Abortion: It Terminates a Biography

Ruth Marcus

Columnist Ruth Marcus writes in today's Washington Post ("In a Supreme Court brief, lawyers bravely tell their own abortion stories") that "Their point is to let the justices know that, even if they do not realize it, they almost certainly know women who have had abortions, women whose biographies are not so different from theirs."

The "they" in that sentence refers to professional women, mostly attorneys, who have told the Supreme Court that having undergone abortions has enhanced their personal biographies. They could not have attained their present status as women professionals had they carried their fetuses to term, and so they urge the justices to, in a pending court case (Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole), disallow recent attempts by states to make abortions harder to get.

Marcus's sentence mentioning professional women's biographies, however, has persuaded me in the exact opposite direction. It occurs to me, as a result of pondering Marcus’s column, that an abortion abruptly terminates a biography: that of the fetus.

True, the fetus's biography is more potential than actual, but so is the rest of yours.

True, the bio of a woman who does not abort her pregnancy will turn out to be vastly different than if she does have the abortion. Possibly it will be, from a certain quite reasonable point of view, worse. But it's also true that she might wind up with a better life, owing to the fact that she will very likely wind up as a different sort of person with different intentions and values. Put another way, her biography might well have a different happy ending.

Being a successful professional woman is a good thing. Keeping a fetus alive and bearing a human being into the world is also a good thing. I believe the latter to be a better thing than the former, though, because abruptly terminating a potential biography is worse than constraining the biography of someone who is already born. People can find happiness despite constrained biographies. People can find no happiness at all if they have no biography whatsoever.