Ayelet Waldman: The Abortion Restrictions I’d Accept.

This is part four 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], part two here [5], and part three here [6].

Ah, that nebulous cloud around that nebulous line. I know for sure that many people would condemn the choice I made. After all, I chose to abort based on the chance of mental retardation, not even the certainty. And I’ve heard from more than one relative of a person with Down’s Syndrome telling me how much their lives have been enriched by the relationship. But I’ve also gotten letters from more than one mother of a mentally retarded person telling me that their lives have been destroyed by their choice to have that baby, their marriages ruined, their other children deprived of attention and love.

I remember, in my support group, there was a woman who aborted because her baby’s hands were deformed. I was horrified. Hands? Fingers? What difference does that make! And then I reminded myself, as you said, that someone could easily be horrified by what I did. (And Lord knows people have been.)

Clearly, we need to do much more to avoid abortion. Every child should have access to clear and honest information about sex, and to birth control. Every woman should have access to prenatal care and to the health and other services that remove the economic imperative from the decision about whether to have a baby [7].

Even now, in a society in which prenatal care isn’t a right, in which there are kids who go hungry, only 3.5 percent of abortions take place between 16 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, and 1.1 percent happen at 21 weeks or later. In the best of worlds, there will still be abortions that happen too late. We’re always going to be confronted with those nebulous clouds.

I find that my thinking gets muddled when I try to figure this out. But you know, the law is about drawing lines. That’s what it’s for. There are lines, and there are slippery slopes, and this is why we pay all those think tanks full of bioethicists. (We do have think tanks full of bioethicists, don’t we? Barack should get on that.) I think I know what my system would look like. Beyond my utopian Danish-style medical care and Our-Bodies-Ourselves sex ed, and my subsidized childcare and mandatory minimum sentences for perpetrators of domestic violence, I would retain an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy up to the 20th week (or somewhere around there), and an absolute right to termination, throughout, in the case of fetal anomaly or danger to the mother’s life. I would include some kind of graduated system tied to different stages of fetal development. And yes, I would probably preclude abortion on the other sides of those lines. This is, I know, far more conservative than many would tolerate, and far far more liberal that others would accept.

But it’s all moot, right? Because the fact is that if you believe that a fertilized egg is a person with precisely the same rights as a three-month-old baby, if you really do believe that abortion is murder [8], then compromise is impossible. (This, by the way, is why I’ve never understood abortion opponents who support exceptions for rape and incest. If it’s murder, why are we allowed to murder people based on who their parents are?) If you really do value a fertilized egg as much as a baby or an adult, then I suppose it makes sense to chain yourself to the door of abortions clinics. Although of course not as much sense as, say, distributing condoms to teenagers to keep them from getting knocked up to begin with.

Read Liz's response here [9].