I feel a need to turn that question around and to ask instead: What if your mother's life would have been significantly happier and healthier if she had not had you? If you as a fetus had the capacity to make decisions, would you have given your life for your mother's life, health and happiness?
My mother, Florence, the last of seven children in a harsh Polish immigrant family, left home at 17 and came to New York City. She got pregnant, chased the soldier who impregnated her and ended up with me. As you might imagine, she was an interesting and difficult person. Frankly, she never should have had children. She had her good qualities, but mothering wasn't one of them. And she had a miserable life. Four kids, two husbands, both of whom abandoned her and us. When the second one left, she had to go to work to support us: a low paying job as a telephone operator working the 11pm to 7am shift and a two hour each way commute was her lot in life.
That life began to change when the youngest of us graduated high school and I offered her a job as the head of the telephone appointment staff at the abortion clinic I was directing. The pay was better, the company included young, empowered women and she flourished. By 1980, she had moved to DC and was the practice manager for a busy orthopedic practice. Her pleasure and first time security was cut short by lung cancer and at the age of 58 she died.
As a fetus I would have gladly given up my chance to enter the world and become Frances Kissling to have given my mother a better chance at happiness. Far too much is made of a mother's obligations to her children and far too little of what a child's love for her mother means. If fetuses could love, I think they would be as passionate in defense of their mothers as born children become.
If we are going to imagine, as some do, fetuses as part of the human community, we are going to have to accept that if they could make decisions, they might be as willing to sacrifice for others as we demand that women and only women be.
]]>This post is part of our online salon: A New Agenda for Girls' and Women's Health and Rights, co-hosted with UN Dispatch.
Michelle, this a great question and I think complicated. I am hoping for a new administration that does not inappropriately use humanitarian or health, food aid, etc. as a means of accomplishing political goals. Within that context, there needs to be room for not funding agencies including governments that are egregious violators of human rights. These issues around family, gender, violence, etc. should be monitored by the State department in its annual human rights report which, in part, informs funding decisions. And of course my new Secretary of Women will work on these issues. :)
Preaching from the US about sexual and reproductive rights is not productive. Our own house is not quite clean enough. So we really need to link our domestic policies and their enforcement with our moral voice abroad. Another and I think very effective mechanism for the kind of in-country changes we would all like to see is to increase funding to civil society groups in that country that have the democratic right and responsibility to seek to influence their own country's polices. I'd much rather see the US empower women's groups and men's groups to work against sexist, anti-woman laws than use our stick. Where ever possible our approach should be the carrot.
This is not to say that the US should not work with government to change policies that are human rights violations. The question is method. I am anxious about denying funds but enthusiastic about government-to-government education as well as south-south collaborations where we work with multilateral agencies and with other southern countries with better records on these issues to influence violators in their regions.
]]>This post is part of our online salon: A New Agenda for Girls' and Women's Health and Rights, co-hosted with UN Dispatch.
Adrienne Germain's "New Agenda for Women" (pdf) is a solid and fairly comprehensive plan for a US administration committed to partnering with governments north and south that are already on board and working to achieving many of these goals. As the discussion progresses, I am sure we can all tweak these objectives and indeed add to them.
But is it a "bold" plan? Only in the sense that the US is so far behind the curve on modern thought about gender, sexuality and reproduction that getting there with our current mindset is unthinkable. In this sense, it is a good plan for the 20th century, but I say let's be really bold and move to the 21st.
A few thoughts:
The full circumstances of the crisis bear repeating. In italics, I highlight some important information that was left out of Ms. Bloom's story. On November 26th, 2007, police agents searched four Barcelona clinics owned by Dr. Carlos Morin. The raid was ordered by the Court of Justice following a complaint by a Catholic anti-abortion group, e-Christians, which claimed abortions were being performed illegally. Dr. Morin had been shown on TV in a secretly recorded tape offering an abortion to a Danish woman who was in her seventh month of pregnancy, and explaining that "loopholes" in Spanish law that would make this possible. Further raids followed at other clinics; 13 people were arrested, including doctors and anesthesiologists. In Holland, a Dutch woman returning from Spain was arrested and charged with having undergone an illegal abortion. Almost all Madrid clinics were then raided -- and a number of irregularities were allegedly found. These included forged signatures of physicians performing abortions, presigned blank medical forms signed by a psychiatrist who certified that the "patient" -- unnamed and unexamined -- suffered from a serious mental health problems that justified an abortion under Spanish law, and evidence of an attempt by one clinic to destroy medical records in anticipation of police action.
There is no doubt that the actions by Spanish authorities were excessive and in some instances possibly violated doctor patient confidentiality. Ms. Bloom does a service in pointing this out. At the same time, moral outrage requires equal attention to and a constructive critique of how Spanish abortion providers interpret and implement the highly flawed Spanish law.
Spain's Ambiguous Abortion Law
Under a 1985 Spanish law a woman can have an abortion during the first 22 weeks of pregnancy for fetal malformation or during the first 12 weeks in cases of rape. Abortion can be performed at any point in the pregnancy if an appropriate specialist physician certifies that the woman faces serious physical or mental health risks. Ms. Bloom says that abortions can "theoretically" be performed under this provision. In fact, they are performed and women travel from throughout Europe to Spain for late term procedures.
The Spanish abortion providers' association recognizes the ethical and legal dilemmas such a law places on them and the subjectivity involved in evaluating performing abortions as late as 26 to 32 weeks gestation based on an "assessment" of serious mental health risks. They have repeated asked the government to pass a law that would set a firm gestational limit and eliminate the need for certification of risk. The providers' association has also established internal guidelines that prevent members from performing abortions beyond 26 weeks of pregnancy, two weeks beyond the most liberal European law, that of the UK.
