Topics Abortion

Question Many pro-life advocates maintain that certain attendant may make abortion a reasonable choice from the perspective of the pregnant woman. Such circumstances are not limited to life-and-death cases, or even concerns directly related to the health. For instance: if a pregnant teen claimed that she had to forego motherhood in order to attend college and go on to to achieve her life goals, many would think this understandable. Such justifications seem plausible to me. And yet it strikes me that we almost never find cases where a mother expresses serious regret at having had children. As far as I can tell, it's very rare for a mother to admit, "On balance, I wish that I had aborted my children." And this holds true almost no matter what the difficulties surrounding the mother's pregnancy may have been. Whether a child is born into poverty, or suffers a birth defect, or prevents the mother from pursuing a career, we hardly ever look back and say, "Yes, this one should have been aborted." That's not to say that having children doesn't make life difficult--obviously, it does. But once a child is born, we hardly ever judge that its life represents more bad than good. I don't mean to suggest that abortion is immoral. What I question is the idea that abortion is often in the best interest of the mother (or parents). It seems like we have a tension here: either the lack of regretful mothers provides strong evidence that having children generally turns out for the best, despite the way things initially seem; or many of these mothers are giving in to some kind of post-hoc rationalization for having ended up in their present state.

Accepted:
October 27, 2011

Comments

I've heard this kind of reasoning before, and I think it's well worth thinking about. But I also think it is ultimately sophistical.

(Something seems to have been mangled in the beginning of the question. The first sentence seems ungrammatical, and I would have thought the views expressed were more likely to be those of pro-choice folks rather than pro-life folks. But this doesn't really affect the issues raised.)

Yes, once a child has been born, the life of that child has precisely the sort of value that any human life has, and any parent who raised such a child and refused to acknowledge the value of that child's life (I wish you'd never been born!) would be a monster. But suppose the mother has been raped by her priest and, for whatever reason, decides to have the child. That does not make the child's life any less valuable, and if the mother raises the child with love, I can only have the deepest respect for her. But should she then have no regret about the fact she was raped? Should she think: Oh, it's a great thing my priest raped me, since I got this child out of it? Of course not. She can lament the rape and love her child, and do both without thinking the child's life somehow makes up for the rape. It does not, in any way. To say it does is to excuse violence. (See this question for related thoughts.)

The fact that a woman who decides to have a child loves the child and recognizes the value of its life simply does not mean that she might not regret becoming pregnant when and how she did. I know a woman who feels exactly that way: who had children very young and whose life was unalterably changed by that fact. She does not love the children she has any less, but in some sense she wishes her life had gone differently, even though she does not wish her children had never existed. Her feelings are obviously very complicated, but surely her perspective is perfectly understandable.

I know a man who feels similarly. His wife blackmailed him into having a child with her. He loves that child. But he very much laments the circumstances under which the child was conceived and the consequences, for all their lives, of his now ex-wife's despicable behavior. And just as it would be wrong for him to excuse his ex-wife's behavior because it gave him the daughter he so loves, so it would be wrong for him to regret his daughter's very existence because of how she came into the world.

So I think there clearly are parents who feel deep regret about the circumstances under which they became parents. What makes things so difficult, both philosophically and personally, is how hard it can be to hold such regret apart from one's love for the child itself. But we can separate these things, in principle. Keeping them separate in practice, on the other hand, must be very hard. But we can (and should) be compassionate towards people who must live with such complicated feelings without endorsing the inference I once heard an adoptive parent make: The life of the child I now have is of great value, so it would have been wrong if her mother had had an abortion. For all we know, that mother was raped by her priest.