The "Convienience" Trope

It’s been widely linked, but this post by (former L, G & M guest-blogger) Lizardbreath is good enough to merit further discussion:

Continuing that pregnancy wouldn’t have been an epic tragedy for me; any proposal for abortion rights that requires abortion to be permissible only when the only alternative would be starving on the streets would leave me right outside.

But man, did I not want to be pregnant. I did not want to be locked into a minimum eighteen-year relationship with someone I’d been dating for a couple of months. I did not want to be responsible forever for someone who didn’t exist yet. I didn’t want to be physically pregnant. I had no idea of where I was going professionally — I was a temp receptionist, thinking about maybe taking the LSATs — or of how I would support myself or a child, and had no idea of how I’d find my way into a career with a new baby. The only thing being able to get an abortion did for me was give me some control over the course of the entire rest of my life.

So, politically useful as it is, I get a little edgy about rhetoric that stipulates that abortion is always a strongly morally weighted decision. I don’t think it is, and if it were I’m not certain that my reasons for not wanting to continue a pregnancy at the time qualify as sufficient to do a wrong thing — if abortion is an evil, it’s not clear to me what evil would have been the lesser under those circumstances. But I am thankful every day of my life that I had the option to end that pregnancy back in 1995.

Some other bloggers have already addressed one important implication: the long-term cost of the potential short-term political games inherent in “abortion is icky” rhetoric. To make a somewhat different point, LB’s post reminds me that a common rhetorical strategy of the forced pregnancy lobby is to describe an abortion obtained under any but the direst cirumstances as an abortion for “convenience”–Byron White used it himself in his dissent in the first abortion cases. As LB’s story suggests (see a similar one from A Rational Animal) , this is a grossly misleading and offensive description. “Convenience” invokes something nice, but trivial–it’s “convenient” to have a branch of your bank open up a few blocks close. A decision about whether to bear a child, conversely, involves large, irrevocable effects (or potential effects) on your employment, intimate relationships, education, and financial situation–the central pillars of most people’s lives, in other words. To describe large changes in these aspects of life reflects an essential belief in the subordination of women–do you think that if pregnancy had similar effects on men’s lives, an unwanted pregnancy would be a mere “inconvenience?” Implicit in such arguments is the assumption that for women educational and career advancement is sort of a luxury, nice if you can get it but easily displaced by a woman’s “natural” role as a mother (a role a woman apparently agrees to take on every time she engages in heterosexual intercourse, which is of course silly.) The description trivializes pregnancy, and trivializes women’s lives.