The Truly Fearful Stories Offered to Justify Elective Abortion

I have been reading When Abortion Was A Crime to better understand why people in our society before Roe v Wade thought that elective abortion would be a good solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy. The author, Leslie J. Reagan, tells story after story, gleaned from court records, of desperate women who received illegal abortions, endured great physical pain and humiliation, and sometimes suffered painful deaths from poorly performed procedures.

The most common, striking characteristic of these stories is desperation. The author describes women who feared ostracization because they were pregnant but unmarried or were married but already had the number of children that those in their social circle deemed to be enough, or too many. She describes wives and their husbands who feared the time and financial burdens of adding another child to their family. She describes wealthy women who did not want to be bothered by another child, or by children at all. Before Roe, these desperate women had to seek abortions in an illegal underground industry whose practices often humiliated them and whose poorly trained and careless doctors, nurses, and midwives sometimes maimed or killed them.

These stories persuade people to legalize elective abortion, but why should that be the conclusion? Shouldn’t these stories persuade us to shift resources from the abortion industry to organizations that address the social causes of despair, which remain after the child that would have been born has died?

What does it take to turn a women from despair that bringing a child into the world will be a life-wrecking burden to the hope that bringing that child into the world will somehow add to her pursuit of love, social acceptance, and personal security?

Here is one part of it. Some women will need help moving past the shock of seeing positive pregnancy test when they do not want to become pregnant. Even when a woman knows that she could become pregnant, recognizing that she is pregnant must make her think of the definite changes to come, which now have a definitive timeline. If she does not want to have the child, those changes can look like despair.

Her situation sounds strangely similar to that of the accident victim who ends up a quadriplegic and requests assisted suicide. That person’s life has changed quickly and drastically. That person inevitably begins to imagine a future without the pursuits they must now abandon and with disability and perhaps chronic suffering. They turn first to death in order to rid themselves of despair. But medical, pastoral and personal experience have shown that with the right help people can move past desperation by reimagining a future that adds new hopes to the past ones that they may still pursue.

Here is why the women in When Abortion Was A Crime seem to be in a similar position: Life has changed quickly and dramatically. They must imagine different futures for themselves than the ones they had planned. They experience despair. By seeking elective abortion, they turn first to death in order to in order to rid themselves of despair.

To bypass elective abortion, these women not only need help reimagining a more hopeful future for themselves, but they also need family and friends to reimagine their own futures in order to help them through pregnancy and childbirth and either raising the child or allowing adoption. They need organizations near them who are capable of helping them see how their child could become a part of a satisfying life for them, and they for their children.

The truly awful stories that pro-choice advocates tell to justify elective abortion should really lead society in the opposite direction.