From: dlb5404@tamsun.tamu.edu (Daryl Biberdorf)
Newsgroups: tx.politics
Subject: Re: HR 4983
Date: 18 Aug 92 17:12:31 GMT
Distribution: tx
Organization: Texas A&M University, College Station

In article <1992Aug11.234350.21681@twisto.eng.hou.compaq.com> darylb@sword.eng.hou.compaq.com (Daryl Biberdorf) writes:
>There was an article in the Village Voice a couple of years ago that
>talked about a new trend called Abortion Chic.  Basically, the goal
>was form women to express both their fertility and femininity sa
>well as their control.  To do this they would deliberately get pregnant
>(the fertility/femininity part) and then abort (the control part).
>
>I have the article in my files at home.  I'll cite it Wednesday evening.

Sorry it took me so long to post this.  I decided to post the entire
article because most of it seems relevant.

From the Feb 4 - Feb 10, 1981, issue of Village Voice (it's older than
I thought):

=========================================================================

  Abortion Chic  The Attraction of 'Wanted-Unwanted Pregnancies'
  by Leslie Savan (probably copyrighted by The Village Voice or Ms. Savan)

For fear of thinking antiabortion thoughts, we refuse to see the ticklish
situation:  getting an abortion has become subliminally chic.  The operation
has so completely lost its stigma in some circles that wit now promises
psychological payoffs we feel are worth the risk.  Most women I know
in their twenties and thirties have now had one, two, or more abortions
whereas 20 years ago women their age would have had one, two, or more
children.  I strongly believe that safe, legal abortions shuld be 
available.  But it seems evident that many women of my generation
are replacing having children with having abortions, not
only in a literal sense but also as a major rite of passage.

The majority of abortions are not due to contraceptive failure.
Statistics vary: one study by demographer Kristin Luker found that
of 500 women receiving abortions only 6 per cent had been using
a consistent method of birth control in the month they conceived; another
study found that only 20 percent were using any form of birth
control.  The easy availability of abortion makes it more likely
that women will use a contraceptive incorrectly or not at all,
risking pregnancies they don't intend to complete.  But such
pregnancues - "wanted-unwanted pregnancies" - become attractive
in the first place because of interacting and not-always-conscious
motives, among them:

* A desire to know if we're fertile, especially if we've postponed
pregnancy until later in life (waiting for that perfect career/relationship
ratio).  I have several friends who say they've intentionally done this.
But idle curiosity was not always the reason.  Two-thirds of the
women in Luker's study said a doctor has told them they
couldn't get pregnant (when in fact the message was probably
something less final like, "Your tilted uterus could make conception
difficult.).  Infrequent but hardly unheard of side effects of
abortion such as subsequent miscarriage or sterility due to tubal
infection - not to mention recurrent pain - make it a terrible
irony for women who got pregnant only to see if they could.

* To test thge commitment of the man.  Will he marry me, or at least
put up half the money for the opeartion?  Presumably this tactic was
made obsolete by the women's movement, but it still goes on, though
most people are unawaree of it.  Men who tacity encourage women
to forget contraception on occasion also enjoy the thrills of this
risk.

* Abortion as a rite of passage, somewhere after the first menses and
(usually) before childbirth.  Not all women take part in it, as not all
go to the prom, but the fact that more women are aborting makes it more
permissible, even intriguing.  A friend of mine couldn't get it out
of her mind how a woman she knew got pregnant and aborted to test
her fertility.  It went so neatly.  A year leater, my
friend didn't user her diaphragm, figuring her period was due soon
and anyway, if she did get pregnant, she'd at least find out at the late 
age of 26 she could conceive.  She did and loved the week she knew
she was pregnant.  She aborted and felt part of a club.

* Abortion as a kind of childbirth.  Like delivery, it ends a
pregnancy, it puts us "in touch with our bodies," and it stirs
our maternal feelings, if only by regret.  Rites without responsibility.

* As a desirable tinge of tragedy.  "I've been through a lot.  I've
had an abortion."  It provides a "real-life experience" and seems
to increase our participation in the great themes of life and death.

* As a way of eating our cake and having it too.  Torn between
"femininity" and feminism, getting pregnant "proves" we are
feminine while getting abortion "proves" we are feminist.

None of this is to even enter the debate over whether the
embryo or fetus is a human being.  I don't know.  I don't know
exactly what we're killing with an abortion, but we are
killing something.  To dismiss that possibility out of hand,
to draw neat lines between human and subhuman, is to lack imagination
and a notion of paying prices.

That abortion might exact psychic and physical prices, individually
and collectively, is an idea most abortion advocates would rather
not think about.  They present abortion with no price; many would
like it to be free.  They present the abortion seeker,
regardless of what she may actually be like, as rational, modern, *and*
humanistic.  She's okay because they're okay.  But this unfounded and
politically approved image only allows us to be more
careless and more likely to play with our new technology - the cheap,
easy-to-get abortion, because it's there and because with it
we can act out a lot of roles and rituals.  That's one price
we pay - we lose our seriousness.

Why we get so many abortions and what they mean to us are questions
rarely asked by anyone on this side of the controversy.  The value-free,
technological thinking of the abortion movement - abortion is no more
than a "choice" - intimidates complex thought on the matter, reducing
it to reassuring slogans.

Abortion proponents, of course, have been intimidated themselves by
anti-abortionists.  A fear of boosting right-to-life power, a fear
I share in writing this, has quashed both public and private doubts.
But to allow antiabortionists to be the only ones to question
ethical and psychological aspects of abortion is to annoint them
as the sole protectors of morality.
=========================================================================






-- 
Daryl Biberdorf  N5GJM    dlb5404@rigel.tamu.edu  or  dlb5404@tamsun.tamu.edu
        "You're not messy.  You're organizationally impaired."
                _Real_Life_Adventures_, July 3, 1992