There are mothers and then there are women who have abortions. It might be the most powerful and pervasive myth anti-abortion lobbyists, politicians and their disciples have ever authored. When every termination becomes a decision to reject motherhood, moralising becomes simple.
Mothers procreate – the virtuous archetype Virgin Mary didn’t even fornicate to do so – while women who have abortions have sex for pleasure, selfishly devouring the forbidden as Eve did.
Mothers sacrifice, women who have abortions choose themselves. A desperate teenager or a selfish hussy might terminate a pregnancy, but a mother, she who has known what it is to give and sustain life, surely could not. Mothers of course have abortions. People who will later bear and, or, rear children have abortions.
The majority of interviewees in the hundreds of articles I have written about abortion had children. “For me, the termination was an act of love for my other children and a reaffirmation of my love for my relationship,” Kate whispered to me over the phone, so as not to wake her sleeping baby. She had had a medical abortion on the eve of Mother’s Day a few years earlier. “If I hadn’t had an abortion my life would be over. I know I would have taken my own life and left many children without a mum.”
It is estimated that more than half of women in Australia who have abortions are mothers. In the United States, about 60% per cent of patients who have abortions are already mothers and half of them have two or more children. Abortion statistics in the United Kingdom from 2021 show that the proportion of terminations to people who were already mothers, versus those to non-mothers, jumped from 51% in the preceding decade to 57%.
I felt deeply that the women in my stories were making decisions as mothers, even for the few who weren’t already or would never become mothers.
In every pregnancy there was a temporal paradox in which the person was both a parent and non-parent, their life stretching forward and backwards between moments as they considered their options. As Lauren Collee writes in the LA Review of Books: “The fetus is pure potentiality: not a single entity, but a fork – the moment at which the normal flow of time splits into two possible trajectories.”
In the interviews I had, they had very carefully considered what a child’s future could entail. In every conversation people could clearly articulate why it was the best choice for everyone, in most cases leaving their own needs until last, or out entirely. When I spent a day at a crisis pregnancy centre the attitude the staff had towards pregnant women, who, usually through false advertising, stumbled across their services, was condescending.
The idea that these people did not have adequate information, intelligence or intuition to make decisions for themselves but simultaneously somehow had the innate ability to care for a child often dovetailed neatly with the idea that abortion is to reject motherhood, either through selfishness, incomprehension that life is growing inside of them – here is an ultrasound! – or ignorance about how easy and fulfilling parenting can be.
Shortly after I stopped writing about reproductive rights full-time, a landmark 10-year study was published that confirmed what I had always believed: not only were my interviewees’ choices painfully considered but their self-knowledge could also be prescient. It wasn’t an aimless prediction, a foolish clairvoyance, but an awareness of their own material conditions.
For the Turnaway Study, Diana Greene Foster and her team of psychologists, epidemiologists, physicians, demographers, economists and public health researchers conducted and analysed almost 8,000 interviews of women in the United States who were either allowed or denied the abortion they wanted. Some gave birth after they were denied an abortion because they had been just over a clinic’s gestational limit, and the rest were just under that limit and received an abortion. “When asked why they want to end a pregnancy, women give specific and personal reasons,” Greene writes. “And their fears are borne out in the experiences of women who carry unwanted pregnancies to term.”
The data should not matter – agency should not only be afforded the prophetic – but it does matter because for decades people have been told they are making rushed, uninformed, selfish choices to end their pregnancies.
The Turnaway Study found that women who were denied their abortions were more likely to live in poverty. It found that women who were unable to terminate their pregnancies were more likely to stay in contact with their violent partner. It found that the children of women who had to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term scored worse on several measures of health and development than those whose mother was able to access the abortion she wanted.
These women proved resilient to the experience of giving birth after an unwanted pregnancy. Greene found no evidence that abortion hurt women, and found that women who had terminated their pregnancy were more frequently better off – physically, financially, professionally – than those who were denied one. Two women who were denied their abortions died of childbirth-related causes. The data does not show that having a child makes your life worse. It shows that when women want to end a pregnancy, there are real repercussions if they are denied that choice.
It says that women know themselves and their families and use that knowledge to make choices. What is parental instinct if it isn’t making decisions about when, if ever, you’re in a position for parenthood?
Women who were given their abortion were more likely to intentionally become pregnant in the next five years than women who were not. These women were not rejecting motherhood. They were family planning as all parents do.
The idea that a uterus grants anyone an allotment or inherent aptitude as a parent is harmful – to parents without uteruses, to non-biological parents, to people who can’t successfully conceive, not to mention to the parents with uteruses who god forbid find the role challenging. But there is a knowledge, not born of biology but generated by the very consideration of the question of parenthood, that we should and can have faith in.
If we trust people with the possibility of bearing and or rearing children we can of course trust them with the decision not to. “Abortion has been around as long as pregnancy, and our responsibility is to let it be complex and to make it safe and accessible,” Merritt Tierce, the US author of Love me Back, told the Paris Review. “And most of all to not question people when they choose abortion – to let them be the experts on their own lives.”
Gina Rushton is editor of Crikey. She is the author of The Parenthood Dilemma and The Most Important Job in the World