This is not the first time that Spanish law has come under international scrutiny. In 2005, an undercover reporter for one of the UK's more scurrilous tabloids was referred by the Bpas, the largest non-profit provider of abortion services in the UK, to Spain for an abortion at 26 weeks. Once in Spain, the reporter did not claim any mental or physical health problem, but was told by the Spanish clinic that this was not a problem; the clinic would simply say there was a risk to her health and perform the abortion. British health authorities investigated Bpas and ruled that they had broken no laws, although Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer who conducted the inquiry recommended, that Bpas tighten its procedures before referring women beyond 24 weeks, the legal limit in the UK abroad.
What Gestational Limits Are Reasonable?
For advocates of a woman's right to choose and especially those who provide abortions, the Spanish case is not an opportunity to laud courageous doctors (although there are plenty of those). Rather it is an opportunity to examine whether any gestational limits on abortion are reasonable and the circumstances under which protocols designed to ensure evaluation of medical and psychological conditions are ignored in pursuit of deeply held beliefs about women's rights. When is civil disobedience justified?
This is not just a question Spanish providers ask. The Supreme Court's trimester frame in both the Roe and Doe decisions require that American providers make tough decisions in the third trimester. Roe allows states to ban third trimester abortions unless the woman's health is at risk. In Doe v Bolton, the Court defined the health exception quite broadly. Associate Justice Blackmun stated in Doe that "the medical judgment [of health] may be exercised in the light of all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age - relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he (sic) needs to make his best medical judgment."
And so, I asked myself: Why do I find the Spanish (and US) clinics' broad interpretation of "serious mental health risks" ethically problematic when I have absolutely no problem with the hundreds of doctors and clinics throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia that are routinely breaking the law and providing safe first trimester abortions to women throughout these regions? When a Spanish clinic certifies that a physically healthy woman more than 24 weeks pregnant with no clinically determined mental health problem has a "serious mental health risk" that justifies an abortion are they playing fast and loose with medical ethics and the law or just acting on their conscientious belief that carrying a fetus to term, no matter what stage of pregnancy you are in when you don't want to is ipso facto a serious mental health risk?
What Does "Clinically Justified Mental Health Risk" Mean?
I had to unpack the question. What did I mean by "healthy women" and "no clinically justified mental health risk"? These are subjective criteria. I am sure my colleague and favorite intellectual sparring partner Ann Furedi of Bpas (with whom I have shared this article) believes that being 16 years old, out of school and having avoided admitting you are pregnant for 7 months constitutes a serious mental health condition. Further, I bet she believes that even a 26 week pregnant lawyer who changed her mind because she was offered a human rights post (or a good corporate job) in Uganda has a very good reason to have an abortion at 33 weeks. And then there are the few people I've met who sincerely believe that a fetus being carried by a woman who decides she does not want to be a mother is better off not being born. Some health professionals believe that a pain-free life is a human right and women have a mental health right to avoid any emotional discomfort or suffering that might occur if they were denied an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. And of course, there is the principle that reproduction is a completely private matter and that the there should be no laws related to abortion. Women can be trusted and when it comes to reproduction the law should trust them absolutely.
None of these opinions can be rejected out of hand. It is difficult to bite the bullet and say one would tacitly force any woman, no matter how pregnant, to carry to term a fetus she can't accept. But respecting women as well as holding medical and social services providers accountable demands that tough issues be discussed. Movement leadership requires that one express opinions about the moral as well as the legal issues of our time. Strong advocacy of a legal right to choose does not require silence on what is moral. Civility demands that one find a way to express views about morality in a way that does no harm and acknowledges that more than one view is respectable.
Reproduction is both a private act and a social phenomenon with public consequences. We want doctors to perform abortions, nurses to assist at the procedure, counselors to be there for women and states to pay for the procedure. At the same time, doctors should not become machines whose only function is to fulfill every patient's every wish. Women are also strong competent moral agents who have made the decision to have abortions or babies regardless of what anyone else thinks. There is nothing even the cruelest anti-abortionists have said that women seeking abortions have not themselves thought. Doctors, even those we consider heroes, are not perfect and feminists have been criticizing them for years, with good cause. The decisions of Spanish doctors are rightfully subject to public reflection and approval or disapproval.
Balancing the Public/Private Dichotomy in Abortion
Advocates of choice will have different views on whether and how to balance the private/public dichotomy in relation to abortion. Setting legal limits on abortion rights is not automatically to be condemned. For me, a legal limit that gives women ample time to decide honors both women's rights and a growing social concern about treating viable fetuses as if they had no claim on our humanity. Accepting that some women and girls will not meet the legal limits and not get an abortion may make us sad but is not wrong. It makes me sad that some women can't find the money to pay for even a first trimester abortion, but I don't conclude that the clinics that do not provide free abortions for all who have financial hardships are responsible for forcing them to carry a pregnancy to term.
This brings me back to those among the Spanish abortion providers who believe that the current requirement for certification of serious physical or mental health risks is routinely applicable at all stages of pregnancy. Should the abortion rights movement endorse this approach?
The Spanish providers who called for the one week strike don't think so. They favor an abortion on request law without the need for any certification. If such a law existed they are willing to accept a gestational limit.
In a European context, this could be as early as 16 weeks or as late as 24 weeks. While a strong ethical argument for no gestational limits can be made in principle, many factors need to be considered before one seriously adopts this approach. Among the questions that would need to be answered are whether abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy is necessary for women's freedom and bodily autonomy and whether such a principled position compromises legality at earlier stages of pregnancy and of course whether it is achievable. A commitment to democracy also requires some respect for compromise and negotiation in contested areas - and abortion is surely one of those areas.
Until the time that Spanish advocates achieve their goal of abortion on request within a reasonably defined gestational limit, I believe abortion providers should voluntarily take a moderate approach to interpreting the Spanish law consistent with the change they seek. That means that abortions beyond 24 weeks gestation should not be performed unless there are serious physical or mental conditions that make continuing the pregnancy a demonstrable danger to the woman. The evaluation of these conditions should not be routine, nor should the facile and not-quite-accurate claim that pregnancy is always medically more dangerous than abortion be used as a fall-back excuse. Women deserve to have their health conditions medically evaluated by specialists who treat each case individually and have no prior bias for or against abortion.
