Musings on Grey

Krista and Lauren point to a thoughtful post by Ayelet Waldman in response to Frances Kissling's essay Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus. They both quote this passage:

To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4 month-old fetus has Down’s Syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby's life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of grey, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.

I agree, but these insights raise questions -- no answers here, just questions -- that I'd like to explore. Reading this post reminded me of the debates over Laci and Connor's law; pro-choice feminists struggled with whether or not to support it. Connor Peterson was a wanted child whose death was against his mother's will, and many pro-choice feminists wanted to support the law wholeheartedly, without apologies or qualms, because of that distinction, but were worried that doing so was an admission of the personhood of a fetus, a step back in the fight for reproductive rights. I think this dilemma is another illustration of a truth.

I wonder how shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric will look. I wonder if the "moral elite" will see "shades of grey" as some kind of admission of guilt. Waldman says of her second-trimester abortion: "I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically." Maybe I've been reading too much Lakoff, but when I saw this, I thought, "pro-life frame." But her feelings toward this fetus were, and still are, very nuanced, a complexity of multiple-truths moral thought of which most pregnant women are capable. She does think of aborting in this case as killing, but chose to have the abortion for several personal reasons. Her decision was "based on [her] own and [her] family’s needs and limitations." She writes, "I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died."

I keep coming back to the complexity. Kissling writes: "The relation of value to wantedness is complex and at times troubling. Antiabortionists have countered the “Every child a wanted child” message by pointing out that if wantedness is what gives us value and a right to life, then who among the unwanted will be the next to be declared disposable—the sick, the disabled, the poor or the unemployed?" Sorry, this post is becoming a series of commonplaces. Please bear with me while I lay all this out. Kissling also writes:

It does lead me to believe that we would do well as prochoice people to present abortion as a complex issue that involves loss—and to be saddened by that loss at the same time as we affirm and support women’s decisions to end pregnancies. Is there not a way to simply say, “Yes, it is sad, unfortunate, tragic (or whatever word you are comfortable with) that this life could not come to fruition. It is sad that we live in a world where there is so little social and economic support for families that many women have no choice but to end pregnancies. It is sad that so many women do not have access to contraception. It is sad that this fetus was not healthy enough to survive and it was good that this woman had the right to make this choice for herself and her family, to avoid suffering, and to act on her values and her sense of what her life should be.”

(To this I'd add: It is sad that we live in a world where so many girls and women are victims of rape and incest. It is sad that there are many doctors and hospitals who refuse women access to emergency contraception.) Still, these are the people who have to be convinced (well, maybe not these particular people, but a majority within the institutions these people represent), not pregnant women. How rhetorically effective is it to say, "yes, it's killing (in some cases), but I should have the legal right to do it because I'm acting on my values and my personal truth"? I can already hear chilling, flippant responses from some who lack sympathy for the position, along the lines of the "who among the unwanted will be the next to be declared disposable" line of thinking Kissling cites, only far less sincere: "So I can kill gays and lesbians because to do so is to act on my values? Yay!" And exactly how will such a shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric be more "relevant to the contemporary world"? It would certainly be a more accurate reflection of what goes on on the ground, but what specifically makes it a more effective rhetorical strategy, especially to a diverse audience that contains a lot of these folks? I hope these posts prompt some brainstorming about what shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric will be.