Article
Social & Legal Studies
2016, Vol. 25(6) 651–666
Talking About Abortion
ª The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916668250
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Carol Sanger
Columbia University, USA
Abstract
This essay examines the complex and contradictory nature of how the issue of abortion
is discussed in the U.S. today. In political debate, on conservative news stations, and
outside abortion clinics, abortion is regularly shouted about loudly and with great
conviction by those who want to see the procedure recriminalized. Yet at the level of
individual experience, abortion is rarely discussed, even among close friends and rela-
tives. How is it that a medical procedure, legal since 1973, remains a source of shame and
secrecy? To answer that question, this essay identifies the categories into which the
subject of abortion commonly falls and argues that so many things in the U.S. are about
abortion because abortion itself is about so many things: medicine, religion, rights,
regulation, morality, sex, gender, families, and politics. There are complicated views
toward abortion within each area, and they complications increase when one area
intersects with another – religion and law, politics and reproduction, the practice of
medicine and the regulation of abortion. Disaggregating the many factors about which
citizens have strong beliefs reveals how the subject of abortion is an opaque slate upon
which concerns not just about fetal personhood but about states’ rights or teenage
promiscuity or women’s power can also be inscribed. Talking more openly about
abortion will help normalize a decision made by millions of women each year so that the
decision can be made outside the parameters of shame and secrecy that so often now set
the scene for women with unwanted pregnancies.
Keywords
Abortion, reproductive politics, regulation, abortion discourse
Abortion is not an easy subject to talk about. This is so at the level of lawmaking, as well
as in more personal realms – among friends, within families, and between partners. In
this essay, I want to consider why this is so. Why does abortion remain so difficult an
issue to discuss, even in countries where the law on the matter is settled in favor of
Corresponding author:
Carol Sanger, School of Law, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Email: csanger@columbia.edu
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abortion’s legality? I focus here primarily on the problem of ‘abortion talk’ in the United
States, although some of the factors I present may resonate for discussion and debate in
other countries as well.
Why then is abortion so unsettled and unsettling a topic? To begin, there is the
provocative problem of vocabulary: Termination of pregnancy or abortion? Pro-life or
antichoice? Fetus or unborn child? Pregnant woman or mother? The choice is not only a
matter of political or philosophical outlook but often one of context. Few people –
including, I suspect, few pro-choice people – when handed a sonogram by an eager
friend or cousin are likely to offer congratulations on the friend’s fetus. To do so misses
the sense of occasion when news of a wanted pregnancy is shared.
To be sure, prenatal life is not always referred to in just one way (embryo) or the other
(child), even by the same people or regarding the same pregnancy. The vocabulary of
reproduction often progresses in stages. Couples move into the language of ‘baby’ as a
pregnancy develops, provided that the pregnancy is coming along well. In contrast,
couples undergoing prenatal diagnostic testing not uncommonly distance themselves
from the language of baby until they have received test results and have decided whether
or not to continue the pregnancy. This kind of linguistic and conceptual distancing
occurs in other pregnancies that are or that have become unwanted.
Another reason that abortion may not be much talked about at a personal level is that
it is a private matter, a woman’s alone to reveal or discuss. One reason is abortion’s
intense physicality. Whatever else abortion may be – sin or blessing, impossibility or
necessity, a source of sadness or a source of relief – it is also a matter of the body and for
this reason alone it may not be the stuff of common or casual conversation.
In addition to abortion’s bodily aspect, women are also reluctant to talk about
abortion because the costs of doing so are perceived, and reasonably so, as quite
high. The most immediate harm is physical. As a United Nations Special Rapporteur
reported in 2011, criminal abortion laws and ‘other legal restrictions’ that affect
women’s access to abortion create a ‘vicious cycle’: ‘Criminalization results in
women seeking clandestine, and likely unsafe, abortions. The stigma resulting from
procuring an illegal abortion . . . perpetuates the notion that abortion is an immoral
practice . . . , which then reinforces continuing criminalization of the practice’ (Grover,
2011: para 35).
