After 20 Million Abortions, Why Isn’t the Pro-Choice Voice Heard?

As the Supreme Court prepares to reconsider the constitutionality of a woman’s right to an abortion, Americans who purportedly support this right remain a relatively silent majority.

The leading opinion polls have consistently found that most Americans stand behind women’s rights in this regard, yet the pro-choice majority is not nearly as visibly active as the anti-abortion movement has been.

The president of the National Organization for Women, Molly Yard, blames the news media for the fact that the public sees and hears from abortion foes more often than its supporters. She says that the media do not adequately cover pro-choice briefings, rallies and marches.

Even if media bias is conceded, some national abortion-rights organizers admit that, despite the findings of opinion polls, the public has been slow to answer their direct appeals for help. They apparently have a smaller list of supporters to draw upon, compared to the anti-abortion forces’ extensive apparatus for organizing and fund-raising.

Since Roe vs. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that the present court is reconsidering, the number of abortions performed in America has increased each year, now totaling close to 21 million. One would expect that these women who benefited from Roe vs. Wade would be mobilizing to keep it in force. Unfortunately, the fact that a woman has had an abortion, or a man has urged his wife or lover to have one, does not mean that they can be counted on to defend abortion rights against the tide of pro-life victories.

Part of the problem, according to Yard and other NOW officials, is that so many of these men and women are too young to remember the dangerous pre-1973 days of “back alley abortions.” Perhaps their mothers, aunts and older sisters who lay on bloodied sheets while someone probed their cervixes with coat hangers have been unwilling to share their stories. Perhaps the young people did not sit on the back stoops of sweltering summer kitchens to hear the women talk about what it was like for lower- and middle-class women to have an abortion before it was legal. Women who have had legal abortions usually say that the experience caused them anxiety and was unpleasant, if not horrific. Can’t they imagine how much worse the experience might be if not permitted by law?

I do not think that it is ignorance of the past that allows Americans to rationalize away their lack of active support for abortion rights, but a basic disbelief that abortion is a right. They have been socialized to feel more comfortable viewing abortion as a last option of desperation.

Even Betty Friedan, a mother of modern feminism, views abortion as a necessary evil rather than a woman’s right when she compares abortion to a mastectomy rather than the exercise of a right no different from the right to an education or a living wage.

Women who choose an abortion persist in seeing themselves as victims of circumstances instead of as people making choices of self-determination. This victim’s view keeps them from actively defending their right to an abortion.

Rosalind Petchesky recognized this phenomenon when she wrote in “Abortion and Woman’s Choice”: “Women’s own understandings about the justice of an abortion will have an important impact less on their willingness to get abortions than on their willingness to fight for them. As feminists are keenly aware, legal changes are fragile without a revolution in consciousness.”

Americans who say that they believe in a woman’s right to have an abortion on demand have not been willing to fight to maintain that right, have conveniently ignored the writing on the wall saying that right was in peril, because they have not experienced a revolution in consciousness. They have not sufficiently internalized the concept of equality for women when it comes to issues of sexuality and reproductive freedom. Rather than changing old concepts, Americans have spent the last 16 years struggling with the guilt of wanting something that they really think is wrong.

It would be easier for these Americans to sit back and let Roe vs. Wade be overturned because this would allow the legal system and medical authorities to once again act as their moral gatekeepers. They want someone else to make their difficult decisions for them. They lack the courage to defend the right for any woman to have what most of us do not want to speak of, think about or have our neighbors think we are a part of--even if they feel justified in wanting it for themselves.