To view the Abstract of Choosing a Life for Vitae, Click Here
Overview:
- Study title: “Choosing a Life for Vitae: Synthesis of Findings”
- April 2003
- This study did not involve additional interviews but was a meta-analysis of the three previous studies.
- Keywords: (1) Synthesis, (2) Meta-analysis, (3) Psychological death, (4) Woman-centered focus, (5) Lexicon analysis, (6) Stay away from legislation
Study:
Background
Objectives:
- Construct a model of the psychological dynamics that affect decisions about
- Understand the current position of Vitae within the context of the psychological dynamics that affect decisions about abortion.
- Develop a strategy for the strengthening of Vitae’s position in the minds of all its constituents.
Findings
Once they confront an unwanted pregnancy, women feel that every choice available to them results in a psychological death of some kind. Parenthood kills the independent self-identity of single adulthood and replaces it with a new self-identity that is enslaved to the emerging self-identity of the child, which threatens to cause great physical and emotional pain as it separates from its mother, not just during its birth, but also throughout its entire development.
Adoption also kills the independent self-identity of the mother, but leaves her in a painful state of half-transformation in which she is becoming a mother but not a parent, and tears the child away in an instant separation which is supposed to take over twenty years to complete, leaving the child self-defenseless against the pain of the world in a kind of living death that seems pitiless, not merciful.
Abortion, although it is the only option that brings in death in its literal, physical form, enables women to feel at least somewhat protected from emotional death. Abortion enables women to preserve the feeling that their children are still just a part of themselves. Women who abort convince themselves that they have ended the lives of their children before those lives have developed any independent existence at all. Thus, women avoid feeling responsible for the killing of another person and are able to restrict the suicidal implications of aborting an unwanted pregnancy by holding to the idea in their minds that it is a mere aspect of themselves that they are aborting.
Abortion is so appealing because it enables women to feel they can contain psychological death to one small compartment of themselves. Once contained, they either try to deny that it exists or try to absorb it into an expanded view of themselves as “courageous.” Doing the latter lets them feel that they have taken responsibility for their actions, and in doing so, have suffered emotionally and physically in order to solve an agonizing problem in their lives.
When told to “Choose life,” people may well ask, “Which life?” The question in their minds is what states of self-identity they can choose for themselves. Pregnant women (who don’t plan to be) are concerned much more with their own lives than with the life that grows within them.
The anticipation of a struggle with the unborn child is actually reflective of a struggle within the mind of the pregnant woman. Two aspects of her self-identity, the single, pre-pregnancy self-identity and the identity of mother, struggle for survival during pregnancy. Even more frightening (to the woman facing an unplanned pregnancy) is that without abortion, the maternal identity will inevitably kill the pre-pregnancy self-identity, growing stronger with every passing day.
When a pro-choice activist tells a pregnant woman that her fetus is not yet human and can be aborted, the pregnant woman is not ultimately thinking about the death of a potential baby, but her own rebirth into a new identity which is not mother but which is not the same as she had pre-pregnancy either. On the other hand, when a pro-life activist tells a woman two months pregnant that the embryo within her is a baby or a child, what the pregnant woman hears is that she has already been transformed into a mother even though she has not ever seen, heard or even felt her baby. Thus we see that all messages about the embryo/fetus/baby/child are messages about the self-identity of the pregnant woman, not about the fetus. These messages also contain suggestions about self-control: either that self-control can be recaptured or that self-control has been forever lost and the pregnant woman must adjust to it.
On an emotional level, the debate over whether women should be allowed to have abortions is inherently skewed against the pro-life position, because it defines the crux of the matter as the ability of women to exert self-control over their sexuality. The Vitae Foundation, PHCs and sidewalk counselors can reframe the debate away from the legal right to have abortion and toward the emotional benefits of parenthood. A great deal of the fear that leads women to abort is related to the psychological trauma of the transition of self-identity during pregnancy, as women abandon their old selves and become mothers. Women’s anxiety about unwanted pregnancy is exacerbated by negative assumptions about what it means to be a mother. On the other hand, positive conceptions of maternal self-identity contribute to the decision not to abort.
One way to reduce young women’s fear of motherhood is to show how pro-life organizations provide support for women who elect to become mothers in challenging circumstances. (Provide statistic that PHCs, on average, help a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy for two full years.)
Young women fear that they are unprepared for the transformation into motherhood, and so when this transformation is thrust upon them, they reject it. Seeing that pro-life organizations are prepared to help uncertain women through this transformation of identity in a gentle, non-judgmental way will disarm a great deal of the resistance young women feel to becoming mothers.
The need for the preservation of the pre-pregnancy identity easily overwhelms common pro-life appeals to the need for character or moral strength or messages focused on the child. Such appeals have the potential to provoke guilty, defensive reactions from women. When they encounter messages that suggest that abortion is morally wrong, they interpret these messages as personal accusations, even when the messages are broadcast through mass media.
Women facing an unplanned pregnancy often don’t feel they know their unborn children, and so, when faced with the terrifying prospect of undergoing the radical transformation into motherhood, they are unlikely to make moral decisions on the basis of what their unborn children need. When they consider whether or not to abort, women consider their own needs, even if they do so in a way that appears to have a basis in morality. Vitae encourages pro-life partners to speak to women where they are by addressing their needs, not by appealing to idealistic models of morality that frightened women will ignore or, worse, see as judgmental and be pushed further toward abortion.
Instead of communicating an assumption that women want to abort, Vitae encourages partners to start all communications with the assumption that women merely need help to find ways to move into motherhood. The question evoked by Vitae messaging is not “Should I have an abortion?” but rather “How am I going to get through my pregnancy so that I can become a mother without sacrificing my dreams?”
People do indeed use abortion as a means of birth control, but ultimately the birth they are controlling is their own rebirth into the new, unwanted identity of parenthood. Without abortion, people fear that they will be transformed by their mistakes so radically that they will be destroyed. In their minds, an unwanted child and parenthood is tantamount to the death of their current self.
Conception, pregnancy and birth are clearly the beginning, middle and end of this process of self-transformation. However, different women believe that they can stop themselves from becoming mothers at different times within this process. Those who are emotionally ready to become mothers regard conception as the start of motherhood, and openly associate the decision to have sex with the decision to accept motherhood when it comes. These women are unable to abort because they have already been transformed into mothers. In their minds, the state of motherhood already feels natural. The act of abortion is thus, to them, an unnatural act.
Other women, however, are not ready to become mothers, and their self-identities not so quickly transformed. Because they are psychologically unprepared, they must perform more emotional work in order to achieve the emotional identity of motherhood. Even when they are pregnant, they do not feel like mothers. Instead, they regard themselves as in the same state of being as women who are not pregnant at all. In their minds, they do not have children because they are not mothers. To them, pregnancy feels like an interruption of the natural state of affairs, and abortion is the means through which normalcy is restored. They are so unprepared for motherhood that pregnancy feels like an assault on the self. It is for this reason that many women feel that they have a right to abortion.
Denial is central to the psychological dynamics of decisions about abortion. In other circumstances, denial is usually unidirectional, so that the emotional mind struggles with the acceptance of one particular aspect of an unsettling reality. In the case of decisions about abortion, denial is active in a multidirectional sense because it applies to all the alternatives to abortion as well as abortion itself.