There is a transparent rationalization at the core of the abortion debate.
First, it must be made clear that all psychological defenses function, in part, by allowing us to lie to ourselves. When we use a healthy, more mature defense, we allow ourselves to soften the blows of reality. For example, when we use "black humor" to mitigate our reverses, we are distancing ourselves from the pain; in effect, we are, usually, with awareness (which is what makes it a healthier defence) trying to diminish the intensity of an unhappy situation. A somewhat less mature, though ubiquitous, defense is rationalization. Rationalization is a more sophisticated form of defense than overt denial but functions in the same way. In a rationalization we invent a reasonable sounding (pseudo) explanation for something we do not want to face too directly. For example, when one has been rejected, it is not uncommon for the unfortunate one who has been rejected to catalog all the reasons that the rejector was a poor choice: She/he wasn't that good-looking and said lots of dumb things, therefore, I am really lucky I led her/him to reject me! Now, I can find someone better and don't even have to feel bad that I was rejected!
The rejectee has now protected his/her self esteem from the full force of rejection and the pain that rejection provokes.
How does this work in the Abortion debate? In a series of posts discussing Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes I addressed the key question concerning abortion: [Emphasis in the original]
Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes (Part II)
Mothers and Fathers: When Does Life Begin?
For a couple who desire a child, life begins before conception. A couple trying to become pregnant find that each month, if the woman has her menses, there is a small feeling of loss; the hoped for and already loved child has not appeared. When, finally, the woman determines she is pregnant, often responding to barely conscious and unconscious bodily signals that herald the changes taking place within, the child begins to take on a reality, a life of its own. By the time of "quickening", typically in the fourth month or thereabouts, the child is already a baby in the minds of the parents. There is no question that wanted children are psychologically already babies from very early in the sequence. Furthermore, a wanted child is the repository of all that is best in the couple. They imbue the soon-to-be infant with all sorts of possibilities and qualities. Most first time parents have significant anxiety over their ability to parent and raise a child, but there is no question that from the moment of the positive EPT, reinforced each step of the way (heartbeat, sonograms, movement), the woman is carrying a person, not a fetus, and not a clump of cells.
Contrast this with an unwanted pregnancy. The language and the psychological processes couldn’t be more different. The future abortion is dehumanized from the start. It is a clump of cells or a fetus. It is the repository of all that is rejected and ambivalent in the parents.
Our society’s response to abortion is an almost direct reflection of the psychological process of splitting.
It should be unobjectionable to point out that for a wanted pregnancy the child exists for the parents, psychologically, long before the actual infant has arrived on the scene. I mentioned the psychological defense of splitting because for new parents the infant is typically imbued with all of the positive, ideal attributes, that the parents most value in themselves. The infant son is going to be a great baseball player or a Doctor; he will be smart, good looking, and funny. The infant daughter will be a great beauty and perhaps grow up to be a Doctor. Our children should be taller and smarter and better looking than we are! This is a healthy use of splitting though can be pathological if the parents do not also recognize that a newborn will change their lives in all sorts of ways. At the same time, we have some anxiety that our offspring will exhibit all of our worst and most ego dystonic attributes; this is the devalued half of the split, which we usually remian relatively unaware of. Our unconscious resentments (encapsulated in the Laius Complex*) are generally maintained out of awareness, in our unconscious minds.
[*Recall that in the Oedipus myth, it was his parents, Laius and Jocasta, who rejected him in a clear expression of projection, (imagining) that he would some day come back and kill his father and sleep with his mother. Later it was Laius, who initiated the fight that led to Oedipus killing him. Our envy of the youth and freedom of our children is tempered and softened by our love for them, just as their resentments are tempered by their love for us.]
This morning David Thompson beautifully described the devalued aspect of the splitting that pregnancy evokes:
Readers will recall Amanda Marcotte, a popular leftwing feminist whose wisdom has entertained us more than once. Not least with her famous publishing blunder and subsequent, rather competitive, displays of racial consciousness. Nor should we forget Amanda’s belief that the inclination to reproduce is a dastardly social construct “preserved” by unnamed villains solely to ensure that women without children aren’t recognised as “complete individuals.” Some may treasure memories of Amanda’s evidence-free claim that critics of academic feminism, among them Daphne Patai and Christina Hoff Sommers, are “trying to oppress women.”
Ms Marcotte’s recent ruminations involve sympathy cards for men and women affected by abortion. Of particular interest to Amanda is the sympathy card for men whose partners have chosen to abort their child-to-be:
The card is question is produced by the Fatherhood Forever Foundation, a religious organisation opposed to current abortion law. Now one might disagree with the motives of the organisation and one might find the cards grimly cheesy and a dubious commercial prospect, but that isn’t what caught my eye. What’s interesting are the reactions of Ms Marcotte and her readers in a post titled Thwarted Sperm Finally Have An Advocate. It goes without saying the Sisterhood isn’t thrilled:
Anti-choicers [are] pretending that they just discovered they oppose abortion because it violates men’s rights over their uterine property (established by the “poke it/own it” law laid down in beer commercials).
Please go to David's blog to read the rest of his comments and his excerpts from Amanda Marcotte's post. She illustrates the negative side of splitting; for her, men can have no noble or loving feelings, but only express the need to control and destroy a woman's autonomy (which is an interesting inversion of the insistence upon the woman's sole right to control and destroy the "other" within her.) For Marcotte, et al, who deny the humanity of men and embryos, they become the repositories of all the devalued, split-off attributes that are unacceptable.
Marcotte, et al, insist that an unwanted pregnancy is not a person, but psychologically, the fetus is exactly that. The abortion is desired because an infant would be too stressful, destabilizing, inconvenient for the mother; if it were not already psychologically a child, she would not have a felt need to get rid of it. The fetus, collection of cells, or whatever other euphemism that is involved, is a devalued object, containing all the evil that the wanted pregnancy lacks. The unwanted baby is destructive, demanding, insistent, a terrible drain on the mother's narcissistic supplies. If it were merely a neutral object, the donation of several months of discomfort leading up to an adoption would be a small price to pay to avoid the death of an incipient person. A pregnancy involves the most intense emotions, both positive and negative, because it is the single greatest creation of any human being. For those who choose abortion, the baby cannot be allowed to be born because its birth and first cries would threaten its devalued, wretched state in the mother's mind.
Ancient cultures often resorted to infanticide when the stress of more mouths to feed became untenable. Our ability to intervene earlier in the process has allowed us to devise a "civilized" approach to the same problem and we are able to disguise what we are doing by way of rationalizations and other defensive maneuvers. To kill a real baby would be monstrous thus the fetus must be dehumanized and embued with all the negative traits available. Most peopel who reluctantly have abortions successfully rationalize the need for the procedure and avoid the full impact of the act.
I remain conflictedly pro-choice, with third trimester (after the point of viability) restrictions because the alternative is too harsh and damaging to our balance of freedoms and responsibilities. Yet I think we would all be better for it were we to fully acknowledge what we are doing.
Tomorrow I will post an excerpt from an Analysis which led me to fundamentally re-evaluate my relationship to abortion.
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