REFORM of American abortion laws became one of the great politi-cal issues of the past decade. Led by California, Colorado, and North Carolina in 1967, state legislatures have steadily, but slowly, been up-dating century old antiabortion statutes.1 This effort reached ...

In this paper I suggest that current extreme polarization over abortion is best understood in the context of Americas' culture war, which sociologist James Davison Hunter describes as a fundamental divide between two value systems—orthodoxy and progressivism. These two value systems have taken on the status of ultimacy such that they reflect two distinct worldviews or belief systems which vie for cultural dominance. Moreover, the conflict over abortion has become entrenched in American life largely because it has been institutionalized through three main polarizing forces: the public media which is characterized by “distortions of public rhetoric”; the battle over the family; and the politicization of American public life.

The topic of this issue revolves around the conflict that has erupted transnationally (in five key countries – Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Poland and Italy) around abortion rights between neoconservative forces and feminist, transfeminist and LGBTQIA+ movements over the last decade. That is, this is an issue dedicated to the struggles for reproductive justice and self-determination for women and individuals with the capacity for gestation during an era marked by populist and neofundamentalist resistance.

The loss in Gonzales v. Carhart and the rhetoric the Court employed point to a significant vulnerability in the movement for legal protections for women’s reproductive health care - its conflicts over motherhood. This Article argues that the movement’s failure to emphasize that abortion serves women’s interest in, and respect for, motherhood divides it from its constituents and creates the vulnerability that the anti-abortion movement now exploits, contributing to the reduction of constitutional protections for abortion. Embracing abortion’s supportive relationship to motherhood is essential to the survival of the abortion right, as well as to the vitality of our continuing battle to redefine motherhood in conditions of equality. In Section I of the paper, I explore the ways women’s respect for the importance of motherhood and “bonds of love” with their children inform their decisions to obtain abortions. In Section II, I summarize the state of abortion jurisprudence, paying particular attention to the Court’s vision of women’s need for, or “interest in,” abortion. I trace the emergence of the Court’s discomfort with women’s decision-making about abortion, linking it with decreasing protections for the right and increasing recognition that abortion serves an interest in women’s social and economic equality. I demonstrate that the Court’s increasing recognition that abortion serves an interest in self-determination that could result in a rejection of the role of mother, accompanied a decreasing recognition of abortion’s importance to women’s interests in motherhood itself, an interest in how any child they bear is cared for. This sense in which abortion serves women’s interests in motherhood was last seen in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where the Court acknowledged that the choice to have an abortion could be seen as reflecting “human responsibility and respect for [human life].” In Section III, I discuss Gonzales v. Carhart and argue that while the ruling itself is limited and much of the Casey standard remains intact, the decision reflects this diminishing sense of abortion as serving the woman’s interest in motherhood. The Court’s opinion reflected a view that abortion destroys motherhood, rather than the view that abortion enhances motherhood and enables women to mother their children in the best conditions possible, and in conditions closer to equality. Finally, in Section IV I explore resistance in the feminist movement to stressing the ways abortion serves a woman’s interest in, and respect for, the importance of motherhood. Despite real risks of appealing to and thus supporting regressive notions of motherhood, I make both normative and prescriptive claims that given the centrality of concerns for motherhood in women’s decision-making about abortion, we must emphasize that women’s interest in abortion in a constitutional sense includes not only her interest in her choice not to be a mother (an aspect of her decisional autonomy), her interest in her personal dignity, her interest in her health and life (an aspect of her bodily integrity), and her interest in privacy of the information about her decision, but also includes her interest in motherhood itself and in deciding how she will mother any child she bears. I contend that these arguments about why women choose and why women need abortions can and should be made within, and not as an alternative to, a rights framework. Stressing that abortion serves women’s interest in motherhood in a constitutional sense very clearly falls within such a framework, and is necessary to drawing a complete picture of the importance of abortion to women’s liberty, equality, and dignity. It strengthens the woman’s right to abortion and is vital to continued protection of the right under any level of scrutiny or in any constitutional framework.

This article tries to show that commonplace economic, ethico-religious, anti-racist, and logical-consistency objections to public funding of abortions and abortion counseling for poor women are quite weak. By contrast, arguments appealing to basic human rights to freedom of speech, informed consent, protection from great harm, justice and equal protection under the law, strongly support public funding. Thus, refusing to provide abortions at public expense for women who cannot afford them is morally unacceptable and rationally unjustifiable, despite the opinions of former Presidents Reagan and Bush, the more conservative members of the Supreme Court of the United States, the current Congress, and the majority of the American people.