Abortion

Loss and Renewal in the Search for Identity

Eva Pattis Zoja, Henry Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134735242
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The debate on abortion has tended to avoid the psychological significance of an unwanted pregnancy, dominated istead by the strong emotions the subject excites. Eva Pattis Zoja examines the thoughts that surround a woman's decision to end a pregnancy, and presents the challenging thesis that voluntary abortion can often be a violent and unconscious act of self-realisation. Treating a theme which is central to our existence, the author makes no attempt to argue for or against, or to deny the painful nature of the subject which she tackles, but instead looks at the way in which a decision to abort can affect a woman's inner life.

1
ABORTION

A non-place*

Abortions are performed in secrecy. Little is written on the subject, and still less is spoken. When a woman decides to have an abortion and then sets out along her path— thinking, ‘now there is only one more day, one more hour’—she does not discuss it with anyone.

It is true that this problem has been the subject of so-called scientific studies: there are any number of publications on its legal, sociological and psychological aspects, but their subtitles make it immediately clear that their main concern is prevention. A pregnant woman who sees her immediate future as holding an abortion instead of a child will find little reason to read them. Statistical comparisons and learned speculations on the reasons why abortion is more or less frequent in certain societies and for certain social classes can be of no interest in such a moment, any more than a woman who is happily pregnant might be likely to take an interest in studies on how to overcome sterility. She would like to know something about the nature of her own situation, something about the experience she is soon to undergo. The findings of specialized studies that might be interesting and useful for her—studies, for example, on the psychological effects of abortion (see Appendix I)—are hard to find. They circulate only in professional journals, or the books in which they appear are out of print; and they were written to be read by specialists, in an idiom that many women will experience as an obstacle.

There is an incredible amount of written material on the subject of pregnancy and birth. Enter any good bookshop: there is book after book, tome after tome of good advice. Pregnancy and birth are important events, and one has to be prepared for them.

And what about abortion? The available literature amounts to a form to fill out and a page of instructions on how to go about it. And then, at the last moment, there are a few quick words from a doctor or a nurse—words which the woman is in any case likely to find incomprehensible, given the state of her emotions. But what about real suggestions, questions of diet, hygiene, advice for her husband or her lover, the psychological tactics for defeating the bouts of depression that frequently ensue? Why must it seem absurd to imagine such things? Does a woman’s psyche have special needs after she brings a child into the world, but not in the wake of an abortion?

There is a total blackout. Addresses and practical information get passed along by word of mouth; the sources of advice then withdraw into anonymity. The written word seems yet to be invented with respect to this event, as though the event itself had no real existence outside of the moments in which it takes place, and could never be the subject of a narrative. Its very protagonists—the women who have had an abortion—attempt to leave it behind them as quickly as possible, erasing all its traces and banning it from thought. Abortion seems to be a phenomenon devoid of all locale, time and memory.

Abortion belongs to a separate dimension. It has certain features of the taboo, in that it stands at a certain limit, at the edge of a certain threshold. One does not speak openly of things that belong to the sphere of taboo, which is not really concerned with prohibitions and authorizations. Taboo, in the traditional societies for which it was fundamental, might rather be said to have signalled the points at which the ordinary world comes to an end and is replaced by a more powerful and invisible realm, where every action can determine a set of consequences that far outstrip the kind that can normally be foreseen.

Faced with a taboo, or with actions that stand at such a limit, our reactions as modern individuals are even more highly characterized by a sense of insecurity. We cannot tell right from wrong; we have no idea how we are supposed to behave. Abortion brings us face to face with an event that ranges well beyond the capacities for understanding and imagination offered by our current systems of thought and moral sensibility, or indeed by our stock of ordinary feelings. There is no mourning, as there is for the death of a person we care about. There are different kinds of question—of choice and will—and sensations of guilt. How can we describe it? Public opinion does not limit itself to simple talk; it screams and denounces; moderates, threatens and combats. More than anything else, it splits us into ‘for’ and ‘against’. So much noise, vehemence and animosity are a function of the level of anxiety that the phenomenon awakens in each of us. This is the kind of anxiety that finds its home in the realm of taboo, the kind that once upon a time transformed itself into modes of fear and respect that were governed by rules of ritual behaviour. Today we remain unmoored and confused, and this utterly precarious attitude encourages anything that might lower the level of tension, even if only temporarily. Spaces which once were protected are now noisily invaded, and one stares in amazement at the ways in which fanatical irrationality asserts itself. Proofs are hotly professed, and professions of belief are presented as demonstrations. Endless discussions arise as a substitute for words that cannot be spoken, or as symptoms of an inability to tolerate the void left by the absence of something else.