When Is Civil Disobedience Justified?
The disrespect for the norms of the law demonstrated by Dr. Morin and expressed to his patients is unacceptable. How, you may ask, is it different from the disrespect of the law demonstrated by those who provide safe illegal abortion services in the developing world? What standard does one use to judge some violations of law heroic and others unacceptable?
In the case of the heroic services provided by doctors in the developing world, the consequences of not performing those procedures include death, serious health injury, and economic deprivation to the woman and her existing children. These consequences are demonstrable. What about declining to perform an abortion for a healthy woman or adolescent in Europe? The undercover clients who "set up" Dr. Morin and Bpas, if they represent any of the women who make their way to Spain, demonstrated no compelling economic or medical reasons for the abortion or for their delay in seeking an abortion, no fetal abnormalities and a high degree of competence in managing getting to the clinics. So to turn such women away is not insignificant, but does not justify bending the law.
Poor women in Europe do not find their way to the Spanish clinics when they find themselves 26 weeks pregnant, as they simply do not have the 4,000 plus euros such procedures cost. Poor women in the US face similar financial challenges in obtaining post 24 weeks abortions which cost from $5,000 to $7,500.
Those who get these abortions are adolescents who denied or were unrealistic about their pregnancy and whose parents can raise the money. In these cases, exceptions need to be considered, but it should not be automatically assumed that every adolescent is better off with a late term abortion than a baby. There will be many contributing factors to both adolescent and adult women's delay in seeking abortions, including ambivalence. Adolescents also need to be protected from parents who coerce abortion as well as from those who want to prohibit it.
Every week, those of us who are pro-choice are faced with new circumstances that should cause us to think about how those circumstances affirm or change our core principles. Do our boundaries shift? In this sense, I hope we never reach a point when abortion is routine or uncontested. Moral and ethical deliberation takes place best in a non-coercive climate of legality: the need individuals, women, doctors, clinics have to evaluate the morality of specific acts and the fact that is some cases one will decide that certain acts are immoral does not mean abortion should become illegal. At the same time, respect for autonomy in moral decision making does not require that abortion be legal for any reason up to the swinging doors of the birthing theater.
]]>Republished with permission from Salon.com.
I spent my final 10 years at Catholics for a Free Choice refusing to take press calls about the "partial-birth" abortion ban. It seemed a no-win proposition. Rational arguments about protecting women's health, preventing tragic births when the infant's brief life would be filled with unbearable pain, and the doctor's need to decide what type of abortion would be safest for her patient were simply too abstract to compete with even a measured and accurate description of what happens during this procedure, known medically as an intact dilation and extraction (D&X) abortion. The 20-plus-week fetus' physical resemblance to a baby was the debate closer.
Even staunch pro-choice legislators had trouble when they looked at visuals of the D&X procedure. The late Catholic Sen. Daniel Moynihan first voted against banning it in 1995 and then voted for it in 1998. Moynihan said the procedure was just "too close to infanticide." Fellow pro-choice Sens. Patrick Leahy and Joseph Biden, also Catholic, joined Moynihan in voting for the ban, with Biden recently repeating Moynihan's oft quoted "infanticide" phrase on "Meet the Press" this April after the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Carhart that the ban on D&X procedures is constitutional.
Apparently the five Supreme Court justices in the majority, all of whom are Catholic, agreed with the senators. Their opinion upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which prohibits the performance of a rare abortion procedure, performed most often in the second trimester of pregnancy, in which a doctor extracts the fetus intact, pulling out its entire body through the cervix and vagina, piercing the skull so that the head can pass safely through the cervix. The bill, or state variations of it, had been ruled unconstitutional by various courts, including the Supreme Court. None of these bills included an exception to allow the procedure to be performed when the woman's health was threatened, which Roe and subsequent Supreme Court decisions held essential. Gonzales v. Carhart was closely watched as it was the first abortion case the post-Sandra Day O'Connor court would decide.
The opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, who is considered the least orthodox of the five, was devastating. Beyond outlawing a method of abortion it deemed only possibly needed by a few women, the decision injected orthodox Catholic teaching into the interpretation of constitutional rights. Kennedy's opinion, which affirms "the government's right to use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman" as it cavalierly dismisses the need a few specific women might have for this procedure, could easily have been written by the late Pope John Paul II or the current Benedict XVI. Women are invisible in this decision as they are invisible in the writings of recent—and not so recent—popes. Now it's impossible for me to remain silent.
The orthodox Catholic preoccupation with the morality of physical acts to the exclusion of the context in which those acts occur is evident in the amount of space the Kennedy decision gives to the description of the medical procedure (approximately eight pages), with only a few paragraphs on the possibility that banning the procedure would "subject [women] to significant health risks." Kennedy and his cohort are satisfied that this is a "contested question" and "medical uncertainty" places no ethical or legal requirement on the court or legislature. Nowhere in the decision are the health reasons that lead doctors to perform this procedure rather than others discussed. No ambivalence exists. No competing values need to be weighed.
After all, the Catholic hierarchy still forbids assisted reproduction in large part because sperm is collected by masturbation. The good of enabling an infertile couple to conceive does not outweigh the evil of spilling one's seed. It still prohibits the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV because the condom is also a contraceptive. In the same way, the reasons why a woman might need the D&X procedure, such as when a deformity truly inconsistent with life is discovered late in a wanted pregnancy, are totally irrelevant to orthodox Catholic anti-abortionists and are absent from Kennedy's opinion or concern.
Let's face it: No abortion procedure is aesthetically pleasing. They are, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her dissent, "gruesome"—some more than others, but none do not trouble a gentle nature. I, like most people, would prefer not to think about how abortions are performed and I certainly don't want to spend my time in an unwinnable debate over techniques that ignores social context. Most of us want abortion to be available when someone in our family needs one, but how it's performed and just what the fetus looks like tend to go unexplored. But every woman knows that abortion includes a difficult "yuck" factor; honest discussion of the subject shouldn't ignore that. The Kennedy opinion, however, ignores everything but that by leaving out the reality of how women and doctors deal with unintended pregnancy and abortion.
