While perusing one of my bookshelves earlier this week, I came across a book I recall purchasing almost 30 years ago that somehow got shelved and forgotten. The Sacrament of Abortion was first published in 1992 by Ginette Paris, a French-Canadian psychologist, author, and professor. With the passage of a draconian and cruel anti-abortion law in Texas last week and with the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it seemed like a good time for me to dive-in and read this slim volume (113 pages including end notes). After breezing through the text, I thought it imperative to share at least a few passages from Paris’ exposition as the book is now, sadly, out-of print and her argument/thesis needs to be heard.
After a brief introduction in which the author identifies the Greek mythological goddess Artemis as her primary inspiration, she states a simple premise for her argument:
This little book develops the idea that abortion is a sacred act, that it is an expression of maternal love.
Following the introduction, Paris delivers, in an 18-page chapter, a brief history of contraception and abortion which, if I had my way, would be required reading for every anti-abortion activist in the world. She leaves no stone unturned:
The Romans, Hebrews, Celts, and early Germans allowed a woman a certain amount of control over her fertility, thanks to the help of midwives, even though women were subordinated to men and valued mainly for their reproductive capacities. Midwives, from the earliest times, have always advised women on all questions having to do with childbirth, nursing, contraception, and abortion. In the Middle Ages their expertise brought them the hostility of the [Roman Catholic] Church. In an attempt to keep mothers away from them, the Church forbade the use of traditional remedies that eased the pain of childbirth, claiming the desire to ameliorate such suffering contradicted the will of God. Mythology, as usual served as justification: when God banned Eve from paradise, did he not lay a curse on her and her descendants, namely, to suffer when bringing forth children?
The desire to ease this pain is therefore an offense against God, and consequently midwives should not help women. Priests took this curse seriously: in 1591 a Scots noblewoman, Eufame Macalyne, was burned alive for having asked a midwife for drugs to ease her labor pains. Until the end of the nineteenth century, priests discouraged doctors from studying the causes of puerperal fever, the major cause of death among new mothers, because the Church considered these deaths an expression of God’s judgment or punishment for some hidden immorality.
When chloroform and ether were discovered and the physician James Simpson proposed to use them in cases of difficult labor, the Church once again raised a hue and cry. A Protestant minister in New England wrote, for example: “Chloroform is an instrument of Satan, who appears to offer women a blessing; but in reality it threatens to harden society and deprive God of the deep and urgent cries of women who call on him for help in their time of need.” One wonders where the Church fathers got the idea that women’s anguished cries were pleasing to God, a pleasure that mustn’t be taken from him. It was Queen Victoria, puritan though she was, who finally silenced the Church men when she allowed her doctor to administer chloroform during the birth of her eighth child. When a Queen speaks, God speaks. The Church changed its attitude immediately, allowing the Queen to interpret God’s will in her own way. But it is as queen, not as woman, that Victoria won the day. The suffering of ordinary women hadn’t managed to arouse the compassion of Churchmen, but the reprimand of a powerful monarch got through to them.
In the following passage, Paris gets to the crux of the matter: society/culture affords only men the power over life and death:
One night I was watching a television documentary with my daughter, then fourteen-years-old, and we were both overcome by the scenes of warfare: children burned to death; peasants shot in front of their homes with their children as witnesses; young soldiers barely out of adolescence forced to dig their own graves, lie in them, and be stabbed to death with knives; military hospitals filled with hopeless amputees; orphanages full of sad-eyed children who have seen too much; mothers collapsing in grief at the news of another son’s death; women who must look after husbands who left in health and returned disabled. My daughter watched this solemnly, realizing how imperfect life is, how lives are being destroyed en masse, everywhere, every minute.
The documentary was followed by a news bulletin: a reporter was interviewing a man who brandished a pro-life sign at a demonstration against abortion. The reporter, holding out the microphone, asked him why he was there. The demonstrator stated with much feeling that he was against abortion because it is a crime and an abomination — murder, in fact, to take the life of a human being, even at the fetus level. My daughter’s reaction showed me how surprisingly sensible adolescents can be when they consider the adult world. She could neither understand nor accept that the horrors shown in the documentary were permissible legal actions sanctioned and funded by governments, forgiven and sometimes even blessed by the Church. To be allowed to kill men, women, and children who are full of life and fully conscious of suffering, a simple formula is needed — a declaration of war. These same men who decide whether or not to kill in war then dare to talk about crime and murder when a woman sacrifices a fetus no bigger than a raisin and less conscious than a chicken.
When women decide to abort, they do so for the sake of principles that are not different from the ones invoked by the makers of war: freedom, self-determination, issues of dignity as important as one’s own survival. The beings sacrificed in abortions do not suffer as do the victims of war and ecological disaster. The difference in thinking between the war maker and the anti-abortion demonstrator can best be explained by the division of power over life and death between men and women. Men have the right to kill and destroy, and when the massacre is called a war they are paid to do it and honored for their actions. War is sanctified, even blessed by our religious leaders. But let a woman decided to abort a fetus that doesn’t even have the neurological apparatus to register suffering, and people are shocked. What’s really shocking is that a woman has the power to make a moral judgment that involves a choice of life and death. That power has been reserved for men.
Any extreme contrast in gender roles implies a division of power between men and women that is absurd for both sexes: women as life-givers, men as war heroes, purveyors of death. In this distribution, women have the power to give life and no right to destroy it, whereas men are absolved for killing but are dissuaded from loving life, women, and children too much. It is expected that a woman will love and care for all the children that her biologic destiny imposes on her and that a soldier will be able to kill without flinching. When this kind of polarization is found within a couple, it’s definitely a sign that something is wrong, that the two partners are in an unhealthy situation, because the ideal of infinite compassion and generosity in women is as untenable as the perpetually strong and warlike aggressivity of men. When this polarization spreads throughout a culture, warlike aggression reaches its peak.
The remainder of the book is primarily devoted to Paris’ building a case for creating a guiding ethical/moral code for women’s autonomy in matters of when to bring life into the world via a discussion of the role of Artemis in Greek mythology. I won’t quote from this section, although it is well-worth the read. I will, however, quote this passage from her closing chapter where, in a discussion of shame and guilt, she presciently describes our modern milieu:
A pagan ecology could provide a new perspective on shame on the collective level just as psychotherapy can help us defuse it on the personal level. When we abandoned traditional religious standards, we believed that a civil code, a system based on legal proceedings, proof of guilt and punishment would be enough to maintain collective values. But a law forbidding the pollution of streams will never suffice if the perpetrator feels no shame, if he doesn’t feel personally tarnished at the thought of throwing garbage into pure water. If we rely solely on laws and regulations, we’ll need video cameras behind every tree to catch the person in the act. And all these large-scale polluters, owners of industries, and legislators will continue to display the same pathological absence of shame. We’ll come to a legislative dead end.
I would love to see this book in print again and available to all who would like to read the full text. To that end, I may attempt to contact Ms. Ginette to see if a new edition could find its way to bookstores in the near future.