Abortion is a difficult subject, since anxiety and guilt lie waiting at every turn of every argument, and they can torment and pursue us to a degree beyond all logic. The ancients saw them personified as the Erinyes, ‘creatures of blackness that excite only horror…. Their aspect is such that it cannot be presented before figures of the gods, nor in the homes of men’ (Aeschylus, Eumenides, 52–6).

We approach a theme which always excites primordial emotions, and which can only be described by images such as these. And so it tends either to be thoroughly, relentlessly repressed, or quickly to give rise to conflicts, no less than to hastily drawn conclusions. So the task demands that we allow ourselves both time and space, and equip ourselves with memory, all of which are parts of the paternal principle. That seems, after all, to be the proper approach to a problem spawned in some of the dark and still unclarified spaces of the maternal principle. We have to be able to look at things from a greater distance, and to see them in symbolic ways.

To see things symbolically means to pass beyond their literal or concrete meanings. Symbolic values cannot be voiced in any direct way, and they refuse to translate into concepts or precisely defined principles. But symbols affect us all the same, and their effects grow ever more concrete as we ever more profoundly and persistently interact with them. Symbols hold a great deal more than single, specific meanings, and they can stand simultaneously in the service of positions that oppose and contrast with one another. Symbols can encompass the ambivalent points of view that live within us.

NOTE

* The term in the original German text is Ab-ort. Ort means place, and Ab-ort would literally translate as ‘a place to be avoided’. Many Austrian dialects use the word Abort to indicate ‘the toilet’. (Translator’s note)

2
A SLIP IN BIRTH CONTROL?

First a slip in birth control, and later an abortion: that is how the facts present themselves if written down on a calendar. But the acceptance of such a point of view already espouses the limits of thinking in terms of cause and effect. It has also been suggested that abortions result from a lack of information on the various methods of birth control. But that conjecture has proved dubious. Clinics report that most of the women for whom they have performed an abortion were well aware, at the time of becoming pregnant, of the use of birth-control devices, even though in fact they did not make use of them, or employed them incorrectly.

Various studies (see Kellerhals and Pasini 1977) have demonstrated that no more than a third of the women who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy has made any use of contraceptive devices; an even smaller minority—between 16 and 18 per cent—has used the more reliable methods, such as the pill, the coil, the diaphragm or the condom. Another study (Oetker and Nohke 1982:27ff) points out that ‘47 per cent of the women who made no use of birth control, and who therefore, objectively, were unprotected, felt “very sure” that they would not become pregnant’. Still another group of authors (Francescato et al. 1979:31) reports that:

Even though these woman had made use, in the course of their lives, of various methods of birth control, inclusive of the most efficient (the pill, the coil, the diaphragm), none of them had employed the pill or the coil in the period immediately preceding conception (28 per cent made use of coitus interruptus, 22 per cent had just suspended the use of the pill, 22 per cent used the diaphragm, and 28 per cent used the condom). And at the moment of conception, 50 per cent were making use of nothing at all; they had abandoned the condom or coitus interruptus, or the diaphragm. The method employed by the other 50 per cent consisted of counting the days since their last menstruation.

These studies, moreover, are simply examples of a considerable number of similar reports. How can such findings be explained? It would seem that such women push birth control to a place outside their field of awareness, or that they take it very lightly. There are also cases in which the pregnancy appears virtually to have been sought out: it was not planned or desired, but nothing at all was done to avoid it. Can this unconscious rejection of birth control depend on the contraceptive methods themselves?

All in all, it is not so easy to stay on good terms with the daily swallowing of a pill, which makes one think of an illness, or with little rubber bags, which are always slightly ridiculous. On the one hand, these devices lack the dignity that we attribute, consciously or not, to the sphere of sexuality. Birth control is banal, calculated and programmatic, and though it may relieve sex of a few inhibitions, it also erases a few of the attractions of risk, no less than it diminishes spontaneity.

