We Need to Get Respectability Politics Out of Abortion Discourse

It doesn’t matter what your reason is for needing an abortion. You deserve access to one, and your abortion story doesn’t have to be about horrific assault or medical trauma to be valid.

So this is something I’ve been thinking and saying for a while, but it really came to surface when I saw this article by Jon Pavlovitz for The Good Men Project.

Now, look. I’m not going to come down on the guy for addressing this issue of trying to meet anti-choice Christian women where they are, given that many religious conservative women are actually more virulently opposed to abortion than the conservative men in power. Better yet, he’s coming at this from the place of a pastor.

As your resident Slutty Jewish Heathen, I come from a drastically different background that wasn’t super religious. So, not opposed to that at all. I welcome the perspective, as most reasonable people would. All due respect.

But as someone who is definitely in the line of fire for anti-choice legislation, and the rhetoric that surrounds it, I took major umbrage with the following paragraph. This is a speech pattern I’ve been seeing on social media, personal essays, and news articles ever since the SCOTUS memo leaked:

This isn’t so much about the semantics of wording it as “pro choice” vs. “pro abortion”. Rather, it’s this idea that the decision to have an abortion is one purely of pain and trauma when that…isn’t what happens most of the time.

After the SCOTUS leak, Twitter and the news media were inundated with tragic stories about how an abortion saved someone’s life.

Stories flooded in about complications with pregnancy, having physical and/or mental health conditions that made pregnancy untenable, and the horrors of incest and being sexually assaulted by a teacher, boss, or someone else in a position of power imbalance.

Others talked about how abortion saved them from a life of privation and suffering because it meant delaying having children until they were emotionally and financially ready, often with a good partner in tow.

I’m not going to invalidate these stories. They matter. But there’s one problem: it started to create a veneer of respectability politics and elevating one narrative over another made it look like some groups deserved to tell their stories more than others, and were thus more “deserving” of abortion than some “sad” single young lady “irresponsibly” enjoying casual sex.

“See, her abortion was for good and moral reasons because she really wanted to be a mother but medical trauma happened.”

“We need abortion because the reminder of a rape is too much to bear.”

“Men benefit from abortion too because it means they’re not forced into fatherhood too young and their girlfriends or wives wanted to wait to have kids.”

Read: it started to come off as “Married moms need abortion too, not just THOSE SLUTS!”

Abortion does save lives. These stories make others feel less alone, they matter. The thing is, they don’t get to the crux of why I’m writing this: according to Healthline, 99% of women who get an abortion feel RELIEVED, rather than traumatized.

Relegating abortion to something you only pursue after an incredibly traumatic experience places a stigma on abortion. Which results in massive amounts of harm.

Abortion stigma is an umbrella term that refers to a wide range of stresses faced by those seeking an abortion. It can encompass everything from fear of the procedure and providers, of being looked down upon by loved ones upon having an abortion, failure to meet social standards for women, and numerous other factors.

In this essay, we’re examining that first one: the fear of having an abortion. Abortion stigma creates this perception that regardless of how safe and/or legal it is, that the act of needing one somehow makes you wrong or inferior.

Of the interviewees in Healthline’s study, only about 29% had negative feelings towards their abortions right after they had them (joining the 99% in the “relieved” camp within 5 years).

The 29% pinned these feelings primarily on abortion stigma within their communities.

Abortion stigma affects massive amounts of people across different cultures, religions, age groups, and walks of life. A national study of more than 4,000 abortion patients in America found that almost 2/3 of the respondents felt someone close to them would look down upon them if they knew they had an abortion, and abortion stigma has been correlated with longer-term psychological distress — more than the actual act of abortion itself.

But more widespread abortion stigma didn’t start with religious and conservative communities. It actually began with harmful Democratic Party rhetoric.

The ghoulish reaction from the Democrat apparatus was to start fundraising barely hours after the leak. They used reproductive rights as a bargaining chip for decades instead of DOING SOMETHING like codifying Roe when they had a chance. But legislative failure to save abortion rights aside, one of the biggest mistakes was when Hillary Clinton made this statement while Bill was still President in the 1990s: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” It became part of the Democratic Party’s national platform, and Clinton even repeated this line in her 2008 presidential campaign.

