Review: Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, by Katha Pollitt

PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights Picador 259pp, £16.99

Author: Katha Pollitt

ISBN-13: 978-0312620547

Publisher: Picador

Guideline Price: £16.99

Against abortion? Don't have one. If only the US feminist, poet, essayist, columnist and author Katha Pollitt could have left it there. She couldn't leave it there, though. And by the end of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights you will be glad she didn't.

Pollitt has written her latest book in horror and incredulity at the erosion of reproductive rights across the United States as the pro-choice lights turned on by the Roe v Wade judgment, in 1973, are switched off across that great nation. Between 2011 and 2013 more restrictions were placed on US abortion services than in the previous 10 years combined.

“Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism and hyperindividualism,” Pollitt writes. She doesn’t agree with that view at all, but it is an opinion that seems to have the wind at its back. “Access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping women to obtain one is a good deed,” writes Pollitt. In the US one in three women will have at least one abortion during their fertile years. That is a lot of good deeds.

These good deeds extend beyond individual women to include the “many men and women who have helped them with money, transportation, information, emotional support, childcare”.

Pollitt has taken two friends to clinics to have their abortions. And Pollitt’s good deeds do not end there. Perhaps her kindest is to write a book that puts abortion at the centre of women’s lives.

“Abortion does not happen on the edge of society, community and family,” she writes. “It is enmeshed in the way we live, it requires the co-operation of many people beyond the woman herself. But that is not the way we talk about it . . . We talk about it as if the woman exists in social isolation.”

Women do not exist in social isolation, of course. The 12 women who leave Ireland every day to access abortion services in Britain do not exist in social isolation. They did not get pregnant on their own. If they are fortunate they will not get unpregnant on their own.

Pollitt confronts the idea that abortion is a “lonely, individual act chosen by desperate women making a fearful decision in the dark.” This is not the case, and advocates of reproductive choice would do well to stop agreeing to such tearing at heartstrings, says Pollitt.

“Forty years of apologetic rhetoric, 40 years of searching for arguments that will support legal abortion while never, ever implying that is an easy decision or a good thing – for women, men, children, families, society – have left the pro-choice movement making the same limited, defensive arguments again and again.”

Abortion: a social good?

From this holy island, where abortion is never permitted unless a committee of doctors believes that you are dying, Pollitt’s argument that abortion is actually a “social good” seems outlandish. But in the wider world it is not.

“We hear endlessly about rape victims, incest victims, women at risk of death and injury, women carrying foetuses with rare fatal conditions – and make no mistake, those girls and women exist and their rights need to be defended. But we don’t hear much about the vast majority of women who choose abortion, who are basically trying to get their life on track or keep it there.”

Pollitt has stories to back up her point. Stories from real women who had abortions and felt just fine.

Naturally, countries such as Ireland pain Pollitt. She writes about the terrible death of Savita Halappanavar, in Galway, in October 2012. “These incidents are the kinds of things that happen in countries where abortion is illegal,” she writes.

Ireland is a salutary tale. It is a worst-case scenario. The US should heed its siren call and reinstate women’s access to safe, legal abortion in every US state where it has been eroded by those who don’t really like women.

Pollitt’s chapter “Are Women People?” is my favourite. “What if we started with women? After all, they are right here. You do not need to give someone an ultrasound to know that a woman is present . . . How much right to life do women have?”

If you love women and their right to life you might read this book. Powerful, poignant and prescriptive for a pro-choice position, Pollitt posits: “At the heart of opposition to legal abortion is an anti-feminist, anti-modern view of relations between the sexes.”

For those troubled by the abortion rate in the US there is an answer, says Pollitt. “More feminism. More justice. More equality. More freedom.” That will do nicely.

Anthea McTeirnan, an Irish Times journalist, is a former chairwoman of the Irish Family Planning Association