Abstract
Abortion is commonly addressed in public discourse as a choice that women face with difficulty, one that negatively marks their experience of femininity and may lead to painful, even traumatic repercussions. Happy Abortions – Our Bodies in the Era of Choice challenges this normative view by revealing how specific emotions have evolved as ‘common sense’ discourses of abortion, reinforcing the cultural meanings through which abortion is evaluated and perceived, both by women and their surrounding communities. Erica Millar addresses the ways in which emotions concerning abortion manifest themselves in the ‘rhetoric of choice’, where the pro-choice and anti-abortion stances coexist in a neoliberal context. While acknowledging women’s autonomy and right to choose how to deal with pregnancy, the rhetoric of choice concurrently depicts abortion as an undesirable and deviant event. Happy Abortions provides a valuable critique of this perspective, considering the broader political, legislative and cultural forces that shape the meanings individuals attribute to abortion. The book lays out the historical evolution of abortion issues over a period of 50 years, including activist movements and political debates that influenced the ways in which abortion is socially read. While the focus of the book is primarily on the western – particularly Australian – context, the author accounts for the diverging circumstances of non-white women and underprivileged groups, faced with further constraints regarding choice due to racial politics, class differences and income inequality.
Happy Abortions opens with an overview of three activist movements (RTL, ALRA, WAAC) that framed the issue of abortion in diverging ways, influencing its interpretations across different social positions. The following chapters address four dominant emotions through which abortion is conveyed. Chapter 2 discusses the ‘maternal happiness’ frame, perceiving women’s happiness as only achievable through motherhood, and thus positioning abortion as a choice that goes against women’s ‘feminine nature’. Chapter 3 explores ‘foetocentric grief’ – another prevalent emotion in abortion discourses, that constructs pregnant women as mothers who go through the loss of their children. Widely employed in political discourse, the book reveals the effects of this frame on abortion policies and regulations. Chapter 4 examines the feeling of shame and the resulting silence that veils the experiences of aborting women. Chapter 5 considers the presence of national interests in population management and composition, whereby women are perceived not only as individuals, but as national objects as well. In a western context, the aborting white woman is viewed as a threat to the supremacy of white culture, and as failing the nation by refusing to produce more (white) citizens. Lastly, the book concludes with a call for an alternative approach that rethinks the interpretations of pro-choice discourses, one that does not depict women as uniform in experience, as ahistorical and naturalised subjects – but rather one that considers the broader context of abortion issues, including power relations and social inequality.
Drawing on (post)feminist theories, Erica Millar challenges established views that stigmatise abortion, and calls for a constructive approach to addressing these rather common experiences of women. Elegantly written, the book clarifies the social mechanisms through which our interpretations of abortion are formed and the underlying emotions that construct these views. The only shortcoming relates to the scarcity of direct accounts of individuals who challenge the normative views on abortion in practice, of women who positively experienced abortions. Nonetheless, Happy Abortions provides an informative, historically grounded account of public readings of abortions and women who have them, disentangling the normative cultural representations of femininity and motherhood, the meanings socially attributed to pregnancy and foetal life, and the emotions that socially prescribe specific ways in which women should be experiencing abortion and dealing with their pregnancies. A positive approach to abortion, as well as an acknowledgement of its normality and frequency is highly relevant to contemporary debates, given the overall persistent silence in which this experience is veiled. Happy Abortions stirs a conversation pertinent not only to scholars in academic fields, but with potential implications for national policies and future abortion legislation as well. The ways in which abortion is socially constructed has practical implications for the lives of many individuals and their surrounding communities, making this topic and this book especially relevant to all readers who aim to understand the dynamic context in which abortion is constructed, and cultivate a critical approach to this issue.