Even among physicians who regularly perform abortions, most limit their practice to the first 15 or so weeks of pregnancy with only 2 percent willing to do them after 20 weeks. Most women try to get an abortion in the first eight weeks of pregnancy and more than 50 percent succeed; 90 percent of all abortions are performed by the 12th week. This self-regulating instinct in doctors and women requires no reinforcement or preaching from government. We all get it: Abortion is not an unmitigated good; it is better to not need one; if needed, it is better to have one early; and it is a very serious situation when one needs one when the fetus is more developed.
At the same time, the overwrought descriptions of intact dilation and evacuation as "partial-birth" abortion, infanticide or killing babies who, if delivered that day, would be shaking their silver rattles and smiling, is ill-informed. Abortion statistics are difficult to gather in a timely manner since Reagan administration politics ended the Centers for Disease Control's abortion surveillance program. For 2000, the Guttmacher Institute estimated that only 1.2 percent (16,100) of all abortions occurred at 21 weeks or later. About 2,200 of these, most of which were performed between 18 and 24 weeks, were D&X procedures.
Given these facts, it's hard to discern the basis for the misguided concerns of politicians like supposedly "pro-choice" Joe Biden who not only support the ban on D&X abortion but impede poor women's access to early abortion by their opposition to federal funding for Medicaid abortions. But the truth is, these positions are politically expedient.
Conventional wisdom holds that abhorring abortion while believing it should be a little bit legal can offer a "pro-choice" candidate moral cover. And second-trimester abortions and poor women are easy targets. The thrice-married Catholic Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani declares in a single sentence his hatred of abortion, respect for a woman's right to choose and nonchalance about Roe's survival. Joe Biden's "feelings" about morality are not different from Giuliani's. Far too often the moralizers are Roman Catholics who should know better.
Moralizing about women's lives is not, of course, an exclusively Catholic habit, but we Catholic feminists tend to sniff it out and want to snuff it out. When we see it in a Supreme Court decision our fear of being considered irrational fades. At the risk of providing yet another opportunity for that pit bull of Catholic orthodoxy, William Donohue, to cry anti-Catholicism, one must stress another aspect of orthodox Catholicism that is the foundation of the majority opinion in this case—its tragic view of women as either victims or sluts.
In her dissent Justice Ginsburg more than teases out the flawed moral frame and outdated understanding of women's nature that dominates Kennedy's opinion. "Ultimately," Ginsburg notes, "the court admits that 'moral concerns' are at work ... by allowing such concerns to carry the day and the case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent."
What Ginsburg is too cautious to say is that those moral concerns are distinctly Roman Catholic. As the world, particularly the U.S., Europe and the United Nations, increasingly recognizes women's sexual and reproductive rights as legitimate, the Vatican has called on its powerful members to reject such public policies wherever possible. And the five Catholic justices have used the "partial-birth" abortion decision to do just that. Kennedy's words about the "bond of love" "mothers" have with their "child" could have been written by John Paul II, who exhorted the Muslim women of Bosnia-Herzegovina who had been raped by Christians to continue their pregnancies. He asked them to turn those rapes into "acts of love" by bringing those "children" into the world. The court's refutation of the long-standing legal and medical distinction between a pre- and post-viable fetus in the claim that "a fetus is a living organism while within the womb, whether or not it is viable outside the womb," and thus entitled to similar protection, could have come from John Paul's encyclical "Evangelium Vitae."
Like Bush's wholesale appropriation of John Paul "culture of life" rhetoric, the opinion is an indicator of the extent to which sectarian Catholic thought and teaching has become the framework of public policy.
In this context, it seems unreasonable to maintain the facade of a court free of a religious test. For some time now, such a test has existed—and it is an orthodox Catholic test. We were ill-served by senators who, fearing that talking about what orthodox Catholicism requires of its adherents would subject them to charges of anti-Catholicism, confirmed justices who cannot distinguish the Constitution from the catechism of the Catholic church.
Defending so-called partial-birth abortions in this context becomes what defending the right to choose abortion has always been, a defense of religious liberty and women's moral autonomy. I am now sorry I did not find a way to say that 10 years ago.
]]>But Roe was a socially transformative decision made in a country that was not yet socially transformed. It was a visionary decision and we were not ready for it. And so it has failed.
We now have a seeming constitutional right to choose abortion and more restrictions on that right than countries with more "moderate" laws. We do not provide government funds for abortions for poor women although most countries where abortion is legal provide funding for all women. We regulate adolescent access, waiting periods, and what a doctor must tell a woman.
How did this happen? Not, as some claim, because the court shut down the democratic process by precluding debate in the state legislatures. The number of state bills introduced and state restrictions imposed is staggering. Articles, books, campus debates and TV programs on abortion probably exceed the total in all of the countries of the industrialized world. More alternative "crisis pregnancy centers" exist in the United States than in any other country. It happened because the core value behind Roe, the vision of women as moral agents, has never been realized. The Harris v McCrae decision in 1980 which allowed states and the federal government to prohibit the use of government funds for women on Medicaid demonstrated that we were not ready to recognize poor women as moral agents. The majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart provides the rhetorical case for the view that women are weak and need protection.
While opinion is divided on whether Roe will be explicitly overturned or eviscerated through restrictions, it will only be available if we can convince the American public that it is a responsible choice as well as a right. At present, public opinion is not far removed from the Court's opinion. The public believes abortion is serious moral business. It can be justified but should not be celebrated. And above all, efforts should be made to avoid needing it.
Pro-choice forces share that view, although our historic and unrelenting emphasis on the promise of Roe and our fear of contributing to the stigmatizing of women who chose abortions often keeps us from leading with those beliefs. Our well founded suspicion of conservative moralism buries our deep morality in rights talk.
