Y: The dominant ideology demands that women who have an abortion feel guilt and shame and maintain silence about our personal experiences of abortion, making an abortion a kind of taboo topic like homosexuality used to be and still is in some quarters.
J: I don't think women feel bad after an abortion because of the "dominant ideology"; I think they feel bad because there's not much to celebrate. An incipient life is ended -- for whatever reason, by means of a procedure which is painful and invasive at best, and life-threatening at worse.
Y: Unless one comes out otherwise, it is even assumed that having an abortion is always a cause and consequence of tragedy, just as it is assumed (even now) that one is a heterosexual unless one comes out (through speech or performance of culturally visible codes of sexuality) otherwise.
J: That's a strange comparison to make.
Y: Silence enforced by guilt and shame isolates women who have an abortion from one another.
J. Sorry Yoshie, but one thing women do talk about to one another is their reproductive history.
Y. Isolation is a recipe for political powerlessness. Also, silence functions as the closet, and the closet serves to reduce a potential majority -- in this case, women who don't feel that abortion is a cause and consequence of tragedy and are willing to demand provision of abortion as a necessary part of health care -- to feeling like a powerless minority.
J. I don't know what kind of "potential majority" they are. But making them potentially representative of women at large and casting the issue of women's reproductive rights in these ("I'm not sorry") terms will not do.
Abortion is not just another form of birth control. While I defend a woman's right to choose whether she terminates a pregnancy or not, that is not the same as saying that the procedure is similar to getting rid of a hangnail.
If we're going to march about something, let's march about child-care, health-care, living-wage laws, sex education, mass-education about rape, etc. Let's say, a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy, but there's a lot we can do so that she never has to make that choice. And that would be a good thing.
Joanna