In her editorial today, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses an article that popped up in the NYT a few days ago. The subject of the report was abortion and television:
TWO 14-year-old girls are talking. One, named Manny, says to the other: "I'm just trying to do the right thing here. For me. For everyone, I guess."Even sexually liberal HBO handled abortion with gloves, as Claire in Six Feet Under gets an abortion but is haunted (specifically, in a hallucination) afterward.* Many mainstream television shows have featured women considering abortion, even going so far as a clinic's doors, only to turn back—none go through with it.The speaker is a character on "Degrassi: The Next Generation," a popular Canadian soap opera for kids, who is telling her best friend why she's decided to have an abortion. The two-part episode was shown on CTV in Canada in January. But the N, the Viacom-owned cable channel that shows "Degrassi" in the United States, has decided not to schedule the episodes.
Unlike such once-taboo issues as date rape, gay relationships and teenage sex, abortion on television remains an aberration. Manny is the very rare character who actually has one; what's even more rare is that she doesn't regret it afterward.
Ehrenreich argues that our representations and repressions of abortion issues conflate reproductive rights with other issues. She's assertive:
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis? Medically informed "terminations" are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.She's damned right, and good for her. Implicit in our conventional wisdom that the inconvenience of a disabled child makes a more compelling case for abortion than the inconvenience of an unwanted child is an admission to—a submission to—a national standard. The progressive fight for abortion rights is not about whether I envision more or less approvable decisions for you but about your right to your body—your right to submit to your conscience alone. The stigmatization of sexual decisions has always been an avenue for sexual domination, and limiting abortion rights with "worst-case scenario" mores is an avenue toward eliminating abortion rights.It would be unfair, though, to pick on the women who are in denial about aborting "defective" fetuses. At least 30 million American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as "convenience" - a number that amounts to about 40 percent of American women. Yet in a 2003 survey conducted by a pro-choice group, only 30 percent of women were unambivalently pro-choice, suggesting that there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.
Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this "bad faith," meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.
To return to Ehrenreich's starting point, it does suggest the powerful interplay between art and the political zeitgeist. Can anyone even think of an indie film dealing with abortion in a realistic way?
* Six Feet Under may go down as the only show in television history to ever reference Matthew Barney—I've never felt more like a target demographic. I mean, they made a point of it—over and over, calling Claire's date "the Matthew Barney of LAC arts"—so I can only assume that mine is the new heartbeat of America. Claire, by the way, is a fine character who has been subjected to some of the more horrible arts courses imaginable, but it seems as if she's finally gone upper division, where the class covers real-world concepts such as a work's "success" and "hot lesbian action."
Posted by Kriston at July 22, 2004 3:41 PMI guess if I was say, Ehrenrich's child from her third pregnancy, I'd be getting on my knees and thanking God that Daddy got that promotion down at the plant so they could afford not to kill me.
I'm pro-choice. But let's not kid ourselves. Let's call it what it is...a convenient way to snuff out those bothersome babies 'cause we were too stupid to have someone put on a condom. That's why people aren't coming out of the woodwork to celebrate what they might have done years ago. --s
Posted by: j.scott barnard at July 22, 2004 4:22 PMWell, I can already tell this thread is going to degenerate into the broader debate, but I can't resist saying: Scott, you hold assumptions we don't share. If all embryos are sentient children, game over, you win.
Kriston, you mention the "interplay between art and the political zeitgeist". There's your problem. Not to be snotty about it, but the amount of art present in most soap operas aimed at middle school audiences is miniscule. TV serves a lot of functions -- art isn't exactly at the top of the list. It's not surprising that some of TV's other priorities would preclude Very Special Episodes dealing with abortion.
If you pick a different medium, I think you'll find a lot mainstream art dealing with abortion -- although I also imagine most of it was probably made around Roe v. Wade. Ben Folds' "Brick" and "The Cider House Rules" come to mind as big hits that touched on abortion, although neither is a specific meditation on it.