It is time to substitute straight talk for rights talk. Straight talk acknowledges that women themselves don't want to need abortions. They want to prevent pregnancies they can't bring to term. Legislatively that means an all out effort to increase funding for family planning and to end the idiocy of abstinence-only sexuality education. It means saying over and over again, that if you can't afford financially or emotionally to bring a child into the world, if you simply do not want children or a child, you have a responsibility to use contraception. Straight talk means accepting that however justifiable and whatever good comes from the decision to end a pregnancy, the act of abortion involves a departure from our common desire to live in a world where all positive forms of life can be nourished. On those grounds, it would be a better world if abortion were less frequently necessary. The Clinton formulation of "safe, legal and rare" is good ethics.
Straight talk includes an acknowledgment that abortion involves weighing competing values. Even if we believe they should be legal, abortions at the later stages of fetal development are morally more complex for most people. Only a few of us believe that fetuses have no value and only a few of us believe they have absolute value. Most believe they increase in value as the pregnancy continues. Adolescents have rights, but we want their parents involved—and they have a responsibility for the health and well being of their children. Health care professionals have a conscience, just as women do. Both need to be respected. Advances in fetal surgery, treatment of premature infants and the ability to bond with a wanted fetus through ultrasound are good things, not threats to the right to choose an abortion.
Most importantly, the moral high ground on abortion can best be found in the context of social justice and a commitment to all reproductive rights. It is found in insisting that the millions of women who rely on the government for health care have as much of a need to make the choice about abortion or childbirth freely as do women who are better off financially. In the United States, this means an all out consistent effort to secure federal and state Medicaid funds for low income women.
It also means working to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity world wide. The need for the abortion rights movement to take up the cause of Safe Motherhood is critical to the integrity of choices. Women world wide do not just die from unsafe abortions. In fact, a far larger number, at least 500,000, die from pregnancy related causes such as post partum hemorrhage and lack of skilled birth attendants. Solving the reproductive health problems of poor women in the United States who choose abortion and of poor women in the developing world who want healthy children requires a belief that women are not just moral adults, but that they matter.
I like to think that in the not too distant future, in a socially transformed United States, women will matter. Roe will be looked at as one of the most-forward-thinking, principled decisions for women in the 20th century. Right now our job is to be sure on whatever basis works that as many women as possible have access to safe affordable abortion services and to pregnancy related health care and safe delivery. That is what choice means. And our government aid, whether for Africa or Alabama, will reflect that value.
]]>Frances Kissling is President of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Priests for Life claims to be "the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization." However, in 2000, the group claimed a mere 13% of the nation's priests as members. Today, it reports no membership income on its tax returns and has lost even more ground among priests.
After more than 15 years trying vainly to grow his Catholic antichoice group into the mass clerical movement envisioned in its rhetoric, its leader, Frank Pavone, now finds himself banished to a Texan wasteland and able to count on a mere 2.5 percent of the nation's priests (some 1,000) as supporters.
His hagiographic campaigning style, with unapologetic electoral campaigning, and unabashed cooperation with some of the most militant antichoice figures, has led him from New York to Amarillo, Texas, where he broke ground on a seminary for his new order of priests, Missionaries of the Gospel of Life. On the same day, the Religion News Service reported the new order had only one member, Pavone himself.
]]>Frances Kissling is President of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Priests for Life claims to be "the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization." However, in 2000, the group claimed a mere 13% of the nation's priests as members. Today, it reports no membership income on its tax returns and has lost even more ground among priests.
After more than 15 years trying vainly to grow his Catholic antichoice group into the mass clerical movement envisioned in its rhetoric, its leader, Frank Pavone, now finds himself banished to a Texan wasteland and able to count on a mere 2.5 percent of the nation's priests (some 1,000) as supporters.
His hagiographic campaigning style, with unapologetic electoral campaigning, and unabashed cooperation with some of the most militant antichoice figures, has led him from New York to Amarillo, Texas, where he broke ground on a seminary for his new order of priests, Missionaries of the Gospel of Life. On the same day, the Religion News Service reported the new order had only one member, Pavone himself.
Now, less than a week before the 2006 elections, when one would more normally expect to hear Pavone claiming imminent victory for antiabortion candidates, he is instead proudly asserting that "more than 1,000 priests" (read 1,000 plus himself, maybe) have signed onto an innocuous statement parroting past statements from the US Catholic bishops about the importance of participating in elections and "building a culture of life." With some 42,000 priests in the U.S., this means Father Frank was able to garner the support of just 2.5 percent of Catholic priests. And there I was, thinking that all priests were "prolife."
Pavone has clearly fallen on hard times, far from the lofty rhetoric with which he is more normally associated.
A new report from Catholics for a Free Choice examines how PFL's electioneering and unwavering loyalties to Republican conservative positions appear at times to outweigh its obedience to the Vatican, and certainly contravene directly Internal Revenue Service guidelines on such activity by tax-exempt nonprofits. Read the report here.
]]>Frances Kissling is President of Catholics for a Free Choice. This article appears in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of Conscience and also on Salon.com.
If abortion is a morally neutral act and does not endanger women's health, why bother to prevent the need for it? After all, the cost of a first-trimester abortion is comparable to the cost of a year's supply of birth control pills-and abortion has fewer complications and less medical risk for women than some of the most effective methods of contraception. This question has plagued advocates of choice since abortion was legalized. It has intensified in the face of antiabortion moralism about sex and responsibility, in the continued stigmatization of women who have abortions and in the increasingly expressed mantra that "there are simply too many abortions in the U.S." Frustration has led some advocates of legal abortion to dig in their heels and insist that any talk about preventing abortions denigrates women as moral decision-makers, misunderstands the reasons women have abortions, retreats from principled support for the right of women to choose abortion without government interference and tacitly lends credence to the contention that abortion is almost always morally wrong.
