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Band-Aid Solutions in the New York Times

by Pia de Solenni 

For decades, abortion advocates have relied on rhetoric to persuade people to either support abortion or not allow their personal anti-abortion views to affect others: “Personally, I’m against abortion, but I can’t make that choice for someone else.” Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion doctor and founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, now NARAL Pro-Choice America, has repeatedly explained how he and his fellow abortion activists intentionally framed abortion as a women’s issue and grossly inflated the numbers of women suffering from illegal abortions.

An article entitled “The New Abortion Providers” in this week’s issue of The New York Times Magazine reads almost like pages from a playbook of the abortion rights crowd. Given that the numbers of abortion are in decline, as are the number of abortion providers, they have learned that they need to reposition abortion. Literally. Instead of having a specific place, like a clinic, that women go to for abortions, abortion providers now want to make abortion mainstream by including it as part of family planning services or women’s health options provided in a primary-care or ob-gyn clinic. The goal, ultimately, is to provide more abortions. So much for “rare” in the old “safe, legal, and rare” slogan.

The article also provides a fascinating insight into the psyche of the younger abortion doctors. Many, if not most, of them are uncomfortable with abortions beyond the first trimester. In fact the principle doctor interviewed for the story, also self-identified as a “Catholic girl,” doesn’t do abortions after 14 weeks gestation. She comments: “[To] be honest with you, I haven’t seen a lot of terminations past 19 weeks. There’s a part of me that’s almost grateful that it’s not even an option for me.”

To be fair, the doctors represented in the piece all think that they are doing something good for women, that they are serving them in some way. Their experience in the U.S. and internationally convinces them that women need abortion. This same thinking provides the apparent motivation for Warren Buffet, who has given at least $3 billion to promote abortion and contraception. His first wife, Susan Thompson Buffet, after whom a Buffet family foundation is named, once explained in an interview with Charlie Rice, ““Warren feels that women all over the world get shortchanged. That’s why he’s so pro-choice.”

Such motivation tends to leave me confused. It reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago.

After a television debate on partial-birth abortion, my opponent, a representative of a pro-abortion organization, said to me, “I don’t get it. You’re young, you’re attractive. Why are you against abortion?” Instead of answering, I suggested that we have the discussion over lunch sometime. So we scheduled a time to meet. I decided to answer her question by asking her why she supported abortion. She had lived internationally and had seen the difficult situations that women and families face when there aren’t enough resources to live. She saw no other choice but abortion and contraception.

In turn, I explained that I think these are band-aid solutions. Even if a woman has an abortion, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s poor, that she doesn’t have access to resources, that she’s in a bad situation, etc. It simply eliminates one aspect of the problem, but it doesn’t improve her situation. What does abortion do to make life better for the woman who is in a crisis pregnancy situation? Her life will always be marked by her pregnancy regardless of its outcome. It doesn’t get rid of her circumstances. In fact, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, about half of the women having abortions in the United States have had a previous abortion. This suggests that their life circumstances did not improve and that they once again needed the “help” of abortion. As a society, I think we fail when a woman feels as if her only choice is abortion. We ought to be able to do something to actually help her change her situation. We ought to be able to address root causes whether at home or abroad.

I didn’t change my debate opponent’s opinion, but she admitted that she’d never thought of the issue from the perspective that I offered and she was unable to answer the question of how this is anything more than a band-aid solution. 

Similarly, the doctors profiled in the Magazine article, while appearing to believe that they provide something that women need, cannot articulate that it actually improves women’s lives. Their rhetoric, however revamped, can take them only so far.

Pia de Solenni is a moral theologian and cultural analyst who writes from Seattle, Wash. She can be reached via Facebook and Twitter. (Her website is getting a prolonged makeover and is currently offline.)

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)