Recently, the comedienne Grace Campbell <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/09/i-felt-entirely-alone-comedian-grace-campbell-on-the-aftermath-of-her-abortion"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">wrote in the Observer</mark></a>: “I am obviously pro-choice. I say obviously, not because I assume you know who I am but rather, I assume you know what’s right. But if you do know who I am, you’ll know my comedy has always been described as ‘sex-positive’ and pro ‘women being able to do what the **** we want with our bodies'.”
The choice she was concerned with was one which led to a clinic where: “The doctor showed me the foetus on the screen, gave me a pill, told me some basic facts, but…did not prepare me for what was about to come. That I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror, or at pictures of myself, for months, because I would totally dissociate from my body in the hope that I would feel further away from my reality. That I would feel a pervasive sense of guilt, for letting go of something that was mine. And that then I would feel shame, shame that feeling guilty was in some way a dishonour to the women who fought for my right to be able to have this choice.”
Grace Campbell, who is haunted by the image she saw, deploys the word “choice” to justify the termination, not only of her unborn child, but of any further argument. The empty conception of “choice”, so beloved of advertisers, shuts out, in the words of the philosopher Charles Taylor, “almost everything important: the sacrificed alternatives in a dilemmatic situation and the moral weight of the situation”.
So entrenched is this way of thinking that even those who oppose the “pro-choice” side often frame their objections in terms of “choice” by highlighting the coercive nature of many abortions.
Preference for the abstract noun over concrete particular reality gives many of our discussions an air of unreality, and abortion is no exception. Why is choice valuable without reference to what is chosen? Choices are always particular choices. To laud “choice” in general is really to misunderstand what choices are – namely the willing of a particular end.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-chilling-story-of-how-eugenic-theory-and-later-ivf-was-pioneered-in-britain/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">The chilling story of how eugenic theory, and later IVF, was pioneered in Britain</mark></a></strong>
The end willed by Grace Campbell, with the support of her friends and society, was not just the termination of her pregnancy but the destruction of a new, “unwanted” life.
Unsurprisingly, that particular end is missing from Campbell’s account, though her account of bodily dissociation is revealing. The physical and emotional sequelae are powerfully described as are the barriers she feels to expressing them. Why would a woman fear to describe the results of her choice? Why would the expression of these harrowing emotions be seen as “letting down” other pro-choice women?
Looking deeper, why should the exercise of a choice – one also seen as a right – bring about such painful, complicated feelings of guilt and loss? Campbell’s choice, which remains undescribed, sets off a cascade of reactions. Might not these emotions tell us something important about such choices and what they may mean?
Campbell recalls “persistent crying, self-hatred and grief” which followed her everywhere she went. She comments, “here I was, 29 years old, floored by a grief so intense it scared me. How could I be grieving something I didn’t know I wanted?”
Of the image the doctor showed her, she says:
“What that doctor might never know, but I hope he will now, was that showing me that blob on a screen would provide a photographic memory for a grief I didn’t know I could feel. A grief for something I never knew, but something I know I would have loved very much. And that every time that image would flash into my head for months to come, I’d burst into tears like a child who’d tripped and wanted their mum.”
Anyone wishing to research the emotional aftermath of abortion and listen to women who have had similar experiences is likely to meet with a barrage of <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-black-color">pro-choice assertions downplaying the extent</mark> of such reactions. This is despite the fact that some research does bear out the mental health damage not infrequently caused by abortion – to say nothing of sadness or distress that does not rise to the level of mental health effects.
Such reactions might at least give us pause and force us to consider the nature of abortion and why it might lead some women to experience these painful emotions.
To suppress, ignore or downplay testimonies like Grace Campbell’s, and to refuse even to describe the nature of the abortion choice, is to betray both women and the medical profession. Campbell insists that she made the right decision, but personal experiences can, sooner or later, reveal to us realities to which they point, despite ourselves. Our perception of particular moral disvalue can even indicate the reality of a universal moral principle.<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/30-years-on-the-lessons-of-veritatis-splendor-are-being-ignored/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">30 years on, the lessons of ‘Veritatis Splendor’ are being ignored</mark></a></strong>
Campbell is candid in describing her experience, overcoming her fear of letting down (and perhaps offending) pro-choice women by sharing these glimpses of reality. Such glimpses can have the nature of an epiphany for anyone who does not drown out the flesh and blood particular with an abstract slogan.
Nor is it just the post-abortive woman who may experience a dawning awareness: abortion providers too may begin to understand how empty the slogans of choice can be. Dr Anthony Levatino, an obstetrician-gynaecologist who performed over a thousand abortions, <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://www.crosswalk.com/headlines/contributors/guest-commentary/abortionist-who-performed-1-200-abortions-becomes-pro-life-activist-says-all-i-could-see-was-somebody-s-son-or-daughter.html">describes his feelings</a> </mark>on doing an abortion after the death in a road accident of his own adopted daughter:
“I finished that abortion…for the first time in my career after all those years and all those abortions, I looked [at the remnants of the aborted baby]…and I didn't see her wonderful right to choose and I didn't see what a great physician I was helping her with her problem. And I didn't even see the $800 cash I just made in 15 minutes. All I could see was somebody's son or daughter."
And elsewhere Levatino <a href="https://thelifeinstitute.net/learning-centre/abortion-facts/providers/former-abortionists/dr-anthony-levatino"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">comments</mark></a>:
“When you lose a child, your child, life is very different. Everything changes. All of a sudden, the idea of a person's life becomes very real. It is not an embryology course anymore. It's not just a couple of hundred dollars. It's the real thing. It's your child you buried…. <strong><em></em></strong>
That is what it took to get me to change. My own sense of self-esteem went down the tubes. I began to feel like a paid assassin. That's exactly what I was. It got to the point where it just wasn't worth it to me anymore. It was costing me too much personally. All the money in the world wouldn't have made a difference. So I quit. I slept a lot better at night after that."<br><br><strong>RELATED: <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/roe-v-wade-was-an-abuse-of-judicial-authority/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Roe v. Wade was an “abuse of judicial authority”</mark></a></strong><br><br>Grace Campbell’s choice, like Levatino’s many choices, clearly cost her a great deal. Yet that cost will remain just a cost if she lets an empty formula trump what her emotions reveal.
As Max Scheler once said, “a given emotion occurs in experience already as something with a ‘meaning’ a ‘sense’.” But that sense can be obscured by an ideology which leads some women to downplay or even censure these emotions, eliminating them from the debate, no less than the “unwanted” child whose destruction they signal.
<em>Photo: A scene during a 'protecting abortion rights' protest outside the US Embassy in London, England, 7 May 2022. The protest followed a leaked draft decision from the US Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images.)</em>
