Only one solution?

Ellen Goodman begins her diatribe against the ban on partial-birth abortion by referring to a historical Supreme Court case (under Justice Joseph P. Bradley) that ruled that women are unfit for public life because working outside of the home is contrary to their nature as wives and mothers. She goes on to compare this ruling to the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban on partial-birth abortion, claiming that the Supreme Court is once again trying to legislate what is good for women.

Regulating women (Ellen Goodman ~ Boston... - Care2 News Network

Abortion is inherently harmful to women, their argument goes, because it violates a woman's true "nature," her role as a mother. This would be familiar stuff to Justice Bradley, but Justice Kennedy also wrote about "the bond of love the mother has for her child," suggesting that any true woman would suffer.

I don't deny that some women feel regret as well as relief after an abortion. More than 30 million American women have had abortions since Roe v. Wade. Each unwanted pregnancy comes with its own story of a failed contraceptive or failed relationship, of an economic or a health crisis.

Some women do indeed feel coerced by men or by parents. Surely thousands have suffered from the crisis they faced and the decision they had to make.

But to this range of individual dilemmas, the pro life argument offers only one solution: Criminalize abortion. To this range of life stories, it offers only one kind of "help": Take the decision out of her hands. Now their argument has been folded into a Supreme Court decision. As Yale Law School's Reva Siegel said, "The opinion imagines that the state knows better than women what they really want and need in matters of motherhood."

I want to first focus on the last argument here. Ms. Goodman's argument reminds me of a debate I had with my aunt about the Church's teaching on contraception. She was arguing that contraception must be made legitimate because a woman has the right to protect herself against an abusive husband or boyfriend who pushes sex on her. She argued that in such cases there is no way that Natural Family Planning could work.

My aunt made a very similar argument to Ms. Goodman's, "the only solution the Church offers a woman in such a condition is to get pregnant." The same is true of Ms. Goodman's claim. Is criminalizing abortion really the only solution offered by pro-life groups? Most pro-life groups that I am aware of support a total respect of reproduction, including the promotion of abstinence education (another thing that Ms. Goodman ridicules). Efforts include pregnancy crisis centers, houses for single pregnant mothers, and promotion of adoption. These and other solutions preserve the dignity of motherhood. Far from taking the choice out of women's hands, pro-life groups attempt to empower women to make the best choices, before they choose to have sex and after the natural consequence and purpose of sex occurs in their bodies. It is Ellen Goodman who is removing choice - by narrowing the decision to two options: kill your baby or suffer with an "unwanted baby."

This is exactly the point where Ms. Goodman's modernist philosophy comes to bear. I think I would find my self disagreeing with Justice Bradley's ruling that women should not work outside the home. However, my reason for disagreeing would be very different from Ms. Goodman's. For me, Justice Bradley's argument is a misapplication of a true principle. Women and men are different, and therefore play different roles in society. It does not necessarily follow that they should not be part of the workforce, or that they should not follow careers. In fact, women should be in the workforce precisely because they are different from men. While men approach their careers from the male perspective and in the role of fathers, women approach their careers from a female perspective and in their role as mothers. Motherhood and fatherhood are roles not limited to the upraising of children.

Modernists see Justice Bradley's ruling in a completely different light. Modernists don't believe that there is such a thing as motherhood, or womanhood, or fatherhood, or manhood. For a modernist, his ruling is an imposition of a subjective label (motherhood, fatherhood, male, female) on a culture. Modernists also see his ruling as a power struggle between men and women, in which men try to impose a subservient role onto women in order to keep them under their thumb. They see attempts to interfere with "abortion rights" in the same way.

This viewpoint also feeds into the liberal view of government. For modernists, the purpose of government is to ensure individual liberty, defined as the right to do whatever you want - ultimately, to make up whatever reality you choose to live. If modernists believed in such things, they would have a tough time coming up with any proof that America was founded on this view of government. Contrarily, our country was formed on a much more Catholic view of government. The purpose of government is primarily to protect the common good. The common good includes some fundamental freedoms and rights, but throughout history a society that allowed its citizens to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted was doomed to failure.

Are gender roles important to the common good? If we examine our culture it doesn't take too much thought to see that our culture is suffering due to the failure of families, higher divorce rates, and lower marriage rates. This is what Justice Bradley was trying to prevent. Keeping women out of the workforce was probably not the way to do it, but a way must be found to bring back parenthood as a value in society and to truly respect gender differences. Government has a stake in this question because how we treat family and gender roles affects all of society.

So what about partial birth abortion? Does government have a stake in the question about whether or not abortion is good for women? Does government have a stake in the question about whether or not a medical procedure should be legal? Clearly, if you consider the purpose of government the protection of the common good, the answer to both of these questions has to be yes. Finally, can somebody please tell me how killing an unborn baby is good for women's health? Let's face it - no matter what your view of gender roles and government, killing babies in order to preserve personal freedom is depraved.

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P.S. Ellen Goodman also makes the following claims:

The abortion-hurts-women argument had its first incarnation in repeatedly debunked attempts to link abortion to breast cancer. Now anti abortionists have fabricated an entire mental illness they name post-abortion syndrome, which has been debunked by study after study.

It is my understanding that Ellen Goodman is simply wrong in calling these findings debunked. Notice that she didn't provide any reference for the studies, which isn't absolutely necessary, but it would be nice if she did. A 1995 study by pro-choice researcher Janet Daling identified specific high-risk groups: women under 18 or over 29 had a twofold increase in risk; women with a family history of breast cancer, an 80% increased risk; and teenagers with a family history who had abortions before they were 18 had an "incalculably higher risk." All 12 of the women in this last category of the study contracted breast cancer by age 45. See also the ABC Link home page

I am less familiar with studies on post-abortion syndrome. It seems to me that PAS is simply an application of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, identified more in clinical settings than by studies. Certainly the outcomes of such projects as Project Rachel give credence to claims of PAS. However, it is also possible that pro-lifers are overstating their case by giving feelings of guilt and remorse a label as if it were a legitimate psychological disorder. I think pro-life groups do themselves a disservice if this is the case. We don't need to use deception or exaggeration to win our case, and to do so actually hurts our credibility. If anyone is aware of objective studies that show whether or not PAS is real, please leave a comment with the info!