Nice mothers support abortion rights too

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/23/nice-mothers-support-abortion-rights-too

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Becoming a parent forces you to ask many questions of yourself. Mostly questions like, "Who puked this milk into my ear?" and, "Will I die if the baby never lets me sleep again?" and, "Who knew the BBC World Service was broadcasting such an informative range of programming through the dark hours of lactation?". But sometimes the questions demanded of you by parenthood are more profound; sometimes, they slice to the pulpy quick of your political identity.

Over the weekend, the New York Times marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade with a blogpost called Judging a Mother's Choice. The author, Christina Loccke, writes self-critically about how becoming a mother has changed her feelings about abortion rights. While she still supports them in principle, in practice – as she deals with friends who have terminations, and suffers the miscarriage of her own wanted pregnancy – she finds herself becoming more ambivalent.

"Nice mommies don't talk about abortion," she writes. "Yes, we believe in a woman's right to choose. No, we don't actually believe she should use it in the face of women choosing to have their children. This is the feminist mother's greatest taboo." I think Loccke is deeply wrong here: nice mummies don't just talk about abortion, they support abortion for everyone. Some of them have abortions, and they're better mothers for having the choices that abortion affords.

All the same, I respect her for writing unsentimentally about what is clearly a painful and complicated set of emotions. I have a little bit of sympathy for her dilemma, too. Resolutely pro-choice myself, as a new mother I had a moment of looking down at the snuffling, purplish creature I'd spawned, and feeling an unwelcome idea form in my head: "If I love my baby so much, how can abortion be right?"

This thought stayed with me and played on me until eventually I mentioned it to my own mum. She fixed me with a serious mum look (my mum is an unstinting source of sensibleness) and said: "Not everyone is in the same situation as you." And that was that: the moral argument that seemed so forceful in my own brain as I held my baby turned out to be nothing but a non sequitur, a moment of solipsism in which I mistook my own experience for a universal template of humanity.

Parenthood can do that. The sheer bludgeoning responsibility is so consuming, and the emotions evoked so elemental, that it's possible to lose sight of the particular in your own circumstances. It's not just that, though; it's also that any decision relating to parenting – and particularly the decision of whether or not to be a parent – is so bound up with our sense of ourselves, that anyone who's chosen otherwise can feel like an existential threat. There are flame wars about buggy brands on parenting forums; bottle or breast is an ongoing battle of big-endian v little-endian proportions and futility. It's hardly a surprise that feelings on abortion run high too.

Having children and loving them narrows the focus of your world. That can appear outwardly as complacency or self-interest: the logistics of going on a protest are highly likely to defeat people with a pram in the hall, and that's assuming they have the time to get exercised about anything between nappy changes and running the steriliser. But that narrowing can work like a lens too, concentrating your attention and energy on the world as you see it through the figure of this small person entrusted to you.

Things that seemed like a good idea in the abstract before I had children – the welfare state, the NHS, the avoidance of the CO2-induced broiling of the planet – seem vitally, painfully important to me now. In the same way that the existence of a good primary school down the road becomes a personal priority when you have children to send there, the existence of a safe, sane and kindly world takes on a new importance when you have to imagine your own children living in it.

I am a feminist mother and I don't (fleeting wobble aside) regard abortion as a great taboo. In fact, I seem to talk almost incessantly about how important and valuable abortion rights are. Abortion is part of the context in which I've made choices about my own fertility, and I want it to be available – safely, legally – to my own children should they ever need it. That's a sort of parental self-interest too, but it's one I don't see any shame or hypocrisy in confessing to.