{"id":237698,"date":"2021-01-13T11:45:46","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T17:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=237698"},"modified":"2021-01-12T18:25:54","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T00:25:54","slug":"feminist-question-pro-abortion-rhetoric-mourning-miscarriages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/feminist-question-pro-abortion-rhetoric-mourning-miscarriages\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminist begins to question pro-abortion rhetoric while mourning her own miscarriages"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

When writer Kate Parsons suffered two miscarriages, she was caught off guard by the intensity of her grief, and found it came into conflict with her pro-abortion beliefs:<\/p>\n

[I] found myself unprepared\u2026 for the devastation I would feel\u2026 I still found myself struggling with a persistent confusion. I was having trouble conceptualizing my losses with my pro-choice politics\u2026. Pregnant pro-choice feminists, coping with the termination of a desired pregnancy, often find it difficult to conceptualize and mourn our losses.<\/em><\/p>\n

The self-help books she read about miscarriage used the word \u201cbabies\u201d to describe preborn children.\u00a0But using the term \u201cbaby\u201d was problematic for Parsons:<\/p>\n

For those, like me, who have staunchly defended the use of the precise prenatal terms \u2013 <\/em>embryo until eight weeks, <\/em>fetus thereafter until birth \u2013 the recommendation to name the lost being a baby can be simultaneously disquieting and compelling.<\/em><\/p>\n

The dehumanizing way she had always viewed preborn children no longer seemed right to her:<\/p>\n

I\u2026 had always maintained a firm distinction between prenatal fetuses and postnatal infants\u2026 yet, after my miscarriages, my confidence in the terms <\/em>embryo and <\/em>fetus began to slip away. Somehow these terms were starting to feel too cold, too detached.<\/em><\/p>\n

I began to find the notion that I had lost “babies” oddly comforting, in spite of the worries that I was being unwittingly swayed by the “other side” to which my pro-choice politics had been so long positioned.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite her pro-abortion beliefs, Parsons found that acknowledging her lost children\u2019s humanity felt comforting. But she saw how this conflicted with her pro-abortion view. Referring to a self-help book that encouraged her to call her lost children \u201cbabies\u201d and miscarriage a \u201cdeath,\u201d she wrote:<\/p>\n

[P]rior to my miscarriages, the pro-life\/antiabortion implications of such suggestions would have raised my hackles. But after my miscarriages, something about these suggestions felt oddly comforting. I had, after all, felt that my experiences had been generally discounted, and the legitimacy of my grief called into question after each loss. <\/em><\/p>\n

Could the source of these feelings be the fact that I was “only” referring to the lost beings as embryos and fetuses?\u00a0<\/em>And did my conflicted feelings signal an inconsistency in, or at least a challenge for, pro-choice feminism?<\/em><\/p>\n

Parsons looked for feminist writing that would help her resolve her conflict, but couldn\u2019t find any:<\/p>\n

I had hoped that other feminist philosophers might offer conceptual clarity on how my confusions had roots in patriarchal thinking, and I expected to find illuminating proposals on how to transform my sadness into more liberating forms of feminist thought. <\/em>Yet to my dismay, I found hardly anything written on the topic at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

She admitted that her pro-abortion views \u201cimpeded her healing\u201d (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

In my case, the fear that I would betray pro-choice efforts and concede personhood by acknowledging my sorrow and mourning the loss impeded my healing and intensified my confusion. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Given that I had become so attached, and dare I say, loved these early beings so strongly, how could I consistently hold that they, or any other being at the same stage of development, could justifiably be terminated?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Ultimately, Parsons found her personal feelings, and her desire to mourn the loss of her children, incompatible with her pro-abortion beliefs:<\/p>\n

I had felt a tension between my firm belief that it would have been justifiable to terminate the lives of my fetuses (had I autonomously chosen to do so) and my extreme sorrow at their termination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, Parsons didn\u2019t convert to the pro-life viewpoint. Even though her heart was telling her that her lost babies were valuable human beings, she decided that \u201cthe fact that I did<\/em> care about the beings I was sustaining need not imply that I, or any other woman, ought<\/em> to care about the prenatal beings she or I might sustain.\u201d<\/p>\n

A fetus\u2019s value, she decided, was based on whether a woman valued him or her. Her babies were valuable only because she wanted them.<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cIt is the woman’s conception of the pregnancy and her relationship to the embryo\/fetus that determines its moral and emotional significance.\u201d<\/p>\n

So her conclusion was that a baby’s worth depends on her mother’s opinion of her. Her babies had worth, she says, only because she wanted them. They were worth grieving over, but unwanted babies aren’t.<\/p>\n

Parsons says that if the pro-choice movement doesn\u2019t give “support” to women who miscarry, some will become pro-life:<\/p>\n

[T]here is reason to worry about swelling in the ranks of pro-life\/antiabortion support, if we do not offer greater support to women who miscarry. As Roe v Wade is put into an increasingly precarious position, feminists cannot simply afford to lose any pro-choice women by failing to listen, communicate, embrace, and\/or comfort them when they miscarry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She doesn’t explain what form this “support” should take, except that it shouldn’t include considering preborn babies as having inherent value or humanity.<\/p>\n

Source: Kate Parsons “Feminist reflections on miscarriage, in light of abortion” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics<\/em> Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2010) 4, 5, 7-8, 14, 15<\/h5>\n

\u201cLike\u201d Live Action News on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0for more pro-life news and commentary!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When writer Kate Parsons suffered two miscarriages, she was caught off guard by the intensity of her grief, and found it came into conflict with her pro-abortion beliefs: [I] found myself unprepared\u2026 for the devastation I would feel\u2026 I still found myself struggling with a persistent confusion. I was having trouble conceptualizing my losses with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":210591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminist begins to question pro-abortion rhetoric while mourning her own miscarriages<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When writer Kate Parsons suffered two miscarriages, she was caught off guard by the intensity of her grief which conflicted with her pro-abortion beliefs.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/feminist-question-pro-abortion-rhetoric-mourning-miscarriages\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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