The Missing Piece From the Abortion Debate

This post was born out of a conversation with my wife shortly after laws designed to limit access to abortion were passed in Georgia, Alabama and other states. I had been trying to figure out how to write about the topic without simply writing a straightforward pro or con stance. T’s description of her reactions to the political rhetoric surrounding abortion helped me realize my own frustrations with the conversations I was hearing. Given the extremely controversial nature of this topic, I want to make clear that this piece is intended to add to the discussion, rather than present a judgment about women’s rights regarding abortion.

It was about ten years ago that I visited the Bodies exhibit in lower Manhattan with my wife and my parents.

The exhibit – which is now in Las Vegas and Atlanta – was the most in-depth human anatomy lesson I had ever seen. There were over two hundred bodies, both male and female, set up in a variety of positions so that attendees could see how human skeletons, muscles and organs connect to each other and how they work together to keep us alive. I remember being struck by the intricacies of the different systems and how a problem in one area would affect other body parts as well. In all, the space was filled with sights that non-medical students and professionals would never be exposed to otherwise.

The creators also included a room that demonstrated infant development. There were bodies of fetuses to show each stage of development during a mother’s pregnancy, as well as infants’ bodies to show how children’s bodies continue growing after they are born. The room was set apart from the rest of the exhibit and kept behind curtains so that attendees could choose whether or not to witness the remains of such tiny beings.

As my father and I were getting ready to leave that room, he turned to me.

“You know, I won’t say anything about whether abortion is right or wrong and I don’t have a problem with women being able to choose what they do with their bodies. But, I’ll tell you, this whole debate about deciding whether a baby’s “life” starts at conception or if it starts later on? Even those really little bodies looked awfully human to me.”

It was at that point that I remembered suddenly where the bodies in the exhibit had come from. When people died and their bodies went unclaimed, the bodies had been donated to a medical school for preservation and educational purposes. It was those bodies that were included here in the exhibit, so that the still-living could see what their insides looked like. The bodies in the infant room were just like the rest of the exhibit: human beings who had died of natural causes.

My breath caught in my throat for a minute as I connected the dots. Even the tiniest, barely weeks- or months-old fetuses, had been living beings at one point. A wave of nausea passed over me and I leaned on the nearby information stand to steady myself. I don’t have the most hardy of dispositions when it comes to medical topics so the suddenly spinning room wasn’t exactly a surprise. The idea that the adult and older teenage bodies had been living beings had been somewhat awkward to conceptualize but the babies, especially the unborn infants… those were more painful to think about.

I remembered the dizziness, the discomfort, the feeling of instability more recently when I found myself inundated with news of states passing laws designed to restrict women’s access to abortions.

I’ve experienced at least a minor flip of the stomach any time the subject of abortion has come up, if only because of the medical nature of the situation and the meaning of the procedure itself. It’s understandable, I think; there have been references to abortion made multiple times per day, every day over the past few weeks and the thought of a baby dying before it even has a chance to live is not an idea with which anyone should be comfortable.

It’s not a matter of judgment for me. I understand that people get abortions for different reasons and I tend to be of the mind that, along with their doctor, the person who is pregnant will make the decision that makes the most sense for them. But I’ve never been romantically involved with someone who needed an abortion and I’m certainly not the person who would be going through the physical procedure. (I’m biologically male, which means I don’t have a uterus. No uterus, no abortion.) I have my own thoughts about the level of involvement the government should have in women’s decisions about their bodies but I tend to think that it’s the people who can actually physically have abortions who should be making those decisions instead of me.

The one thing that I have noticed has been missing from most of the punditry and other pontificating about this subject is adoption. Through all of the debates about which options should be available to pregnant people, I seem to keep hearing the issue reduced to the binary of kill the baby versus leave the baby alive. In the personal accounts I’ve heard and read over the last few weeks, abortion has been described as the only logical choice because of the mother’s inability to care for the baby if it had been carried to term. 

I can acknowledge that abortion might have actually been the best option for the parents involved in each of the scenarios I’ve read. Again, far be it from me to judge the decisions a person makes about their body and their life, especially when I don’t have all the details. But I have to admit that, particularly as someone who has worked in the child welfare field for over a decade, I bristle at the only reference to adoption being a child “bouncing around foster care.“¹ Foster care and adoption may not be the best options for a newborn child – they may not even be mediocre options in some areas of the country – but I have seen too many happy endings for families with adopted children to believe that it shouldn’t at least be a consideration. I have met too many people who want nothing more than to care for a child, but cannot because of bureaucracies of one sort or another, to accept the idea that there are not enough potentially loving, wonderful homes in our country for babies and young children.

And, despite the absence of a direct connection between someone who had an abortion and myself, I have to be thankful that one particular woman decided against having an abortion; if she had chosen otherwise, I never would have met my wife.

^{1. I actually agree with almost everything in Minka Kelly’s Instagram post. In particular, she is exactly on point in making references to our country’s need for more comprehensive sex education and an overhaul of the paid parental leave system, as well as the absurdly high maternal mortality rates and costs of day care. As I said, I simply took exception to the seemingly black-and-white classification of foster care as an obvious dead end for a child.↩}

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