Birthing Abortion in a New Context
The Great Transformation demands an evolution in our thinking
Regardless of the final Supreme Court decision on the Roe vs. Wade reconsideration, this societal “moment” of reflection offers a ripe opportunity to throw away the shackles of convention and consider anew how we might think about abortion in light of our unprecedented planetary crises and the period of great transformation and awakening that we’re living through.
This transformation, of course, involves nothing less than the death and rebirth of a broken system — a way of living with each other and the Earth that can no longer sustain itself. So as we grapple with all of the problems that are surfacing during this time of upheaval, it’s important that we do so with an acknowledgement — an explicit awareness — that viewing any issue through the old, broken lens will offer up equally broken pathways for moving forward. We’re being called to embrace new paradigms and new ways of being that are rooted in one of the antidotes to that which is not in alignment today: long-term well-being for all.
I want to be clear that I’ll be covering only two aspects of abortion that I think require the most re-tooling in our thinking and that are the most relevant to our pressing state of planetary affairs. Abortion is an extremely complex topic, charged with real, deep, raw aspects of the human condition that require great care and empathy and an ability to hold space for shades of light and dark while, at times, withholding judgment. As much as every nuance of this topic is worthy of discussion, I’m going to draw a bit of a tight boundary here and start with what I view as a first phase of sorts. And this deals with ecology and freedom.
Naturally, any case that goes before the Supreme Court is going to be evaluated on the grounds of interpreted constitutionality. But therein lies the rub. While it does indeed have its admirable components, it’s no secret that the U.S. Constitution is an imperfect set of guiding principles by which to live. One of its egregious failings is its anthropocentricism. Highlighted by many scholars and the work of the now decently well-known group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, the Constitution gives virtually no regard to Nature, or Gaia herself. In fact, the Constitution and our entire legal framework, as they’ve come to be interpreted, are downright hostile to Nature, setting forth quite readily the legal provisions for her commodification, appropriation, and destruction.
Adding insult to injury, America has a particularly dysfunctional relationship with the concept of freedom. We’ve come to hyper-fixate on a bankrupt, perverted form of freedom — that which considers only the self (what we could call Freedom 2) rather than the self in light of all others (what we could call Freedom 1). Whereas Freedom 2 is a juvenile, low-level expression of freedom, we’re being called to grow and evolve into the more mature, elevated Freedom 1, which takes our environment, our fellow humans and non-humans, Mother Gaia, and the entire cosmos into our web of consideration. It’s again no secret that legal interpretations in this domain have come to mirror our cultural sentiment of dysfunctionality.
Given America’s legal and cultural disregard for the non-human world, along with its immature (and destructive) view of freedom, it comes as no surprise that the context through which we view procreation is severely stunted. Society is struggling in vain to find solutions within the very broken framework from which our problems have arisen in the first place. Interpreting — and re-interpreting, and re-interpreting again — a Constitution that gives no credence to ecology, and that does little better in its treatment of freedom, has virtually no hope of moving us in a better direction.
A couple’s, or a woman’s, decision to have children is by no means an individual one — that is, a decision whose ramifications will fall squarely within their orbit and affect no one else. Quite the opposite! There is perhaps no greater issue of consequence for the human and non-human collective than the decision to procreate. We live in an interconnected web of life, and the size of any given species affects that species as well as the entire web. Species that grow too large in number are not only subject to overshoot and collapse but adversely affect the greater ecosystem within which they’re embedded. Since humans have virtually taken over the planet, the implications of us overshooting the carrying capacity are, quite obviously, enormous — and potentially catastrophic. There’s a social component for us humans, too. As Isaac Asimov so eloquently put it, “Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.” Most progressive pundits today seem oblivious to the fact that our social problems aren’t just a result of poor policy decisions or political corruption — they very literally have also to do with the fact that more and more humans being jammed onto the planet means we’re competing for ever dwindling biophysical and social resources. (See this and this — among many, many other fantastic resources — for more on population ecology and the dangers of overpopulation).
Regulating abortion is not simply a matter of telling a woman what she can and cannot do with her body — and whether it’s the state or federal government that can do the telling. This ecology-blind, Freedom 2-centered framing of the issue ignores the simple fact that abortion has everything to do with the long-term well-being of all. With such weighty consequences connected to a decision — that is, catastrophic social-ecological collapse due to human overpopulation and exploitation — we absolutely can place or remove limits on people’s behavior and decisions with these considerations in mind, and they must be dealt with at a systemic, i.e., federal and international, level. But given the Constitution’s abdication on ecology, and more generally our cultural-legal abdication on Freedom 1, we’re left in the same position that we are on so many other fronts today: doing what we can to change the broken system from within, on the one hand, while recognizing, on the other, that the likelihood of this not working means we’ll have to reject and step outside the system to build new ones — which, in some cases, may involve a great deal of risk.
As I mentioned earlier, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Society is clearly grappling with whether there should be limits on the point in a pregnancy at which an abortion ought to take place and, if so, what those limits should be. Relatedly, it’s grappling with the philosophical question of “murder” (which usually takes on an extraordinarily narrow vantage point). There’s the issue of human life at all costs versus quality of life; the reality that women will always get abortions, regardless of whether they’re legal or safe; the fact that men, and their vital role in procreation and contraception, rarely enter into the abortion equation; and the oft-ignored yet very real psycho-emotional component that having an abortion is an excruciating decision for a woman to make — one that she lives with (and knows she’ll live with) for the rest of her life. Needless to say, my views on these intricate points, that are by all means worthy of our attention and resolution, still lead me to firmly hold that safe abortion ought to be legal, free, and universally accessible, with the caveat that it should ideally be a last resort, prevented entirely through contraception. The ecological imperative we’re up against demands that it be so.
