On Abortion and Over-Population
by Nancy Forest-Flier
In a recent letter, a friend explained his reluctant acceptance of abortion with the statement: "I also believe that the human race is over-running the planet and destroying our Mother the Earth." While recognizing abortion as a moral problem, he saw it as the lesser of two evils. The cost of saving the planet is to reduce the human population. This is a widely accepted notion, and there are many who have succeeded in making us believe that over-population is the problem and that birth control and abortion are the answer.
Population control is often an attempt by Western, wealthy nations to impose their values on poor, usually non-white nations, and these countries are not happy about it. At a recent 1998 Population Consultation of the UN NGO Committee on Population and Development in New York, the ambassador from the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez, shocked the audience with a speech in which she sharply criticized groups such as Zero Population Growth and Planned Parenthood for trying to reduce fertility in countries that don't want it (and thinking that it's for their own good, etc.). She accused the West of targeting poor and darker-skinned countries, such as her own. "It used to be," she pointed out, "that older women could depend on their adult children to care for them in old age. In 1960, for example, a Jamaican woman had an average of six children; by 1990 she was likely to have fewer than three. Now typically she has two. Who will supply the support system for this mother when she is old?"
Even more amazing was the speech by Dr. James McCarthy, Head of the Center for Population at Columbia University, who called himself a "recovering demographer" and told the audience that "population doesn't matter."
In her book Sex and Destiny, feminist Germaine Greer comments, "we [should] abandon the rhetoric of crisis for we are the crisis. Let us stop worrying about a world crammed with people... stop counting the babies born every minute... use our imagination to understand how poverty is created and maintained... so that we lose our phobia about the poor. Rather than being afraid of the powerless, let us be afraid of the powerful -- the rich, sterile nations who have no stake in the future. More 'unwanted' children are born to us, the rich, than to them, the poor."
Although there are clearly some over-populated places in the world, this does not mean that the world is over-populated. There are many, many factors involved. Someone told me recently that the entire population of the world, if it agreed to live at the same density as New York City, could fit into the state of Texas. Not a very savory prospect, but interesting.
Justifying abortion by the population-control argument boils down to saying that we should encourage the use of abortion as birth control. But there are already countries that use abortion as birth control -- Russia and other former East bloc countries -- and the women there are in despair. Some women have several abortions in their lifetime because the birth control possibilities are so limited, and they are urgently demanding better conditions so that they don't have to resort to abortion just to limit births. So this argument just doesn't hold water. Not only do the poor countries not want population control, not only is the whole over-population argument questionable, but individual women who are forced to control births through abortion are crying for help.
I would be surprised if any woman ever had an abortion for the sake of the planet, or because of her concern for over-population. Among the women I have known who had abortions, none of them, at that terrible point in their lives, cared a hoot about over-population. Women have abortions because they feel cornered, abandoned, hopeless, scared, manipulated. At least my friends all felt this way. And after the abortion they mourned deeply. They may still be mourning. Frederica Mathewes Green, in her book Real Choices, explains the psychological after-effects of abortion; if they had it to do over again, most women admit that they would choose not to abort.
My personal feeling is that abortion is just as much a feminist issue as it is a pro-life issue. I think women have been sold a very shoddy bill of goods. Radical feminist leaders have played right into the hands of Hugh Hefner types: abortion is a wonderful solution for both of them. Women are expected to make the "right" choice as soon as a problem pregnancy comes along (at least the playboy philosophy hopes they will).
The other argument one hears is that abortion is a more merciful solution for the children of the poor than growing up in destitution. My friend asked: "Isn't poverty and isolation a slow, cruel death as opposed to an operation that deals with the new life before it can actually think and breathe?"
Not necessarily. That's implying that poor people should consider abortion when they get pregnant, because it's sure better than raising children in poverty and isolation. But there are lots and lots of poor women who curse their poverty, and then on top of it all they feel driven to the abortion clinic when they get pregnant, just because society has few other options.
With all our collective intelligence, with all our social science, with all our money, society in the West should be able to come up with a better solution for dealing with problem pregnancies (not medical problems) than abortion. Abortion leaves far, far too many psychological scars. But it's the cheap way out. What abortion does is pressure the most vulnerable -- scared pregnant women -- into "getting rid of the problem" so that society doesn't have to deal with it.
My friend wrote: "I shudder to think of our making common cause with the so-called 'Christian' right who are militantly against abortion but endorse war, sexism and capital punishment." But must we be inconsistent simply because others are inconsistent? Just because the far-right seems to have co-opted the pro-life argument doesn't mean that nobody else can endorse it. This calls for a little bit of courage. I urged my friend not to let the agenda of the far right limit his agenda. If you think abortion is wrong, oppose it bravely!
Here in the Netherlands we have the lowest abortion rate in the entire Western world. And, says the Minister of Health, "we're proud of it." Proud to have a low abortion rate? That must mean that lowering the abortion rate, or trying to, is a thing worth doing. What I'm saying is, let's try to lower the abortion rate everywhere. Let's not abandon women to their own private darkness where they have to make these impossible decisions alone (and then face a society that shrugs its shoulders).
William Styron's book Sophie's Choice is about such an impossible choice. On one level it's about the Holocaust, but on another level it's about the pressure to decide which of your children you will allow to live and which you will abandon to the hand of violence. Sophie could not live with her choice and finally took her own life.
One can find women who are no more troubled about an abortion they had than they are troubled about a missed bus, but for every woman who is blas about having abortions you will find many more who wish they hadn't had to do violence to their unborn children and to their consciences. I'm not insisting that the laws be changed (although it would be good if it did eventually happen), or that all women be forced to go through with their pregnancy no matter what (even if their health is at risk), or that we abandon women to back-street butchers. I'm saying, let's work from the other side. Let's try to create a society in which abortion is unthinkable. A society that forces the weak and frightened to shoulder the burden of a social problem should be ashamed of itself.
How do we do it? That's a good question. My hope is that peace organizations will at last begin to explore rather than ignore the problem, to start some dialogues, to try to cut through the rhetoric and terrible division and to address a problem that everybody can rally around.
Nancy Forest-Flier is a translator and editor.