]]>Frances Kissling is President of Catholics for a Free Choice. This article appears in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of Conscience and also on Salon.com.
If abortion is a morally neutral act and does not endanger women's health, why bother to prevent the need for it? After all, the cost of a first-trimester abortion is comparable to the cost of a year's supply of birth control pills-and abortion has fewer complications and less medical risk for women than some of the most effective methods of contraception. This question has plagued advocates of choice since abortion was legalized. It has intensified in the face of antiabortion moralism about sex and responsibility, in the continued stigmatization of women who have abortions and in the increasingly expressed mantra that "there are simply too many abortions in the U.S." Frustration has led some advocates of legal abortion to dig in their heels and insist that any talk about preventing abortions denigrates women as moral decision-makers, misunderstands the reasons women have abortions, retreats from principled support for the right of women to choose abortion without government interference and tacitly lends credence to the contention that abortion is almost always morally wrong.
At the evidence level, some worry that the emphasis on prevention as a solution violates a core belief that good facts make good ethics. Demographers and social scientists are more than skeptical of claims by the group Democrats for Life (DfL) that we can reduce abortions by 95 percent in 10 years if we modestly increase economic support for women who face unintended pregnancies. The critics note that the level of increased support suggested by this interest group compares unfavorably with the level of support currently afforded to women in European countries-and the rate of abortions in those countries, while lower than that in the US, comes nowhere near the 95/10 goal DfL espouses.
Tactically, there is concern that an explicit goal of working to prevent the need for abortions or to reduce the incidence of abortion undermines efforts to demonstrate that those opposed to abortion are extremists. Are we buying into the antichoice movement's framing of the issue? Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, noted that "while we're talking about all this, we could be putting the right wing on the defensive. We have to put the dying and suffering of women who don't have access to safe abortion onto the table."
Further exasperation ensues when efforts to prevent unintended pregnancy, and thus also reduce the abortion rate, are cast as a "common-ground" approach with both "sides" in agreement. In reality, the organizations most identified with opposition to legal abortion are at best only marginally interested in reducing unintended pregnancy through contraceptive use; they are focused instead on abstinence for those who are unmarried and are divided on contraception in marriage. Many legislators who are opposed to legal abortion have discovered the hard way that embracing contraception diminishes their support from hard-line antiabortion groups. A case in point is Robert Casey, the prolife Democrat running for Republican US senator Rick Santorum's seat in Pennsylvania. Casey has attempted to temper his antiabortion position by supporting a wide range of measures that would reduce the need for abortion. A progressive Democrat, he supports more economic support for low-income and poor women who become pregnant and for children and families. He also supports contraception, including emergency contraception for adults over the counter. As a result, Casey has gone from prolife Catholic poster boy to the whipping boy of antiabortion groups.
Prolife Democratic congressman Tim Ryan, who has led the effort for recognition of prolife Democrats in the party, was dealt a blow when the group he is most closely associated with, Democrats for Life, refused to endorse his Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act. The group's executive director, Kristen Day, said the bill had become a problem for them because "when you start talking about contraception, people are very committed to one side or the other." Day noted that her group was concerned only with helping women who had already become pregnant avoid abortion. Perhaps most sadly, the bill was introduced at a press conference at which the only "antiabortion" group willing to stand beside the prolife Ryan and prochoice Rosa DeLauro was the Catholic Alliance, which claims to be a progressive Catholic group challenging right-wing Catholicism. The Catholic Alliance was represented by Sister Sharon Dillon, who distanced herself from the bill by saying that as a Catholic group, her organization could not support the measures in the bill that provided support for contraception.
There is, of course, widespread support among abortion-rights advocates for contraception. Indeed, the country's Planned Parenthood affiliates have prevented more abortions by providing family planning than have groups like Priests for Life and the American Life League, who remain adamantly opposed to abortion and refuse to support contraception, the best hope for reducing the need for abortion. Why should prochoice groups accept the rhetoric of common ground on preventing the need for abortion, when the facts show that their counterparts in the antiabortion movement are unwilling to support contraception? Why should they, like Hillary Clinton, express respect for those in the antiabortion movement who actually are part of the problem?
Frankly, we shouldn't. But our commitment is not with antichoice leaders and groups. Our commitment is to women and to the vision of a just society that motivates our work. Our allies are those legislators who share substantially in that vision, including those who are far less accepting of a moral view that is broad enough to encompass the decision to have an abortion. Our link is to the vast majority of Americans who want abortion to be legal, but find it morally, not just practically preferable to work to avoid its need.
So we definitely should not let any one or all of the above obstacles keep us from strongly supporting efforts to reduce the need for abortion. And we should not have an ounce of ambivalence about publicly declaring ourselves to be committed to ensuring that public policy include a focus on lowering abortion rates without restricting women's freedom.
This takes us back to the very first sentence of this essay. Is abortion a morally neutral act? Is it, as some have said, an unambiguous moral good? This is where we go limp and get tongue-tied. Why, people ask us-if abortion is such a good thing; if it results in women coming to terms with their moral autonomy, making good choices for their lives, acting in the interests of society and their existing and future children-do we want to reduce the need for it? Simply put, the movement as a whole and most of our leaders find it difficult to acknowledge publicly that we have spent our lives, our passion, fighting for something that both is central to human freedom and autonomy and ends a form of human life.
We cannot imagine coercing a woman to continue a pregnancy that is unsupportable. At the same time, there is something valuable about encouraging public policy and personal decision-making that start from a presumption in favor of life. We interpret life broadly. We say we are in favor of legal abortion because it protects women's lives. We do not mean just their physical lives; we mean their capacity to live full, free and happy lives. Why, then, should we think that a presumption in favor of life is inappropriately applied to fetal life? Why do we insist that because the fetus is not a person in any theological, scientific, legal or sociological sense, it does not deserve our consideration? Do not people want to know if those of us who advocate a moral right to choose an abortion also approach all aspects of life with wonder and awe? Can we totally separate our attitude toward the justifiable taking of non-personal life in abortion from the other principles of protecting life that have become crucial to our survival as civilized human beings?
