goals of abortion

In traditional societies abortion had not only causes but also purposes: goals that related to something more than the simple elimination of the foetus, as in the case of the interruption of a woman's first pregnancy to facilitate the next. We find such a practice superstitious, but still it shows an analogy to events that take place naturally, without intentional intervention. Any number of cases of a spontaneous miscarriage during a first pregnancy, followed by a pregnancy that goes to term without complications, give the impression that the first pregnancy was a kind of psychic preparation, a test, as though to make certain of the fertility of the terrain. Such spontaneous miscarriages are sometimes followed by the achievement of a greater level of awareness on the part of the two partners, allowing each of them to come to terms with doubts and ambivalent feelings.

When seeking the causes of a voluntary abortion, we often go no further than pathological labels: a woman finds behalf with as unplanned pregnancy and then aborts because she is more neurotic than others. To ask whether an abortion can also serve unconscious purposes is to enter a new dimension. The thought that the aim of a pregnancy might be something other than the birth of a child and that an abortion might find its target in something other than the avoidance of the birth of a child - frames an eventuality that allows us to break new ground, as well as casting new light on the phenomenon of repeated abortions.

Precisely because these goals are unconscious, as abortion is unable to reach them. They recreate the same situation, again and again, giving rise to a train of events unfortunately like the plight of the drug addict, who is looking less for relief from momentary torment than for the realization of a secret desire to become a different person. What results is a vicious circle, and as the addict plods along its perimeter, the original goal becomes ever more difficult to recognize, since it turns into an ever more destructive travesty of itself the addict has indeed become a different person, with a body, personality and spiritual life that have been transformed, but in ways utterly different from the fantasy which at first he or she bad hoped to realize.

If abortion has goals in addition to causes, the irrational behavior of many women with respect to birth control can be seen not only as an error, but also as something of the order of a lapses or unconscious slip, or an error unconsciously 'desired'. If we do not want once again to restrict ourselves to the problem's pathological aspects, we cannot remain satisfied with interpreting this error terms such as self-deception, masochism, depression, aggressively with respect to the partner or the parents, or identification with a negative mother complex: we have to discover the ways in which it springs from a goal concerned with the future. In addition to adding, What elements of the past have determined it?', we also have to inquire, 'What new elements does it spawn?'

This, substantially, is the procedure adopted by the analytic psychology of Carl G. Jung. Unlike Freud, Jung sees the slip, toe symptom and the neurosis as something more than the return of the repressed, or of things that once were conscious, and then expelled from consciousness; he sees them also as the still crude expression of new psychic contents which are attempting to rise into consciousness and which have no way of achieving this goal other than disturbing the existing psychological equilibrium. It is therefore insufficient to interpret an unwanted pregnancy as an unconscious wish for a child. The question is larger and more complex than that the unconscious need does not have to be concerned with a child, and might instead be a question of a search for a situation of extreme conflict - and not necessarily as a source of suffering. We often search out the most difficult challenges, since without overcoming them we do not yet feel ourselves to have become adults. Such a pattern of behavior may strike us as paradoxical or perverse, but it also belongs to the normal course of life. From a rational point of view, initiations into adulthood are usually quite wasteful - it is enough to remember such traditionally masculine initiations as going off to war - but that hardly decreases their symbolic charge: crowing such a threshold gives us the feeling of having reached completion and adulthood. And the clarity of this is directly proportionate to the threshold's levy of difficulty, danger and potential destructiveness.

One can thus imagine a woman feeling an unconscious wish not for a child, but for a pregnancy, since pregnancies are connected with important images and expectations: pregnancy is the most powerful and archaic symbol of novelty and renewal. But there is also the possibility of another unconscious goal which has almost never been considered: an unwanted pregnancy could quite precisely serve the purpose of allowing a woman to have an abortion. Abortion itself could be the object of an unconscious wish, by virtue of being charged with a meaning of which until now we know nothing eke.

G. Devereux likewise sees the possibility that abortion itself might be a goal: 'Some women cause themselves to become pregnant in order to be able to abort' (Devereux 1976: 383). But his thoughts remain bound to a Freudian scheme that reduces such women to pathological cases. In the examples he offers, the goals of the unconsciously desired abortions were always negative: punishment of the partner, self-punishment or a desire for castration; and in cases of repeated abortions, the woman's goal was to show that she could not be castrated. No matter how interesting Devereux's interpretations may be, they never depart from the field of pathology. This itself, moreover, confirms his fundamental presupposition that abortion is a neurotic response to a neurotic situation, always and inevitably traumatic. He sees pregnancy as a natural process of which the interruption can never be anything other than a brutal aggression. He thus, as well, refuses to recognize the sociocultural relativity of his thesis, which passes a negative Christian judgment on all those traditional Peoples who have practiced ritual forms of abortion. And in strictly psychological terms, such a thesis also neglects a number of highly important perceptions. There are cases where a pregnancy is experienced not at all as a 'normal process' but rather as a violence, sickness or abnormality, and abortion is the route to liberation.

Let us take our reflections further by searching out possible unconscious goals which would not be pathological. An unwanted pregnancy puts a woman in a trap. The very notion of 'making a choice' is likely to strike her as bizarre and impossible, since she has no desire for either of the roads that lie before her. The conflict is probably more intense than anything in her previous experience. But can we say that finding access to the experience of something still unknown is exclusively reserved to the woman who resolves this plight by deciding to have a child? For those who decide instead to have an abortion, can one only hope that they will work their way through it psychologically, that they Will enter and complete a state of mourning, and that they will manage to survive the event without having suffered too great a wound? Or do they also have a chance of finding their way into a previously unknown psychological condition which could never have come into existence without an abortion? And if so, can the achievement of this new and known condition.justify the taking of a life.

With repeated abortions, the mechanic would seem to be the contrary one: an action is compulsively repeated as though to mace it easier to perform it again. Its repetition could derive from the fact that its fundamental goal remains elusive. A meaningless abortion is an abortion that will have to be repeated; and if the next is still without meaning, it will have to be repeated. It's as though each new abortion reformulates the hope of finally discovering its hidden meaning, and thus of reaching its implicit goal, in spite of the dangerous fact that this cycle of behavior is driven by a worn-out mechanism that continues to function by virtue of inertia The repetition compulsion would come to an end only when the woman had become aware of what she had been seeking in this wholly irrational yet resolute way.

Now, however, before further confronting our specific theme what an abortion may bring to light, if anything at all - we should look at some of the unconscious images connected with pregnancy.