In my experience a lot of pro-lifers are terrified about talking to people who’ve had abortions. At Minimise workshops people will tell me that they never know whether the person they’re talking to might have had an abortion themselves, or (even more likely) have a close friend or family member who’s had one. This makes them worried about engaging in conversations about abortion with almost anyone.
This fear is, I think, born out of something good. Pro-lifers recognise that abortion is a decision that few people make easily, and which people often (though not always) have complicated feelings and thoughts about. For every person who outright regrets their abortion or who becomes pro-life, there are others who are still pro-choice but have a deeply ambiguous relationship to their own choice (Sinéad O’Connor was one of those). Part of that ambiguity is that people often credit a past abortion with making the kind of life they now lead possible. They see themselves as having done something terribly difficult and morally fraught, but ultimately necessary for their own wellbeing or that of others. Pro-lifers recognise that this is going to make any conversation about the ethics of abortion extremely fraught territory, and they don’t want to be cruel or hurtful.
Far from demonising women who’ve had abortions, I think the vast majority of pro-lifers believe something like the ‘abortion creates two victims’ line. (That line has its own problems in my view, but that’s for a different post.) But given that abortion is tragically common, that makes people apprehensive about talking about abortion at all.
So what do I generally say to this worry? I tend to say three things:
- A lot of ‘the right way to talk to people who’ve had abortions’ is just the right way to talk to anyone.
If you’re really worried that you couldn’t stand over the normal way you talk about abortion if you realised that the person you were talking to had had one themselves, that’s a sign that there’s something wrong with the normal way you talk about abortion. If you’re being dismissive of women who’ve had abortions or attributing to them motivations that you wouldn’t be comfortable saying to their faces, you should stop doing that in all your conversations.
If, on the other hand, you’re being kind and respectful to the people you’re talking to, you’re assuming that the pro-choice person you are talking to is trying to find the truth and do what’s right, and you’re avoiding straw-manning and caricaturing people who disagree with you, you should be able to be confident that you won’t do anything to carelessly hurt another person, even if they’ve had an abortion.
Now, if someone I’m talking to reveals that they’ve had an abortion I’ll ask them if it’s OK to continue the conversation. I’ll say something like ‘I’m sorry to hear you went through that. I’m not going to make any assumptions about how you feel about it, but if you’d rather not carry on the conversation I totally respect that.’ If I know them I might then say something about being happy to pick it up another time if they ever want to hear more about where I’m coming from. But I think pro-lifers should be willing to do that in all sorts of contexts. We shouldn’t as a rule be trying to force people to have conversations if they don’t want to be having them! That’s just basic respect and decency.
- Abortion is different from many other human rights violations, and that’s OK
One very concrete worry about talking to someone who’s had an abortion or is close to someone who had is that as pro-lifers we think that abortion is a serious wrong. It’s killing an innocent person. It’s always easier to talk about serious ethical questions with a degree of abstraction than it is to accuse another person of doing something evil.
The thing is though, the cause of this discomfort also points to its solution. We wouldn’t, I think, be particularly uncomfortable telling a person who owned slaves that they were doing something wrong. So why are we about abortion? I think the reason is that we correctly recognise that the subjective culpability of many women who have abortions is much lower than in other cases of human rights violations. There are a lot of reasons for this – again worth another post – but one is that it’s easier to be mistaken in good faith about the personhood of very young embryos and foetuses than it is about the personhood of born people. So if somebody says something to me like, ‘Do you think I’m a murderer?’ I’d be able to truthfully respond that the situation is very different: that I presume you have a good-faith belief that the unborn aren’t actually persons (or, perhaps, that their action was justified in a similar way to how self-defence might be).
These concerns don’t make abortion any less objectively wrong, but they should change how we think about women who have abortions.
- Dialogue is still possible even if one person thinks the other has done something very wrong
Think about vegetarianism. Many ethical vegetarians think non-vegetarians are acting seriously wrongly, constantly violating the rights of innocent animals and directly enabling their deaths. But if you’re a meat-eater, think about your vegetarian friends. If you were having a discussion about the ethics of vegetarianism with them, you might feel challenged and even disturbed by their belief that your actions were seriously wrong. But that wouldn’t make you hate them or think that they had no respect for you.
Having conversations about abortion is certainly more difficult when the person you’re talking to has personal experience of the issue. But that shouldn’t paralyse us, and should rather inspire us to more kindness, compassion, and respect in all our conversations.
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