The Fundamental Meaning of Choice : People argue the wrong points. Look instead at what it means to take an identity that can never be shed: that of parent.

RU-486. Can we have it or can’t we? Which side will win the pro- or anti-abortion forces? Once again, the battle lines have been drawn in the never-ending womb wars of late 20th-Century America, and truth is the first casualty.

The truth being buried under an avalanche of absolutes and abstractions is that both sides have tended to frame the abortion debate in the most narrow political and ethical terms. The public disagreement about RU-486, like the larger argument about abortion, highlights conflicting attitudes about the roles of sex, childbearing and careers in women’s lives. But for women themselves, how they feel about child-rearing and child-caring is probably a greater influence.

Although you’d never know from listening to the abortion debate, it is inextricably linked to these complex and fundamental care-giving activities. When contemplating motherhood, most women realize that this is not a decision about a brief moment of ecstasy, nine months of pregnancy and a few hours of delivery-room agony. It is rather about one’s ability to engage in the difficult work of helping children grow and develop, to demonstrate the patience and understanding necessary to affirm their strengths and overcome their weaknesses, to be loyal to them in spite of anger, sadness, illness, terrible handicaps and even death. It is a decision about taking on a job whose demands literally never end and acquiring an identity that can never be entirely shed.

When I was 26, I made the choice to have an abortion. I terminated an unwanted pregnancy not because I wanted to preserve some abstract right, some absolute prerogative of individual liberty. I made this decision because somewhere deep inside me I understood the immense and relentless responsibilities of being a mother. And I knew that I was not ready for it.

I have never once regretted my decision. I believed then that every woman should indeed have the absolute right to determine when and if she is prepared to take responsibility for another human being.

I believe the same thing today. But today, I understand in the most profound manner why that right is so important. I know from personal experience that the intense work of parenting does not end after a few exhausting months of round-the-clock feeding and diapering, years of “the terrible twos,” sibling rivalry and sullen adolescence. I know it involves far more than teaching children to “go potty,” feed themselves, read, write and think, respect other human beings, control hostility and anger, overcome sadness and disappointment, forge close relationships with others and maybe someday find a mate and have children of their own.

It involves the extraordinary capacity to cope with one’s own frustration--and sometimes even one’s own rage--to balance one’s own needs with the often unpredictable needs of another, to tolerate terrible anxiety and even dread about their safety and well-being, to give and give and give when there is no “please” and “thank you,” and finally, in such a bittersweet finale, to let go.

This is not a job, I quickly learned, that one can successfully undertake in isolation. It really does take the equivalent of a traditional village to raise a child. That community must include fathers, relatives, friends, neighbors and even perfect strangers. It must help provide money, time and social support.

That is precisely why, as a mother, I am awe-struck and sometimes infuriated by the narrow and mean-spirited nature of the abortion debate. I am stunned when I hear right-wing pro-life advocates, in effect, imposing motherhood on women unprepared for or unwilling to assume this role.

How can anyone have the unmitigated chutzpah to tell another human being that she must bear the year-in and year-out responsibility of parenting? How can men--I think here particularly of politicians, priests and Supreme Court justices who have spent little or no time caring for children and, in some cases, oppose much-needed economic and social supports to almost all who do--how can they so cavalierly decree that any woman can adjust to the burdens and demands of child-rearing? Do these “right-to-lifers” really believe that a stream of estrogen magically ensures a lifetime supply of love, nurturing, parental wisdom and understanding?

It would be almost laughable, were it not so tragic, that those who claim to be protecting innocent young lives in fact seem to view children not as the objects of care but as punishment for adult misconduct or as penance for sexual misbehavior. Isn’t that the meaning of anti-abortion advocates’ oft-repeated cliche that a woman trapped in an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy “has made her bed and now must lie in it?”

And I find it dismaying that so many feminists defend the right to choose solely on the grounds of privacy and personal liberty. That is a stance which, as author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observes, only reinforces “the extreme individualistic view of society as composed of atomized individuals” rather than framing the issue as one affirming an individual’s absolute need of a family and community of care and nurture.

Today our society debates whether life begins at the moment of conception and whether a promising new drug can be used to terminate unwanted pregnancy. What we really need to question is our society’s conception of what it takes to nurture and nourish human life, not in isolation but within a human community.