Abortion, Questions, Ethics, Embodiment

Abstract

A book published in Australia in 2000 about 'women's stories of grief after abortion' claims that 'the response of traumatized aborting women has been repressed' and that their voices 'struggle to be heard'. The back-cover blurb describes the book as 'the secret sufferings of bereft and yearning mothers' and urges readers to 'listen to the voices of women until now silenced in the abortion debate'. Giving Sorrow Words by Melinda Tankard Reist is an edited collection of the personal accounts of eighteen women which tell of intense emotional suffering, and in some cases physical suffering, in the wake of abortions. It has received significant media coverage. Notably most of the women in the book chose abortion against their own wishes. The eighteen were selected from two hundred and fifty who responded to small advertisements in magazines and newspapers headed 'Abortion Grief'. Tankard Reist does not claim to be either for or against abortion although the statement in the biographical note at the back of the book that she 'advises Senator Brian Harradine on bioethical and human rights issues' is close to a declaration of strong opposition to abortion.1 Contrary to Tankard Reist's claim that the idea that abortion leads to suffering is a repressed truth, the idea has a long history. Claims of secrecy, and active silencing, however, construct the idea as revelation and create heightened truth status for the voices that are presented.2 While it is true that the voices of women who have had abortions, whatever their experience, continue to be comparatively absent in Australian public discourse, representations of the suffering aborting woman are abundant - evidenced by the long list of books and articles to which Tankard Reist refers. The alleged inevitability of negative psychological effects and the rights of the fetus are the two main arguments of the Australian anti-abortion movement. Even many people who are 'pro-choice' believe that abortion is an unfortunate experience at best, and that psychological and even physical complications are likely. In this article I want to identify the cultural assumptions that have historically generated and supported the idea that abortion causes suffering and disability and to examine the historical effects of the various representations of this idea. I aim to unsettle the truth of this idea and promote ways in which we might hear different truths and think about women who have had abortions outside the assumption of inevitable post-abortion suffering. This, in turn, is about creating different possibilities for the embodiment of the experience of abortion. After sketching the twentieth-century history of