Yes. According to Rosalind Petchesky's research, many 'pro-choice' people base their views upon the privacy defense only, as does the American legal tradition, which is one of the problems. Petchesky writes (in _Abortion and Woman's Choice_): "In his plurality opinion in _Webster_, Chief Justice Renquist...argues in effect that 'a woman's ability to obtain an abortion' is not impaired by a state's prohibition on abortions in public hospitals; she is still 'free' to 'choose' a physician somewhere! Indeed, this classical, asocial concept of liberty may be more acceptable to neoconservatives than outright prohibition, in so far as constructing barriers to poor and young women's practical access to abortion can be achieved within a framework of legality and the private market" (xxiii).
Another painful inadequacy of the privacy right is its relation to "the doctrine of individual responsibility of pregnant women for risk or harm to the fetus. This doctrine incorporates in law the ancient patriarchal idea of woman as vessel...but additionally imposes on the individual woman _criminal_ responsibility and punishment for her behavior during pregnancy" (393).
>By insisting on the idea that abortion is murder, all of the
>discussion then turns on definitions about individual conduct, with
>absolutely no attention to the context of this conduct.
Maybe it's the other way around. The desire for the enforcement of individual responsiblity makes for an idea that abortion is murder. I don't think that most Americans (with the exception of deranged terrorists) actually fully believe in and act on this idea. Even self-identified anti-abortionists tend not to make *explicit* enemies of women who abort (though sexism and misogyny lurk in their words) because there are just too many of us. (They'd rather represent women as 'victims of physical & psychological harms of abortions,' so they can come across as protectors.) They prefer to focus their attacks upon doctors and abortion clinics.
That said, attention to the context is not enough if attention is limited to hardships and difficulties, though they certainly exist now. Many 'pro-choice' people are inclined to think that abortion is a 'necessary evil' that is dictated (or should be dictated) by the existence of sexism, economic hardships, etc, but this view doesn't correspond to reality. Even in empirical terms, "the conditions underlying rising aboriton rates in the 1970s and 1980s have on the whole involved a greater expansion of women's relative power in American society than at any other time" (Petchesky 390). In other words, aboriton is closer to a 'necessary good,' demanded by women's increasing sense of entitlement to the control of our bodies and lives.
Yoshie