A modern sensibility about an expanded definition of respect for persons and life became common in the last part of the 20th century. The war in Vietnam was almost over, and we thought we had learned a lesson about peace and justice. Women and racial minorities had their rights recognized. These advances now seem illusory as we see the way in which our country and other countries have morally distanced themselves from massive slaughter in war and in tribal and ethnic conflict. We see the continuing disregard for the lives and aspirations of the poor and marginalized people among us. We are not just committed to the lives of persons; we are committed to being persons who respect many forms of life. We want to behave in ways that honor even non-human life-animals and plants included. We respect the environment, which is essential to our survival. We seek laws that ensure that human tissue and body parts are treated respectfully even as they are used to further the health and well-being of all. We insist that human subjects not be experimented upon. We speak out against the torture of one person, even if it would save the lives of many others, and we are horrified that this principle is not universally accepted. It is foolish to think that these sentiments and values do not or should not affect the way in which we and the American people think about the fact that abortion necessarily results in the ending of potential human life. To think that we should remain inured to these instincts would tragically diminish our humanity and make us less worthy public leaders.
Although it would be unjust to place on women's reproductive decisions the moral burden of upholding absolutely a presumption in favor of life, it is important that we express our belief that the ability to create and nurture and bring into the world new people should be exercised carefully, consciously, responsibly and with awe for our capacity to create life. That is one reason why we must commit ourselves to working to make abortion unnecessary, and be willing to use those words. We must not flinch when Hillary Clinton says abortion should be "safe, legal and rare." We must applaud prochoice members of congress like Rosa DeLauro, who says: "We must create an environment that encourages pregnancies that can be carried to term." Such statements are not made in a vacuum; they are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of Catholics who have some creepy obsession with fetuses. They are part of thoughtful attempts to balance respect for a woman's right to make the choice about when to bring a new child into the world with a deep presumption that life, even the life of non-persons, is worthy of respect. And they should be based on our values, on the desire not to better "message" abortion rights, but to respect the moral sensibilities of American women.
We have been on the defensive so long that we are like lionesses ready to rip out the throat of anyone who attacks our cubs-and women are our cubs! Yet the vast majority of American women act as if they do not want to need abortions. How many times have we heard a woman say, "I missed my period; I hope I am not pregnant; I don't want to have to have an abortion"? According to the latest figures, 89 percent of women who are at risk of unintended pregnancy use contraception. They represent 48 percent of the 3.1 million women annually who have unintended pregnancies. The 11 percent of women at risk for pregnancy who are not using contraception account for the remaining 52 percent of unintended pregnancies.
They know there is no fully satisfying outcome to undesired pregnancy. The choice to have a child one is not prepared to parent or cannot afford, give a child up for adoption or have an abortion is a grim one. Women are strong and they cope well with these lousy choices. An unwanted child can become loved and cared for; an adoption, although painful, can be viewed as a generous gift; an abortion today may enable better parenting or a more fulfilled life without children in the future. Unwanted children can also remain unwanted and uncared for, though, and both adoption and abortion can result in lifelong sadness. For those who are prochoice, this second set of outcomes of unintended pregnancies is inconsistent with our vision of a just and caring society. Women should not end up having children they do not want and cannot care for, nor should they end up having abortions they would have preferred not to have.
Why then do we get so caught up, so tongue-tied when we are asked if we want to prevent abortion? We spend countless hours trying to find the most nuanced way of answering this question. We worry that some woman will be hurt if we acknowledge the moral ambiguity of abortion. Yes, words are important, but so is vision. Should we say there are too many abortions in the US? I doubt it. Which abortion tipped the balance from just enough to too many? It's a little bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears: too hot, too cold, just right. Which woman should not have had an abortion? What reason was frivolous? Our heads spin! We believe we are on thin ice if we say we want to reduce the number of abortions. Is there an ideal number of abortions? An arbitrary rate that is acceptable? Are some women irresponsible? Should we set an annual number and then stop performing abortions once we have hit that number? Does every woman who reaches puberty get an abortion chit which can only be redeemed once in a lifetime?
There is nothing unusual about moral complexity. Women-and men-live with it every day. It is what it means to be a human person. We are in favor of a woman's right to decide when she will give the gift of life; after all, gifts must be freely given. We love life and want to act in its interest, and so we are in favor of supporting women's own desire not to become pregnant when they do not wish to bring a child into the world, we strongly support the right of every woman to continue a difficult but wanted pregnancy, and we will do everything we can to support her economically and emotionally.
The reality is that we could use a lot of government involvement in supporting women's moral agency. One of the most touching phrases in the Roe v. Wade decision was the recognition that women should not be isolated in their pregnancies. Government has washed its hands of pregnancy-it will not pay for abortion, it provides inadequately for contraception and sexuality education, and it certainly does not provide for women, children and families. It is time to change that. A moral discourse that calls on individuals to act toward the creation of life responsibly cannot be separated from a call of social justice for measures, like those included in the Ryan-DeLauro bill, that contribute to a sense that it is not women alone who are responsible for respecting life, but government as well.
]]>Frances Kissling is is the president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Earlier this month, on September 11 to be exact, the IRS announced that it had revoked the nonprofit 501(c)(3) status of Youth Ministries, Inc., which did business as the vehemently antichoice Operation Rescue West (ORW). While the IRS does not provide information on the circumstances that lead to revocations of any group's tax-exempt status, a complaint filed by my organization, Catholics for a Free Choice in 2004 provided information on ORW's electoral activities during the Boston Democratic Party convention that we considered to be violations of IRS regulations.
