ABORTION TALK.

• Author: Huntington, Clare
• Position: Book review

ABOUT ABORTION: TERMINATING PREGNANCY IN TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY AMERICA. By Carol Sanger. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 2017. Pp. xv, 238. $29.95.

INTRODUCTION

Public service announcements routinely note that one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. (1) Advocates frequently invoke the twenty percent wage gap between men and women. (2) And educational groups often cite the (more contested) statistic that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during college. (3) But there is another data point not regularly part of public conversation: nearly one in four women will have an abortion by the age of forty-five. (4) The widespread--but largely secret--practice of terminating pregnancies is what Carol Sanger (5) wants us to talk about. As much as possible.

Sanger's call for "abortion talk" (p. x) arrives just as the confirmations to the U.S. Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh bring the future of abortion rights to an urgent new salience. Indeed, these personnel changes at the Court have led many commentators and advocates to anticipate significant new restrictions on women's access to lawful abortions, if not a complete repudiation of Roe v. Wade. (6) With this renewed uncertainty, About Abortion is a welcome and timely intervention in one of our most highly polarized debates.

In her exceptionally thoughtful and evenhanded book, Sanger's goal is to encourage true conversation about abortion. As she contends, advocates on both sides of the debate yell about abortion, march about abortion, and litigate about abortion. But they--and we, the broader public--rarely talk about women's experiences of abortion. Sanger argues that this absence of real conversation, held at a lower decibel, impoverishes our views about abortion and, in turn, impoverishes our democracy. According to Sanger, policymakers and ordinary citizens need a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of women's experiences with abortion to determine the proper regulation of the practice (pp. xiii-xiv). Sanger assumes the legality of abortion (p. xiii), but she clarifies that the "book is neither for abortion nor against it. It is about abortion" (p. xiv). Thus, although Sanger supports the ongoing availability of abortion, in most of the book she is not normative about the particulars of the law. Instead of "a full-on revolution," Sanger wants "just a bit more openness and generosity" (p. 238).

While exploring women's experiences with abortion, Sanger toggles between two perspectives. She uses a metaphorical wide-angle lens, capturing the broad social and cultural context of abortion. She also uses a telephoto lens, focusing attention on the fine-grained experiences of women, treating them as subjects, not objects, of the law. In all of this, Sanger decenters familiar flashpoints, such as the moment life begins or the consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade. (7) Instead, Sanger takes the reader in unexpected directions, describing the nineteenth-century practice of photographing deceased children, Halloween costumes that transform a pregnant belly into a fetal trick-or-treater, and high school confidences about how to get an abortion without telling parents.

This eclectic method has considerable normative consequences for both abortion talk and family law more generally. The textured, contextual conversation prompted by the book is salutary, lowering the temperature of the debate and bringing attention to new aspects of the issue. More broadly, the method is relevant to scholarly inquiry in other areas of family law. Sanger demonstrates that to understand a hotly contested legal conflict, it is critical to look at it from multiple angles, drawing in the social and cultural context and, especially, seeing the issue from the perspective of those most affected by the conflict. This embedded humanism may well be useful in other fields, but it is highly relevant to family law given the mutually constitutive relationship between law and social context, as well as the profound effect of legal regulation on the daily life of families. The book thus succeeds in two ways. It opens the conversation about abortion, and it provides a method for scholars to think about the enormous range of influences in family law and the felt experience of that legal regulation.

Despite the remarkable breadth of social and cultural inputs Sanger considers, it is vital to bring more fully into the conversation other important factors that affect women's experiences with abortion--most notably race and class. The odious history and ongoing policy of controlling the fertility of women of color, and especially low-income women of color, (8) and the disproportionate rates of abortion among low-income women and women of color (9) mean the experiences of these women are distinctive and should be added to the conversation. This Review thus engages in the call for conversation Sanger issues, drawing out additional voices to address these and other aspects of women's experiences. The talk continues.

