that it needed a new strategy, one that Stansell characterizes as a "softer, more 'woman-friendly' message." And that's when the Christian right began its journey into the past, a trip designed to take us all back to the future.

Painting abortion as an option that no woman really wants — a tragic abuse forced upon women by uncaring male partners and greedy abortion providers who lie to women about the nature of abortion and of pregnancy itself — antiabortion strategists engineered a truly draconian ban that made South Dakota the first state to defy the constitutional guarantees of Roe v. Wade, and that continues to inspire lawmakers in other states to attempt the same.

But as Stansell points out, an even greater concern is that the fictitious "evidence" and cooked-up conclusions of South Dakota's Task Force on Abortion are clearly echoed in Justice Kennedy's Gonzales v. Carhart opinion.

To comprehend just how bad the Court's decision is, you need look no further than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's powerful and lucid dissent. Ginsburg notes Kennedy's reversion to "ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution." In Kennedy's statement about the legal salience of "the bond of love the mother has for her child," she hears echoes of the Court's 1908 ruling in Muller v. Oregon that labor laws for women must be geared to the "proper discharge of her maternal functions." In the Court's assumption of the role of benevolent overseer of the pregnant woman's psyche--preventing her from casually making "so grave a choice"--she hears resonances of the 1873 case Bradwell v. Illinois, which asserted that "the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wives and mothers."

Justice Ginsburg does well to remind us of these decisions, which in their own time were influenced by 19th Century "experts" with similar opinions on the fitness of women to make reproductive decisions or to act as their own moral agents.

A early and influential proponent of the criminalization of abortion was Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer of Boston. Storer's "Why Not? A Book for Every Woman" was circulated by order of the American Medical Association in 1868 — and after reading what Dr. Storer had to say, one wouldn't be surprised to find a time-tattered copy in Justice Kennedy's desk.

To women ... the topic ... is one that affects, and more directly, perhaps, than can anything else, their health, their lives. It concerns their discretion, their conscience, their moral character, their peace of mind, even its very possession, for cases of insanity in women from the physical shock of an induced abortion, or from subsequent remorse, are not uncommon.
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I propose to show that induced abortions are not only a crime against life, the child being always alive, or practically supposed to be so; against ... all natural instinct, and against public interests and morality, but that, barring ethical considerations, and looked at in a selfish light alone, they are so dangerous to the woman's health, her own physical and domestic best interests, that their induction, permittal, or solicitation by one cognizant of their true character, should almost be looked upon as proof of actual insanity.

Kennedy's conviction that a woman could not agree to a "partial birth abortion" if she understood the nature of the procedure, and that learning such details after the fact would necessarily be harmful to her mental health — in short, that if she wasn't as horrified as he was, she damned well should be — is a direct descendant of Storer's own presumption of insight into processes of the female mind clearly understood by him, if unknown to women themselves.

[E]ven though the occurrence of any such feeling may be denied, there is probably always a certain measure of compunction for the deed in the woman's heart - a touch of pity for the little being about to be sacrificed - a trace of regret for the child that, if born, would have proved so dear - a trace of shame at casting from her the pledge of a husband's or lover's affection - a trace of remorse for what she knows to be a wrong, no matter to what small extent, or how justifiable, it may seem to herself, and we have an explanation of the additional element in these intentional abortions, which increases the evil effect upon the mother, not as regards her bodily health alone, but in some sad cases to the extent even of utterly overthrowing her reason.

We have seen that, in some instances, the thought of the crime, coming upon the mind at a time when the physical system is weak and prostrated, is sufficient to occasion death. The same tremendous idea, so laden with the consciousness of guilt against God, humanity, and even mere natural instinct, is undoubtedly able, where not affecting life, to produce insanity. This it may do either by its first and sudden occurrence to the mind, or, subsequently, by those long and unavailing regrets, that remorse, if conscience exist, is sure to bring. Were we wrong in considering death the preferable alternative?

That's right: she was better off dead. And with the Supreme Court's decision that there is no need for an exception to protect her health, a woman of the 21st Century is placed at risk of much the same fate.

Today, as we are bombarded with ubiquitous messages from "Christian" politicians that we "must reduce the number of abortions" by publicly funding programs to promote adoption — to the extent, in one ludicrous instance, of proposing straight cash payments from the state to dissuade women from abortion to adoption arrangements — it is instructive to learn that today's religious right walks a path well-trodden more than a hundred years ago.

Were well-arranged foundling hospitals provided in all our large cities, they would prove a most efficient means of preventing the sacrifice of hundreds of the children of shame, and, so far from encouraging immorality, they would afford one of its surest preventives, for by keeping a woman from the crime of infanticide or the equally guilty intentional miscarriage, they would save her from one element of the self-condemnation and hatred which so often hurry the victim of seduction downward to the life of the brothel.

Ah, yes, self-condemnation and the "victim" consigned to a downward spiral ending in the "life of the brothel." That opinion, too, is echoed today, as Operation Outcry testifies in statehouses across the country that it wasn't childhood sexual abuse or any other of a number of dreadful and dysfunctional circumstances that led them to alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, or even a life of crime and ultimate imprisonment — no, none of those, but a long-ago abortion chosen of their own free will.

To the woman in good bodily condition, occasional child-bearing is an important means of healthful self-preservation; to the invalid, an intentional miscarriage is no means of cure; if she be in poor health, let her seek aid and relief in the proper quarter, but not, by thus tampering with natural and physiological laws, alike imperiling both body and soul.

Perhaps it's only to be expected that Dr. Storer and "Dr." Kennedy would share the opinion that exceptions for a woman's health are simply not supported by the weight of scientific evidence. Interference with what Storer called "natural and physiological laws" and what Kennedy calls "ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child" can only worsen whatever ails a woman in the first place.

Justice Ginsburg wrote, "This Court has repeatedly confirmed the destiny of the woman must be shaped ... on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society." But that was then, and this is now — and everything old is new again.

Title image: University of North Carolina

Horatio R. Storer: AnesthesiaNursing.com