Should Women Who Have Had an Abortion Feel Guilty About It?

The (non-graphic) video above follows a woman named Emily Letts
having an early-term abortion (according
to Letts, she was only a few weeks pregnant when she had the
procedure). The video was produced for the Abortion Care Network’s
“Abortion
Stigma Busting Competition.”

Writing in Cosmopolitan, Letts, who works as a
counselor at a birth-control and abortion clinice, says

I know
there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears.
Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I
really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions.
Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their
decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling
guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best
decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about
it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and
embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily,
wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the
advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in
after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am
grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop
the guilt.

Read more.

According to the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, there were slightly more than 1 million
abortions performed in the U.S. in 2012, and virtually all of them
(89 percent to 92 percent, depending on the source) were done at 12
weeks of gestation or earlier. Abortion rates are trending down,
mostly due to an increase in the use of and effectiveness of birth
control.

Letts’ video is certainly provocative and it likely generates
the broadly ambivalent feelings that abortion itself inspires in
Americans. For all the political discussions about abortion, few
voters (18 percent, according to Gallup) say that candidates must
share their views on abortion to win their vote. About equal
percentages (in the mid-40s) call themselves “pro-choice” and
“pro-life.” While there is widespread agreement that later-term
abortions should be banned except in cases involving the life of
the woman, there is very strong agreement that abortion should be
legal in the first three months of pregnancy, with 61 percent
saying yes and 31 percent saying no. Those
percentages essentially flip when it comes to the second trimester.
For all the stats above and more, see
Gallup.

It seems to me that there is wisdom in that split reaction. We
understand that a fetus at, say, 10 weeks is very different than
one at 20 or 30 weeks. While strict opponents of abortion talk
about life beginning at the moment of conception (exactly what that
means is often difficult to define precisely) and strict proponents
of abortion say that anything goes until delivery, most of us
follow a less stark, less Manichean line.

That sliding approval scale also comports with the
levels of grief that mothers and fathers feel in real life: We
grieve a baby that dies hours after birth in a very different way
than we do a miscarriage that happens at eight weeks, 20 weeks, or
even later in a pregnancy.

While I find something vaguely unseemly in Letts’ presentation
(she’s an actress by trade and there’s a lurking sense of
exhibitionism in it all), I think she is right not to feel guilty
about her abortion. While the exact definition of
personhood will always ultimately be somewhat arbitrary and
socially constructed, she certainly didn’t commit infanticide.
Rather, she exercised control over her body.

For people interested in a truly enaging social history of
abortion, I highly recommend Marvin Olasky’s
Abortion Rites. A strong social conservative and opponent of
abortion, Olasky nevertheless provides a comprehensive and
meticulous examination of the changing status and practice of
abortion in American culture from the colonial period through the
early 1990s, when the book was published. Independent of your
position on abortion, you will walk away with a much-richer and, I
suspect, a much greater understanding for the complexity of the
issue.

Last year, Reason hosted a powerful discussion about libertarian
perspectives on abortion with Ronald Bailey, Mollie Hemingway, and
Katherine Mangu-Ward. Watch it now:

More links and resources here.