Ayelet Waldman and Elizabeth Weil: When Is Abortion Not OK?

This is part three of a dialogue about having a late-term abortion between Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace [2], and Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-author, with Dara Torres, of Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life [3].You can read part one here [4] and part two here [5].

Ah, the line, deciding when it's OK to stop a pregnancy and when doing so is tantamount to killing a baby. That is the truly difficult part of this debate. When I'm really honest with myself, I'm not sure where that line is. The imagined woman you summon—the one who terminates at 36 weeks on a whim—that woman goes too far for me. But, two things: She forces me to acknowledge, for the thousandth time, that I went too far for somebody else, and she also makes me wonder if she's really OK. I mean, what sane woman, especially what sane woman who's had any prenatal care at all, carries a baby for eight months and then gives up on a whim? Ayelet, you've had five pregnancies. Can you even imagine a non-whacked woman who would do such a thing? So perhaps when she arrives at the clinic, we could catch that straw woman in a net of psychological care and screening, which seems the least we can offer to any woman who chooses to abort.

Still, the line, the limitations. Like most of the left I'm hesitant to pull out a pen and a ruler and draw. I can form a nebulous cloud around where I think it should be (if one can form a cloud around a line). The outer contours of that cloud are easiest to sketch in, of course—first-trimester abortions, abortions for victims of abuse. The next level is straightforward for me, too—women carrying babies with known and serious fetal anomolies, babies that can't live outside the womb, no matter how late in the pregnancy such problems are detected. The tough zone starts for me with the horrible question of which babies—not to mince words—are too fucked up, which babies have defects so serious we think it's OK to decide they can't live? What do you think about a baby with cystic fibrosis? What about a blind or a deaf one? We all know great people born in horrible bodies. Should we be allowed to say, no thanks, I'd rather try again for a better-formed kid?

I banged up against this issue a few years ago in an article for the New York Times Magazine about wrongful birth lawsuits [6]. I told the story of a woman who did not find out until she was admitted to the hospital, when she was 31 weeks pregnant, that the child she was carrying had Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, the symptoms of which include mental retardation, physical disfigurement, inability to speak, seizures, and respiratory and digestive problems. As she bravely told me, and the rest of the world, she wished she'd been given the chance to abort. She even sued her doctor for malpractice because his shoddy care deprived her of that possibility. I bring her up because I think part of the public discussion we need to have is about the link between abortion and prenatal testing. Why are we doing all this testing if we don't condone women acting on the results? Yes, disabilities do add rich color and texture to the fabric of humanity. But as Laurie Zoloth, director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University, said to me when I was reporting that piece: "There's enough evil and caprice to always assure there will be disabilities. But could there be fewer? When people worry about curing too many things, I'm always glad that bioethics wasn't around when people were thinking about infectious diseases or polio or yellow fever."

But, ah, here's the tough part again: Do we really think aborting all future Down babies amount to "curing" a disease?

Read Ayelet's response here [7].

Photograph of pregnant woman by Anna Jurkovska/Shutterstock Images LLC/Getty Images.