But even where abortion is legal, as in the United States, the problem endures. As a
federal appeals court judge stated in a 2002 case involving the confidentiality of medical
records sought by the state:
[W]omen seeking abortions in South Carolina have a great deal more to fear than stigma.
The protests designed to harass and intimidate women from entering abortion clinics, and
the violence inflicted on abortion providers, provide women with ample reason to fear for
their physical safety. (Greenville Women’s Clinic v. Commissioner, South Carolina Depart-
ment of Health and Environmental Control, 2002: 377)
Some pregnant women fear physical restraint or punishment from belligerent hus-
bands. This relation between domestic violence and access to abortion anchored the
Supreme Court’s decision in 1992 that states could not condition a wife’s abortion on
Sanger
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her notifying her husband first (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v.
Casey, 1992: 893–894).
Talking about abortion also puts women at reputational risk. It is near to impossible to
imagine a woman politician – or a professor, dinner guest, employee and so on –
mentioning that she had an abortion at some point in her life. (I suspect it is the revelation
that will do women politicians in, rather as affairs sometimes do for men.) In recent
years, perhaps particularly among the young, having an abortion is taken as an indication
of bad character (Dominus, 2005: 200, 202). Even among women who terminate a
pregnancy following an unwelcome prenatal diagnosis, such as fetal abnormality, there
are hierarchies of acceptable reasons and language. As Waldman (2009) discovered
when she joined an online abortion support group, her willingness to describe her
abortion as an abortion was not well-received by others in the support group who wanted
to distinguish the termination of wanted pregnancies from other, seemingly more casual
abortions. [As one abortion provider explained to me, patients tend to agree on only three
acceptable reasons for an abortion: ‘rape, incest, and mine’.] Thus, there is little soli-
darity even among women who have chosen abortion.
Looking only at the first decade of the 21st century – from George W. Bush to Barack
Obama – abortion has been central to how Americans conceptualize, debate, and some-
times resolve all sorts of things: foreign aid, health care reform, high school sex educa-
tion, and judicial nominations to the Supreme Court. Each year brings new controversies
over something to do with abortion.
While some involve popular culture, other abortion controversies bring to the surface
issues of long-standing social tension, such as those around race. In 2011, a huge bill-
board appeared in Manhattan featuring a Black child above the caption ‘The Most
Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb’ (Dewan, 2005: A1). Similar
billboards (‘Black Children are an Endangered Species’) went up in Atlanta, all part of a
larger pro-life outreach campaign to minority communities denouncing legal abortion as
part of a genocidal plan. Other abortion decisions raise questions about discrimination
based on sex, or what some identify as sex discrimination and others consider a matter of
gender preference or gender balancing in their offspring. There is some evidence that
among certain immigrant communities in the United States, the preference for sons has
resulted in skewed girl–boy birth ratios (Abrevaya, 2009). In 2013, Kansas and North
Carolina enacted legislation criminalizing the provision of any abortion performed for
the purpose of sex selection.
As these many examples make clear, the subject of abortion has over the last 40 years
embedded itself in American consciousness, American politics, and American culture
with remarkable durability and reach. But why is so much in the United States, and
perhaps elsewhere, about abortion? (see e.g. Murray, Rodriguez Ruiz and O’Rourke, in
this volume). My argument is that so many things are about abortion because abortion
itself is about so many things. I therefore want to set out the central categories into which
abortion falls as a way of beginning to understand how much is at stake when people talk
about or around the issue. That is to say, in this essay, I want to talk about ‘about’.
In proceeding, it may be useful to start with an accepted definition of abortion. The
term refers to the induced (intentional) termination of a pregnancy through the destruc-
tion of the embryo or fetus (see Oxford English Dictionary, 2014). Where abortion is
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