Do Unto Mothers As You Would Have Them Do Unto You 


Jim speaks out on abortion. 

Over the last three days I wrote and then erased two lengthy pieces in which I tried to lay out my views on the practice of abortion. If you really want to cover the ground of this topic and the topics that relate to it, that's what you're in for—a long, long trip. And painful too. I disposed of these earlier entries on this topic because I ended up sounding too preachy and conflicted. But last night—I do some of my best thinking in the middle of the night—it hit me like a ton of bricks what was wrong with my approach. Deciding to have an abortion is so overwhelmingly difficult that it is highly doubtful that you can really make the decision prior to the actual situation which seems to call for it.

That realization brought back to me all the things I had learned in the early 1970's while I was preparing to be a transactional analyst. As part of the process of going into training, I was required to start and run two counseling groups successfully for one year, under the supervision of my trainer, of course. It's probably almost too obvious to mention, but as a counselor, you're not supposed to be telling your clients how to run their lives, as if you had magical secrets that would work for everyone, but rather, you are supposed to help them. Help them what? Well, get on with their lives. Marry or dump the guy or gal. Start making enough money to live on. Have the confidence to walk into a party and have a good time. Loose or gain weight.

And how do you do that? You learn not to manipulate and control. You learn to form hypotheses about what a person wants and test these out in therapy with the person involved. Where you find conflicts, you try to help the client bring them to the level of awareness where they can be resolved. All the while you are doing these things, you are establishing trust with the client, trust that you have their best interest at heart, and that you won't try to force them into a direction that they are unwilling to go. It's a very rewarding profession, you know, counseling, when you are fairly good at it. Because you really end up helping people. And how is that? Well, just by caring enough to want to help them, and patient enough to go at their speed, and accepting enough not to force them into a mold that is not right for them.

And so, I guess I got hooked. I think this kind of counseling is a good idea. But this model presupposes that you can trust people to make the best decisions about their own personal matters, especially if they can get patient, caring, unbiased help if ever they need it. You know, it's the same set of values that our constitutional republic is based on. You can go back and read all the literature that was floating around in the late 18th Century. The idea was that government was a necessary evil. People had to band together in the world to achieve a common good, and in a republic the idea is that if you don't like your officials, you can vote them out. And even the officials are not completely free, because the constitution guarantees a number of rights, freedom being among them.

Now to the abortion issue. I asked myself, "What kind of counselor do you want helping an adult woman to make a decision as difficult and challenging as this decision?" And the answer is obvious. I don't want ANYONE doing that who cannot separate their sectarian view from the woman's situation, and help her to make the best decision for her. Two hypothetical cases will suffice to make the point here.

Let's say this woman is a member of the Catholic church and has relatively good relations with her own birth family. She's a young adult, but it's at least not improbable that she will end up marrying a Catholic man and raising a family. I wouldn't want her counselor to allow her to overlook during a period of stress and fear how she may feel later about a decision to abort now. The point of discussing this wouldn't be to use guilt to force her into a decision, it would be to allow her to explore the depth and consequences of any guilt she might feel. The point would be to make her decision the right one for her.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want a counselor trying to convince a woman that the developing fetus in her was already fully human and had an immortal soul and that aborting it would be murder, blood on her hands as it was. Of course, the counselor, or anyone, has a right to espouse that belief, even fight for it. But the counseling room is not the place for that. It's simply not consistent with the principles of democracy to foist theological positions off on people as truths in an effort to manipulate and control their decisions.

As it stands right now fetuses are not U. S. Citizens. The current law of the land, Roe vs. Wade, tells states that they cannot regulate abortion during the first trimester, that they can make provisions protecting maternal health for abortions during the second trimester, and that they may restrict or even prohibit abortions during the third trimester. This definition leaves out of the discussion consideration of the so-called quickening of the fetus and of the stage of viability. Perhaps it makes up for this by providing a clear criterion for the obvious recognition that, failing a sectartan interpretation of the nature of the fetus, abortions done in the first few months of pregnancy are not criminal action, no matter how difficult and painful they might be.

I understand that some people would like to see the definition of citizenship enlarged to include fetuses. I applaud their political right to attempt to institute such a change. But it is very hard for me to see how that could be done in a country which guarantees freedom of religion. How could you prove that a fetus had the same rights as a fully developed human without recourse to some metaphysical theory about the nature of God, humanity, sin, etc.? I don't see how you could avoid it, and I'll wait to see the first non-sectarian argument that a fetus should have citizenship status.

I have entitled this piece "Do unto mothers as you would have them do unto you." Perhaps the meaning is obvious, but just to spell it out a bit, consider this. A zealot for regarding the destruction of a fetus at any stage of development as murder might say, "But that's exactly what I would want if I were pregnant and attempting to make the decision to keep or abort the fetus!! I would want someone to warn me of the horrible consequences of abortion, that I would have blood on my hands!" However, that's not how it works. Surely the point is that what the zealot would NOT want is someone trying to convince them that a fetus had no soul at that stage of development. No, doing unto mothers as you would have them do unto you is just what I described earlier as the ideal counselor. It's helping the mother to make a very hard decision, being a patient, wise friend, and holding your sectarian views (other than that you might put them out as an example) at bay.

I find myself wondering if the charges of godless liberal that may be floating my way right now have any validity. Well, if valuing a country which is not a theocracy—a country in which Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Native American and atheist are treated the same before the law—is being a liberal, then I'm a liberal. I'm certainly not godless, and all you have to do is to read the What In God's Name? category of this blog to understand that. But also notice that I never told you what I would decide had I been a woman under such a circumstance. I suspect that there, I would have been very conservative. But then we'll never know, will we? 

Posted: Thu - February 9, 2006 at 10:44 AM          

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