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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Tragic Pregnancies

The Tragic Pregnancies

Sir: I would like to congratulate your correspondent, A.W. McNamara, on his clear presentation of the view commonly held by Catholic theologians in regard to abortion. Like him I bow to the Church’s teaching on this matter; yet I feel he has left unstated a factor of enormous practical importance – the psychological state of a modern woman, married or unmarried, who has the misfortune to be pregnant. Let me set down some of the possibilities:

  • (a) Given a kind of family background which is by no means uncommon in New Zealand (even in Catholic homes) an unmarried teen-ager who finds herself pregnant may see the alternatives of suicide or abortion as preferable to informing her parents about her predicament. In many cases the parents, if informed, will insist on abortion anyway. I personally know more than one case of a teen-age girl being literally dragged to an abortionist by her intensely respectable parents.
  • (b) An older spinster or widow or divorcee would commonly be regarded as both insane and depraved by her neighbours if she insisted on giving birth to a child conceived illicitly. If she does have the child, the choice will then lie between the uncertainties of adoption or a life (for her and the child) of continual social stigma.
  • (c) A married woman who has received a normal non-Catholic New Zealand upbringing will almost certainly be intensely disturbed if she finds herself pregnant (let us say) for a fifth time. Her neighbours will regard her as a bungler. Her own conscience will tell her that her first duty is to her own health and the material standard of living of her family. More important, she knows that another birth will put off by a few more years that moment for which her secular education has prepared her – when she can relinquish the ignoble burden of household chores and motherhood and ‘be herself ’ again. Our whole notion of female independence is bound up in the matter.

I do not want to give anyone the impression that I think our social and sexual values are sane ones. But I think your correspondent should recognise that a great many New Zealand women, finding themselves pregnant, would have to exercise heroic virtue in choosing not to have an abortion. From observation, I do not think women ever have abortions light-heartedly. Thepage 600 psychological scarring is very great; and many women who do not hold the full Catholic view that abortion is a concealed form of infanticide still consider that it is wrong to kill a foetus. They choose abortion because of a prior state of mind that verges on desperation. I think this desperation is engendered partly by a set of values according to which health, social status and independence are the most important things in life, but much more by the cruel and Pharisaic attitudes which people have towards women who have conceived children illicitly. I would like to see kindness and more kindness preached from the pulpits; and I would like to see those women honoured who have the courage to bear illegitimate children. If this happened, I think there would be fewer abortions.

1963 (287)