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Nick Brown | for The Phoenix

Adrienne Asche discussed why she supports abortion last week.

BY MINH-DUYEN NGUYEN

In print | Published November 12, 2009

Adrienne Asche ’69 began her lecture “Will We Need Abortion in Utopia?” this Monday with a few forewarnings and caveats that showed a recognition of the sensitive nature of abortion.

“You can see how divisive the issue can be,” Asche said. “I understand why a lot of pro-choice people don’t want to give any ground at all to the enemy — the opposition — that might be given by having certain conversations. But since I’m in the realm of philosophy and ethics and not exclusively in the realm of policy, I may be able to say things that cannot be said politically. I think that politics would thrive better from more openness and more conversation and not hiding things.”

Asche studies the social, political, ethical, and psychological ramifications of human reproduction and the family. She received her doctorate in social psychology from Columbia University. Within her policy work, Asche participated in the Board of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities, the Clinton Task Force on Health Care Reform, and the Ethical, Legal, & Social Implications Policy Planning Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Among other works, she is a board member of the Society of Jewish Ethics and the American Civil Liberties Union, a fellow at the Hastings Center and a member of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law.

Taking a unique angle on abortion, Asche frames all of her arguments in a utopian world. In talking of her utopia, Asche described a world free of sexual inequality, but further asserts that even in such conditions, abortion is necessary.

“Even in a world where coerced sex was rare, where women did not face economic discrimination … where employers structured their expectations in line with familial responsibilities, where women and men took on equal share of those responsibilities, we would need birth control and abortion,” Asche said.

Chloe Browne ’12 expressed her views on the effectiveness of Asche’s utopian framework and the reasons why she thinks this framework is necessary.

“By setting her story in this place where gender inequality doesn’t exist and where child support isn’t needed and where violent inter-gender relationships aren’t a problem, she helped us look at why abortion isn’t just a women’s issue, but why abortion is humanity’s issue,” Browne said.

Asche also spoke about a few arguments that dominate pro-choice arguments. She argued that the pro-choice argument that references fetuses as “clumps of cells” with no moral status doesn’t solve any problems.

“I actually think that it would be very good for supporters and opponents to agree that a fetus implanted in a woman’s body is a genetically different entity from the woman who gestates it,” Asche said. “It has the potential for a separate biological and social life. It doesn’t have that while implanted. This is a comment that says I think we shouldn’t be talking about fetuses or even embryos as clumps of cells.”

Furthermore, she contended that arguments that a woman’s child-bearing role has delegated her to an inferior role in society is not enough to justify abortion.

“Abortion is not merely a remedy for social reconstructive gender inequalities,” Asche said. “It allows people to maintain deeply felt attitudes toward sexual relationships, parenthood, and familial obligations. And for that reason, even in a world without sex discriminations and even with vastly improved societal arrangements for children with adults, I think we need abortion even in a social utopia that we don’t have.”

Josh Glickenhaus ’12, a philosophy major attending the lecture, said he was in agreement with Asche on both her views regarding abortion and her rationale behind it.

“In general, I agree with the point she was making,” Glickenhaus said. “I thought it was an interesting argument that I hadn’t heard articulated before in terms of the need to consent to be a biological parent — that it is the right of adults to consent to parenthood even more so than it is the right of the unborn fetus to be born.”

In order to frame her argument, Asche discussed three claims that she said must be accepted to accept her argument for abortion.

Browne saw these three interdependent claims as a way of helping her to understand a new rationale behind Asche’s pro-choice arguments.

First, Asche spoke about how not all sexual relationships need to have pro-creative intent. Often people engage in sexual activities for reasons other than pro-creation — “for fun, or for affection, or for comfort, for all sorts of reasons,” Asche said.

Next, Asche discussed how both biologically and socially coerced parenthood are harmful socially and psychologically. She explained that biological parenthood implies the necessity of a genetic rather than a social relationship between parent and child.

“The cultural significance of parenthood is the very thing that makes the prospect of having a child that one does not desire so psychologically distressing and socially offensive,” Asche said. “So rather, as some abortion opponents would say, abortion makes parenthood a less significant occurrence or demeans the parent-child or mother-child relationship, a lot of people would say that abortion protects the significance of voluntary parenthood.”

To conclude, Asche argued that there are social and legal limits to society’s expectations of what parents must do for their children.

“Even when an adult consents to become a parent, there are moral and legal limits to what we expect parents to do for already born children,” Asche said. “We should not demand that one sex makes sacrifices of their body to gestate new life, if we don’t demand that both sexes make comparable sacrifices, donating their blood for example, to meet the needs of the children whom they already have a relationship with.”

The lecture affected many on a personal level. Glickenhaus spoke of the benefits of the lecture for himself, more as a person than a philosophy major.

“It was beneficial to me as a person because I have a greater arsenal in order to argue on the issue, I have a fuller picture on the issue,” Glickenhaus said. “I am pro-choice. That’s just kind of how I was raised. That’s the background I came from. Now I feel like have a better rationale behind that.”

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