Posted by: tom at July 22, 2004 4:36 PMMy comment sounds pretty insensitive on re-read. The point I was trying to make was more related to this part of the quote:
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this "bad faith," meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights. The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.I think I'd serve any discussion better by blogging about it sometime...rather than mucking up this thread. --s Posted by: j.scott barnard at July 22, 2004 5:02 PM
Have you guys seen Degrassi? That shit is hard. They've done the cutting episode, the spousal abuse episode, and the interracial dating episode among others. There is in fact a petition going around somewhere on the internet asking The N to show the abortion episode. Of course, I signed. But I love the show.
But to put this in context, these aren't special episodes or anything. That's just a normal day in grade 8 in Canada.
Posted by: walsh at July 22, 2004 5:59 PMI am personally against abortion — were I a potential father, I'd do everything I could to convince the soon-to-be mother to carry the child to term, even if we were giving it up for adoption — but I think this post touches on the key points of the matter for me. I don't think a fetus constitutes a person, but I do value it's potential for life very much. Either way, I don't think I have much of a say in the matter since I don't have the physiological burden of carrying the baby.
That said, we shouldn't try to dance around the fact that abortion snuffs out a potential for life. Of course many women (and a good share of men, too, I imagine) will feel a great deal of remorse if they destroy this potential. But if a woman realizes this is truly the best thing for her and for future children she may have, and is comfortable with her decision, I don't see any problem with that. I wish it could have worked out otherwise.
All this is why I favor extensive, accurate education, on both the procedure and the other options. In the end, there will never be a scientific consensus, much less a political one, so by all means leave this difficult decision up to the woman who actually has to suffer through it.
I don't know, though, whenever I try to articulate my thoughts on this subject, I feel very mealy-mouthed, or cognitive-dissonance-ency. It's tought to make decisions on the basis of a shrug, so maybe I'll just butt out.
Posted by: matty at July 22, 2004 6:05 PMDidn't someone on The Real World get an abortion once?
There's also controversy brewing among conservatives lately because an Usher song (I think it's Usher, at least) mentions trying to convince his woman to get an abortion. I think I saw an outraged column about this on Town Hall the other day.
I remember the original Degrassi from my formative years, and it also was pretty intense.
Posted by: Dimmy Karras at July 23, 2004 10:50 AMThe real story here is clearly one of endurance. They look so happy, Canadians, and yet each day is a journey through hell.
Posted by: Kriston at July 23, 2004 10:52 AMDimmy, you're showing your age if you remember the first Degrassi. I've caught late night re-runs of the current Degrassi and saw that one kid's father, one kid's mother and one of the teachers were actors from the original series playing their older selves. Surreal. --s
Posted by: j.scott barnard at July 23, 2004 12:45 PMIsn't Ehrenreich giving an excuse beyond "convenience" for her own abortions? The fetuses she aborted were not physicially defective, but she's clearly saying that she aborted them for strong economic reasons.
Here would be the point at which some feminists would start talking about how if we had a better social safety net -- if, for example, Ehrenreich could have felt secure about her children's welfare even with two additional kids -- there wouldn't be a need for abortion.
There are very few people who are willing to maintain a right to abortion in a perfect world of no rape, excellent and freely available contraception, massive social support for pregnant women, sufficient government aid for single mothers and easy adoptions. And because of the rarity of those people, I suspect that abortion really is a somewhat conditional right in most of our minds. (Thus distinguishing it from, say, freedom of speech; we would maintain the right to say "Fuck the government" even if they never did fuck up.)
In Ehrenreich's case, if she can't afford another child, it's OK to have an abortion, because she's doing this for her existing kids, so she's still a Good Mother. If she could afford another child, and just didn't want one, I suspect that a few people who applauded the economic decision would be thinking, "Selfish whore."
Posted by: PG at July 24, 2004 10:53 AMCapps, did Kev give you a point for your footnote?
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