On the other hand, birth control, if taken seriously, can have an almost magical air. If you do not take that pill—a primitive form of logic seems to say—you will be sure to have a baby. So the pill, month after month, conjures baby after baby away. Such a semiconscious fantasy equates the pill with a state of infertility; and instinct therefore shies away from it. Our world of interior images registers contraceptives as something more than simple tools to be put to rational use; they relate to the mystery of the inception of life and are therefore invested with magical and transcendent properties, in much the same way, conversely, as an air of the sacred hovers over everything concerned with death. So we can expect the use of contraceptives to call any number of irrational attitudes into play. Instructions on their use are couched in terms that appeal exclusively to reason, and such terms are insufficient. Instructions should also, and indeed primarily, address themselves to our psychological needs, inclusive of the need for symbols. But none of this is possible in the world in which we live: medicine, sexuality and fertility are entirely mundane questions. We thus have easy and reliable methods of birth control which none the less are used in unreliable ways: rational tools whose use is guided by superstition. In spite of their familiarity with birth control, women still become pregnant while apparently not wanting to. And that is not all: for many of these women, unwanted pregnancies followed by abortions occur again and again. How can one explain such puzzling, irrational behaviour?

Do such women unconsciously ‘desire’ a child, as one often hears said? Or do they only want a pregnancy? Could it even be that they unconsciously want an abortion? And if that is the case, what sorts of meaning and expectation would be connected with it?

We will see that the relationship between birth control, unwanted pregnancy and abortion is more complex than any simple sequence of causes and effects: the reason for an unwanted pregnancy is more than a failure in birth control; and the reason for an abortion is more than simply not wanting to have a child. An abortion can also conceal a goal that is not fulfilled in the interruption of the pregnancy, but takes it instead as a point of departure for a transformation of the personality.

An example from traditional culture, as reported by the anthropologist F.Saba Sardi (Sardi 1977), can help us shift and enlarge our habitual points of view. Ashanti women, in western Africa, see it as their duty to abort when a pregnancy has occurred under certain circumstances. And in such a situation a woman will be plagued by feelings of guilt if she does not abort. (Our current notion of guilt is not entirely appropriate here, since the feeling has more to do with ‘owing something to someone’, much as the German word Schuld means both ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’.)

Such guilt derives from a pregnancy which has come about ‘by error’: at the wrong moment, or with the wrong partner, or without the observance of certain rituals which the culture sees as a precondition for bearing a child. It is not the abortion which constitutes a transgression, but the pregnancy.

In our modern western society, quite to the contrary, a woman generally experiences feelings of guilt if she does abort. Guilt arises from this specific act, or at most is referred to the sexual act. But it never arises from carrying a pregnancy to term. Our society never reproves a woman for not having had an abortion.

Some traditional peoples sometimes see a foetus itself as the seat of guilt, and see that condition as demanding its elimination. In the Christian tradition, the elimination of a foetus gives rise to guilt. Abortion, in one cultural background, eliminates guilt; in the other, it creates it.

3
ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

Yale University has conducted a large-scale study of the symbolic representations and modes of behaviour of peoples throughout the world, a study that includes the subject of abortion. It constitutes the basis of some of the other texts to which we will refer, such as G.Devereux’s study of abortion in traditional cultures (Devereux 1976), and the essay by F.Saba Sardi to which I referred above (Sardi 1977). These works provide the framework for the brief exposition that follows.

Abortion has been practised by all human societies of which we have any record. But the terms on which various societies relate to the subject differ so widely as to make it impossible to formulate general statements. It is not at all uncommon to find wholly opposing reasons for abortion, and the same holds true for the emotional reactions and social judgements that accompany it. The techniques employed for performing abortions are again quite various.

Attitudes can differ, and even oppose one another, within a single culture. The same group can condemn or demand an abortion in the light of any number of circumstances, including the age, social status and group affiliation (initiated or uninitiated, for example) of the persons concerned. It is particularly important that abortions as practised in various traditional societies have not only causes but also aims and purposes. When a group demands that certain pregnancies find their conclusion in an abortion, it is clear that such pregnancies fulfil a special function and hold a particular, pre-established meaning.

The South American Mataco people do not allow the existence of illegitimate children; unmarried girls who become pregnant must always abort. And Mataco women interrupt their first pregnancy for the purpose of facilitating the next. This practice has nothing to do with ‘not wanting to have a baby’. Abortion, quite to the contrary, plays a role in the service of motherhood; an abortion is seen as a necessary preparation for the birth of a subsequent child. The aborted foetus and the future child do not stand in contradiction to one another: the aborted foetus is a precondition for the future child’s existence.

Such beliefs are of interest to depth psychology because of the measure of symbolic truth they contain. They help us to see our own patterns of irrational behaviour in a larger context, and to free them from the veil of rationalization under which we attempt to justify them. A woman who has had her fifth or sixth abortion is not very convincing when she states every time that her only motivation is simply that she does not want a child.