K Street wonks clung to this statement like cellophane well after the Bush years came and went, and even long after Americans evicted those expired hoards of Pop-Tarts from their Y2K doomsday bunkers. “Safe, legal, and rare” became the clarion call of Congressional and Senatorial campaigns, until organizations like Exhale, NARAL, and Shout Your Abortion criticized them because the “rare” part drove home the idea that abortion was bad, and should be avoided. In 2012, the Democratic Party finally listened to the pushback and changed the wording to “abortion should be safe and legal”.

The 90s are getting farther away in the rearview mirror. But the damage was done: the “rare” part didn’t just imply that one was bad and wrong for needing an abortion, that you somehow had failed because your birth control did or due to circumstances out of your control. Which…hello, are you aware these evangelical freaks are coming for birth control next? And steady access to contraceptives is already tenuous in many places?

“Rare” also implies that you’re not having sex enough and/or with enough partners to warrant the risk of needing an abortion. Or speaking purely from a medical standpoint, that all pregnancies are hunky-dory experiences where nothing ever goes wrong with the pregnant person or the fetus and that therefore, you’ve failed if you needed an abortion. What we were told should be rare is actually a VERY common and safe medical procedure.

All this rhetoric did was increase abortion stigma, which makes abortion patients more likely to delay seeking care, or even engage in self-harm.

“Safe, legal, and rare” evolved to “the only abortion seekers are those doing it from a place of SEVERE TRAUMA!” like some twisted form of Pokemon.

Are there people whose abortion stories come from a place of trauma? Yes. But that’s not the vast majority.

Many people just don’t want to be pregnant. At the moment, or EVER. And that alone is a valid reason to need an abortion.

EVERYONE should have access to abortion on demand, and no barriers to receiving any reproductive care they need. A REAL vision for a pro-choice society would be coverage and access to fertility and sterilization treatments alike regardless of gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other factors.

Making one group of abortion seekers sound more respectable than others because their need comes from a place of trauma really doesn’t do anything to advance reproductive rights.

Moreover, respectability politics is a trap. A con job.

Because here’s the thing. The theocrats want to punish women and queer people. (And stop calling them the Christian Taliban; this is AMERICAN WHITE SUPREMACY and it must be called what it is.) The rentier class wants a permanent supply of starving and overworked Uber drivers, Amazon shelf-stockers, and soldiers to bomb other countries we have no business being in. Oh, and a surplus of healthy white babies to abuse and brainwash to see their sick, authoritarian vision through.

Neither is going to be swayed by common sense.

They don’t care if women die, if families suffer, if communities are robbed of people they cherish dearly.

You cannot reason with these people.

If you have an abortion story about how your life was saved by the procedure, I’m glad you’re here. Your story is valid. I do want to drive that point home! The problem is that it’s not going to persuade these fanatics IN THE SLIGHTEST.

They give not one micron of an iota of a meta-fuck if you’re some nice white Christian lady who has that vaunted white cishet marriage with 2.3 living children, and rarely have sex with said husband. THEY’RE GOING TO CALL YOU AN IRREDEEMABLE WHORE WHO DESERVED SUFFERING ANYWAY.

I promise: it’s okay if you needed an abortion because you met a friend of a friend, sparks flew, one thing led to another, and the condom broke.

Or you got lost in passion with your boyfriend and forgot about the Trojans, then the pharmacist neglected to tell you that Plan B doesn’t work if you’re over 165 pounds.

Oh hey, that’s a great example of why “safe, legal, and rare” was such harmful bullshit! Because abortion is not that rare when most adult women in America can’t effectively use a nuclear option in cases of stealthing and rape at worst, condom loss or getting caught up in the heat of the moment at best.

Not to mention that we live in an increasingly commitmentphobic society these days where straight women who want to lock it down find themselves in these situations where we’re basically having sex until we’re actually in a real relationship. And where those of us who don’t want to have kids have to fight doctors for 16 years before finally getting one who’ll sterilize us. So it’s just plain unrealistic to expect that most people are going to abstain from sex to please some fascist theocrats who are most definitely engaging in cocaine orgies behind closed doors.

Most abortions don’t result from traumatic situations. A majority of abortion patients know off the bat that they don’t want to be pregnant and feel relief when they get the procedure. It doesn’t matter if the patient was married 15 years or were having enough dick appointments to warrant a spreadsheet.

Respectability politics is never going to stave off this creeping authoritarianism.