This Review proceeds as follows. Part I describes Sanger's book-length bid for dialogue. Part II argues that the book largely succeeds at initiating an open and generous conversation about women's experiences with abortion but that we need to focus on additional aspects of those experiences as well, especially the way race and class mediate a woman's experience terminating a pregnancy. Part III demonstrates that About Abortions method expands the boundaries of family law scholarship, with deeply generative impact.

1. THE CONVERSATION

   The underpinning of About Abortion is Sanger's contention that a pervasive secrecy surrounds abortion, distorting how abortion is discussed and regulated (pp. xi, xiii). To begin this argument, Sanger distinguishes secrecy from privacy. Privacy is the choice to keep information personal; privacy is voluntary, confers dignity, and flows from and reinforces autonomy (pp. 48, 60). By contrast, secrecy is a "more ominous proposition" (p. 60), because rather than choosing to keep information private, the subject knows that divulging the information can lead to harm, including, in the context of abortion, "harassment, stigmatization, or fear of violence" (p. 61). As Sanger sums up the matter, "secrecy is a much darker, more psychologically taxing, and socially corrosive phenomenon than privacy" (p. 62).

   To counter this secrecy and to better inform democratic debate about the regulation of abortion, Sanger seeks to bring women's experiences with abortion into the open. Sanger contends that citizens cannot know what they think about abortion without knowing more about abortion, and especially without knowing more about the experiences of women (pp. xiii, 22,49).

   With such a setup, a reader might expect an ethnography, relating stories about individual women who have decided whether to terminate a pregnancy. The chapter describing judicial bypass proceedings for pregnant minors has this feel, bringing the reader into the courtroom, in the shoes of the pregnant teen (Chapter Seven). As Sanger describes, in most states, a pregnant minor must either involve a parent in the decision to terminate a pregnancy or seek judicial approval for the teen to consent to the procedure without involvement from a parent. (10) Judicial approval requires a court determination that the minor is sufficiently mature to consent to the procedure. (11) Sanger contends that even though courts approve the vast majority of petitions, the requirement that a teen participate in a hearing is deeply troubling (p. 158). In addition to the immediate harms of delaying a medical procedure and risking public exposure, Sanger focuses on the more insidious harm of requiring a young woman to tell a court about intensely personal matters: sex, pregnancy, and a home life that prevents the young woman from involving a parent (p. 158). Sanger concludes these proceedings "have come to operate as a form of punishment" (p. 159). Drawing out the nuance in the proceedings, Sanger distinguishes the natural embarrassment a teenager may feel discussing these issues with anyone from the humiliation a teenager experiences when discussing these issues in court (pp. 160-61). Sanger then follows this argument with a rich description of the actual proceedings and the cultural script--demonstrating maturity and remorse--teenagers are required to follow (pp. 161-76).

   Most of the book, however, operates at the level of sociocultural geography, not ethnography, showing how abortion is interwoven in American life. As evidence that fetuses are visually dominant in American society, Sanger describes viewers finding a fetus in satellite images of Hurricane Katrina (p. 70). As evidence that abortion remains politically divisive, Sanger cites the headlines accompanying the revelation that Miss America 2015 had interned with Planned Parenthood (p. 1). And as evidence that we are openly reminded that some women choose not to abort a fetus with a medical abnormality, Sanger depicts Sarah Palin's family passing around baby Trig at the Republican National Convention (p. 19). As these examples demonstrate, Sanger sees abortion everywhere. According to Sanger, "[s]o many things in American public life are about abortion because abortion itself is about so many things" (p. 4), including medicine; the legal rights of women, states, doctors, and the fetus; religion; morality; sex; lawmaking; personal decisionmaking; gender; and more (pp. 5-17).

   At the center of this multipronged exploration of abortion is the place of the fetus, meriting three full chapters. She defends this fetal primacy by noting that "the fetus has become actively involved across a range of endeavors--religious, scientific, artistic, medical, literary, political, and, of course, procreative. Each form of engagement between citizens and fetuses, real or representational, further imbricates the fetus into ... everyday...