Before exploring this argument further, I should cite a few more examples of the causes and goals of abortion among various traditional peoples. The women of a number of the native cultures of South America (in Peru, Chile and Brazil) abort when they think that their flanks are too narrow to permit the passage of a foetus which, in turn, is considered too large. They thus find protection from a situation that strikes them as physically impossible, or at least as excessively difficult. Such convictions will be seen to be out of line with the facts of physiology, but this increases their resonance as symbol: the child (the new task) is too large; the mother’s loins (her psychic resources) are too small. Abortions are practised among the Dayk people of south-east Borneo when the pregnant woman’s belly is particularly large, and therefore suspected of holding not only a child but also a serpent, ape or otherwise animal twin. Jivaro women abort when they feel that the seed of a demon has made them pregnant. There are also cultures where the foetus itself can be held to be a demon or a monster. In western culture, on the other hand, a ‘moral’ malformation of the foetus is inconceivable: we cannot imagine an evil embryo—the very notion seems shocking.

The women of the West African Dahomey people can abort when they are ill; but this is for magical rather than medical reasons, in the sense that the foetus is held to be responsible for the illness. A woman’s age is a decisive factor in nearly all traditional cultures: abortion is imposed on girls who become pregnant before having been initiated. Factors connected with the father can also be a reason for an abortion: when the child would have ‘many fathers’ (among the Wogeo, of New Guinea); when the father is a relative or a foreigner (the Gunatuna and Sedang peoples of Malaysia, and the Tucuna people of Brazil); when he has been taken prisoner of war (the Jivaro of Ecuador); and when he has died (the Pima Indians of the Amazon jungle). The women of the aboriginal Australian tribes of the region of Victoria see an altercation with their husbands as a reason to abort; Crow and Assiniboine women abort when they have been abandoned by their husbands; Dusun women will abort simply on the basis of having had a dream in which their husbands have shirked their duties.

Collective abortions have been practised in situations in which the destiny of a people’s descendants seemed desperate (the slaves of the Antilles). Economic questions can also be decisive: when a pregnancy would make it impossible for a woman to follow the travels of her nomad group (the Cudaveo, of Brazil) or when food is scarce (Australian peoples such as the Ngali and the Yumi). The women of the Matuntara people, and of other tribes of central Australia, are known to abort their second pregnancy: the foetus is eaten, as a way of giving strength to the first-born child. All of these reasons for abortion—as well as the ensuing emotional reactions (from terror through resignation to rejoicing)—are marked by a single, common feature which is always and everywhere present. Without exception, abortion always and everywhere belongs to the sphere of taboo. It is never a simple, day-to-day occurrence; there are rules and regulations which have to be observed.

We now find it very difficult to grasp what taboo once meant. But we know that taboo and prohibition are not the same thing, and that the sphere of taboo is a question of highly special events: events of extraordinary meaning: events which exit from the realm of everyday life. Taboo is concerned with limits, borders and thresholds, and as such it is a signal of danger; but the sphere of taboo is not off limits; and entering it involves no moral wrong. It is a space that lies at the threshold between life and death, a place of transcendence.

Abortion ‘was never simply a subject for laws and regulations; it was always, as well, a source of revelation’ (Sardi 1977:346). In much the same way, the foetus was never simply ‘a scrap of flesh’. It always had a meaning, was always a symbol of something. It could be used for magical purposes or ritually buried. Abortion was an act of communication with the great beyond: like birth, like death, and as a synthesis of both.

4
A COMPARISON

The position of modern western society with respect to abortion is quite different. For the first time it is possible to insist that abortion means nothing, that it is simply a form of birth control chosen by certain women...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: ABORTION
• 2: A SLIP IN BIRTH CONTROL?
• 3: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
• 4: A COMPARISON
• 5: THE CHRONICS
• 6: THE GOALS OF AN ABORTION
• 7: UNCONSCIOUSLY DESIRED
• 8: INITIATION AND MATERNITY
• 9: INITIATION AND ABORTION
• 10: BEYOND THE MOTHER:
• 11: KILLING
• 12: TWO CHOICES
• 13: A SACRIFICE
• 14: THE GUILT OF BECOMING AN ADULT
• 15: AN ULTERIOR THRESHOLD
• 16: ABORTION AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
• 17: THE NON-FATHER
• 18: THE ESCORTS
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II