Ursula Le Guin on abortion

Posted by Sappho on January 30th, 2004 filed in Abortion, News and Commentary

There was a long thread (now closed) at Amy Welborn’s blog Ursula Le Guin’s remarks about abortion. Peter Nixon at Sursum Corda and Emily at After Abortion have also weighed in.

The thing that struck me about Ursula Le Guin’s remarks (and those of Mary Oberst, wife of the governor of Oregon, who spoke with her) was how horrendously bad and punitive in all ways, for women conceiving children out of wedlock, were the circumstances they described in the 1950s. Some commenters suggested that, because Le Guin had a relatively privileged background (daughter of famous scholars, able, after the abortion, to get a Fulbright scholarship, etc.), that hers must have been an abortion of convenience, an attempt to avoid a mere “lifestyle cramp.” I don’t believe it. I read her words, her expectations of the ruin of all her hopes if that pregnancy continued, of not going to college, being unmarriageable, looking forward to a life as “another useless woman” living off her parents, and I think of Frederica Mathews-Greene’s often quoted remark, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Really, if all a woman sees in her future is disgrace, is it any wonder she still chokes up, decades later, when thinking of the fate she narrowly missed?

I can remember, from my own high school days in the 1970s, gossip about a couple of girls who were supposed to have gotten pregnant and been sent elsewhere to have their babies, and one friend who had a pregnancy scare, but the first time I actually knew a woman my age who had a child out of wedlock was when I was in college. It wasn’t an easy situation; she and the expecting father were living in a bus when I first met them, and later, after the baby was born and after they had broken up, she was staying with friends at the college house where I used to live, without any real means of support, but afraid to apply for welfare because she thought her baby might be taken away from her. She herself was not in college. I’ve since known plenty of people of my generation or younger who have dealt with unplanned premarital pregnancies – the ones who have gotten abortions or encouraged girl friends to do so, the ones who have given up children for adoption, the ones who have kept the child (with a range of results, including never married or college educated, but also including people who were able to get the education). And from this I have to conclude two things. First, that having an early, out of wedlock pregnancy is terribly hard, and puts you and the child at greater risk in a variety of ways. But second, that “hard” doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, the kind of horribly punitive situation described by Oberst and Le Guin. And that, whatever your beliefs about Roe vs. Wade, that isn’t a world we should ever go back to.

I said over at Sursum Corda that I believed that if, heaven forbid, I had actually had a child early, out of wedlock, I could still have married, still have gone to college, and would not have been condemned to a useless life. I think this was misunderstood as an attack on Le Guin; it wasn’t. Rather, I’m saying that all of an unwed mother’s alternatives – save one, shotgun marriage – were made harsher and more punitive in the environment she and Oberst describe in the 1950s than they are now.

I thought often, when young, about what I would do if I were pregnant, even though for the vast majority of the time before I got married I wasn’t actually having sexual intercourse with anyone. I was pretty sure that adoption was my first choice. I still believe now, with the hindsight of a woman over 40, that it is a good choice, but, having spoken with birth mothers in connection with considering adoption as a way of dealing with our own infertility, I’m aware that it’s a choice which I would have found much harder than I thought I would have, when I was young. It’s not, after all, just nine months out of your life, it’s the surrender of the baby you’ve carried for nine months, and all the subsequent worries that you may have about that child and about that choice. I know it’s not easy. But I also know that the whole system of adoption was run, in the 1950s, in a way that was less birth mother friendly than adoption now.

Likewise with keeping the child. Suppose I had a baby, after I had the National Merit scholarship and the acceptance to Stanford, but before I had the degree. It would of course have been hard to finish my college degree; I of course had good reason to believe that my education and employability would have been threatened. But here’s what would not have happened: I would not have lost the scholarship, or the financial aid package that Stanford added to it. People would not have given up on me. I would have been at a school where day care did, after all, exist, and where subsidized day care was, after all, a possibility. One which would still have wanted me to complete my education, and which would still have tried to make the concrete accomodations that would let me do so. The grandparents that I had living near college, and whom I believe would have helped me in some way, could still have been there in the 1950s, but the rest of the story would have been so very different.

If I had gotten pregnant and kept the child in high school before I had the scholarship and the college acceptances, my prospects of course would be worse. No longer would guidance counselors and teachers be expecting me to be bound for Ivy League or the equivalent. But worse, in the 1970s, is still not as bad as worse in the 1950s. It’s still a world in which day care exists and in which motherhood is sometimes combined with education. It’s still a world in which a smart girl surrounded by people who would normally want to go to college could hope – maybe more slowly, and maybe at a less classy school – to eventually wind up educated, employable, and married. Dreams can still die, and there’s a very good chance that the bright and ambitious young women who is hoping to be the first in her family to go to college doesn’t get there if she gets pregnant. But they sure die a lot faster if the whole world around you is determined to be punitive about your pregnancy.

Emily of After Abortion is uncertain about the changes in women’s lives in the past 30 years:

If there were a “Woman’s Misery Index” that took into account the lived experience of women in a wide range of life areas, I’m reasonably certain that the WMI would have skyrocketed in the last 30 years.

I’m not convinced. There’s a downside to the changes that have taken place, yes, especially when it comes to family life. I can sympathize with the arguments of people like Elizabeth Marquardt at Marriage Movement about divorce; I do believe that it matters to have children’s fathers and mothers working together to raise them. I’d like, culturally, to see a trend back to less divorce, and more support for couples with children working through difficult (but non-abusive) situations. I can definitely see a downside to the sexual revolution, and the trend toward casual sex. But, when I look back at the world of the 1950s that Oberst and Le Guin describe, it certainly isn’t a place to which I want to go back. Partly, of course, because I welcome the ways in which education and employment opportunities have opened up for women; I want to keep the world in which I can be an engineer, a thing I know I couldn’t have done without standing on the shoulders of women who went before me. But also for another reason. The world that met Le Guin in the 1950s was a world short on mercy.

Several people have remarked about Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. It is a story of a city whose joy and beauty all depend on the suffering of one child, and some see in it an analogy to abortion, maybe a sign of some conflict in Le Guin’s conscience about her own abortion. I’d have to say, though, that a world which casts out and makes unemployable and unmarriageable a young woman who bears a child out of wedlock, like Omelas, has its own hostage.