Beyond Pro-life and Pro-choice by Amery Fran

Author:Amery, Fran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bristol University Press

Anti-abortion participants also challenged the claim that restrictions on ‘late’ abortions would primarily affect frightened young girls and weary mothers, pointing to statistics apparently showing that the majority of abortions after 18 weeks were carried out on single, childless (and, by implication, less deserving) women (Paisley in Hansard, 1990b: 237; Duffy in Hansard, 1990b: 253). In this way, those in favour of abortion restrictions appealed to female purity, dividing women into the categories of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ and thus challenging the depiction of the Abortion Act 1967 as a measure to help the vulnerable. Deserving women were those who had behaved in a morally correct manner and were simply the victims of circumstance, while undeserving women sought abortions for trivialities – whether personal inconvenience or eugenic purposes – without having performed any maternal duties. This logic demonstrates the danger inherent in appealing to female virtue in order to justify legal abortion: ideas about female virtue can easily be subverted by arguing that virtuous women will ‘choose life’ when given the right support, or undermined by demonstrating that women seeking abortion are not particularly ‘virtuous’ after all.

Foetal subjects

As previously noted, the debates took place in the context of advances in foetal imaging technology and advances in medical science that allowed foetal life to be sustained outside the uterus at an earlier stage of gestation. As Rosalind Petchesky observed in her pivotal work on the topic, anti-abortion activists were quick to use this imagery to transform the foetus into a ‘person’ in the popular imagination. The 1984 US film The Silent Scream depicts an abortion, purporting to show the foetus attempting to escape the cannula and screaming silently. The film was framed as new knowledge allowed by a new ‘science of fetology’, allowing abortion to be witnessed ‘from the victim’s vantage point’ (Petchesky, 1987: 266). While The Silent Scream’s claims were rebutted by various members of the medical community, it has had a large influence on the abortion debate in the US. Petchesky attributes this to the seemingly ‘objective’ nature of photography – its assumed ability to capture ‘literal reality’ – in spite of foetal imagery’s tendency to depict the foetus as suspended in mid-air, abstracted from the pregnant body (1987: 268–9). Because it depicted the foetus in this way, this imagery was pivotal in allowing the foetus to be constructed as a separate, autonomous being and subject in its own right:

the autonomous, free-floating fetus merely extends to gestation the Hobbesian view of born human beings as disconnected, solitary individuals. It is this abstract individualism, effacing the pregnant woman and the fetus’s dependence on her, that gives the fetal image its symbolic transparency, so that we can read in it our selves, our lost babies, our mythic secure past. (1987: 270)

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