]]>Frances Kissling is is the president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Earlier this month, on September 11 to be exact, the IRS announced that it had revoked the nonprofit 501(c)(3) status of Youth Ministries, Inc., which did business as the vehemently antichoice Operation Rescue West (ORW). While the IRS does not provide information on the circumstances that lead to revocations of any group's tax-exempt status, a complaint filed by my organization, Catholics for a Free Choice in 2004 provided information on ORW's electoral activities during the Boston Democratic Party convention that we considered to be violations of IRS regulations.
Our complaint referred to a full-page ad placed by the antichoice group on July 15, 2004, in the Wanderer, an ultraconservative national Catholic weekly. In the ad, ORW called on readers to make what it said was a "tax-deductible donation to help pay the bills and affect the outcome of the election" and called for readers to give a tax-deductible donation to help "defeat [John Kerry] in November and enable President Bush to appoint a pro-life Supreme Court Justice to finally overturn Roe v. Wade." In making its case, Operation Rescue West cited the statements of several cardinals and bishops who had attacked Catholic politicians for their support of a woman's right to choose and invited the support of readers as they are "going into the middle of a war in Boston." [Emphasis in original.] ORW said that the money raised would be spent in Boston during the Democratic Party convention, where it planned to distribute antiabortion, anti-Kerry materials and display highly visible ads on trucks at key sites.
This egregious violation of US tax laws was perhaps the most visible and vicious by various tax-exempt organizations opposed to abortion rights and, by extension, candidates who support these rights during the 2004 election season.
The lawyer we worked with on the complaint, John Pomeranz of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP, noted that "the Political Activity Compliance Initiative that the IRS ran in 2004 led to the revocation of 501(c)(3) status for only a handful of the organizations audited. It is a mark of how flagrantly and egregiously ORW violated the law that its tax-exempt status has been revoked."
The IRS's vigilance in monitoring election activities by 501(c)(3) organizations is to be applauded and we hope the revocation of Operation Rescue West's tax-exempt status will send a clear message to tax-exempt groups that think they are above the law that such activities will be monitored, reported to the IRS and acted upon. As we enter the 2006 campaign season, we are already seeing substantial violations of the regulations from groups such as Priests for Life which seems to believe it need not comply with our election laws.
Antichoice religious groups violating tax laws are well aware of the scrutiny they are under and some are attempting to get around the restrictions. Only this year, Catholic Answers, another vehemently antichoice organization, announced that it was being investigated and had set up Catholic Answers Action--a 501(c)(4) organization--as a direct result of a complaint filed in 2004 by CFFC. In a statement on its Web site, Catholic Answers noted, "We were forced to start [Catholic Answers Action] because of a complaint filed against Catholic Answers by Frances Kissling, president of the misnamed Catholics for a Free Choice.... For more than a year her complaint has been winding its way through the IRS, which has been sending us loads of interrogatories to answer. We were forced to hire a top-flight pro-life law firm to represent Catholic Answers and to protect our interests." We believe that the Catholic Answers solution is flawed and we are filing another complaint against the 501(c)(4) group it established.
Clearly reporting these violations works and so far this year CFFC has filed two complaints against Priests for Life for similar violations. In an electioneering communication to Priests for Life supporters, Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of the Catholic-right antichoice organization, stated, "We will repeat and intensify this year all we did in the previous election cycles. The pro-abortion groups, the liberals in the Church, the over-cautious attorneys, and the people who don't want to see the Church ‘influencing elections' can yell and scream all they want. In fact, I invite them to. It won't make a shred of difference. We will move forward with more boldness than ever before." Click here to read our latest report on Priests for Life.
We all know and understand that charitable status is a privilege, not a right. Nonprofit organizations are free to educate members and the public, but must do so within the limits of charitable laws. Organizations even have the right to participate in the election process if they choose to renounce their charitable status. What they are not free to do is flout the federal statutes and IRS regulations that govern all charities by endorsing or targeting candidates during an election year. CFFC will continue to monitor any and all election-related activities by Catholic nonprofits and report violations to the IRS.
]]>Editor's note: It really says something about ORW that their response to losing tax-exempt status was equivalent to a shrug of their shoulders. From the NY Times: “We have reorganized as simply Operation Rescue,” said Cheryl Sullenger, the group’s outreach coordinator. “Losing our tax exemption doesn’t have much of an effect on us, one way or the other. We have learned some lessons through this whole thing, and I think we’re in a better place now than we were before the I.R.S. investigation.”
I would not be surprised if hard-liners in the Vatican prevailed on the question of condoms fearing that if condoms could be seen as the lesser of two evils by preventing death from AIDS, someone might claim that contraception could be seen as the lesser of two evils in preventing abortion.
It is perhaps appalling that the world community continues to be held hostage to the Vatican’s views on sexuality and reproduction, which are at the root of the current objection to a prevention strategy that includes condoms. However, that is indeed the case. If the Vatican’s view did not influence the larger, secular effort to prevent the transmission of AIDS it could be seen as the quaint and quirky view of sexuality and responsibility that it is. But the fact is that the Vatican’s objection to condoms has had a great effect on the larger community.
Of course, the greatest effect is on those who seek care in Catholic-controlled facilities. The church claims that 25% of those with AIDS get their health care from church agencies. That means a large number of them are either kept ignorant of the importance of condoms for those who are sexually active or simply not provided with the condoms they need. As AIDS treatment becomes more available and people live longer, this means more people will be infected.
But more importantly, Vatican opposition to condoms has had a large influence on the major agencies responsible for AIDS prevention and treatment. The group includes ministries of health around the world, UNAIDS and private foundations like Gates and Clinton. The emphasis over the past decade on treatment over prevention is only partly due to an appropriate concern regarding the cost of drugs and the lack of access to them. It is also an easy way for these agencies to avoid controversy and attacks from the church.
One can only hope that the mere discussion within the church of a possible change in policy will give these agencies the backbone they need to once and for all reject the ignorant and irresponsible position of the church and stand up for the right of those at risk of transmitting or getting AIDS to have a healthy and responsible sexual life while preventing the transmission of a devastating disease.
]]>