Not Personal, Not Political, But Social
Just in time for the annual March for Life, several homes in my neighborhood have yard signs reading: “Pregnancy Is Personal, Not Political.”
That’s half right: Pregnancy is not political. Politics involves who we elect as president, governor, or mayor. It has to do with strategic energy reserves and borders, diplomacy, and national defense. Politics along with public policy and law are abstract and impersonal. Pregnancy is none of those things, and the countries that are attempting to make pregnancy a political issue are failing.
To maintain the population, each American woman would have to bear 2.1 children. In the United States, that rate is 1.7 and dropping — which isn’t good, but given, for example, the fact that South Korea’s birth rate is 0.8, it isn’t too bad. Since demography is destiny, countries with falling birthrates address the problem politically by incentivizing couples to have larger families with offers such as lifetime exemption from income taxes, inexpensive child care, and minivan subsidies, but nothing they’ve tried works. Why? Because they assume that pregnancy — or the lack thereof — is political and has a political solution.
They’re wrong.
Social Constructs
Is pregnancy personal? At first glance, it seems so. Women testify to the deeply personal nature of carrying and giving birth to a child, and we’ve heard repeatedly that abortion is a woman’s personal choice. But that still doesn’t make it personal.
The personal is about me as an individual: how I wear my hair, where I live, my religious beliefs, my code of conduct, what I do in my spare time, where I work, what I eat, how I organize my home (assuming that I live alone), etc.. Pregnancy may have personal ramifications for women’s bodies and other aspects of their lives, but it is not, in itself a strictly personal endeavor.
The simplistic thinker who created these pro-abortion signs (for that, of course, is what they are) managed to leave out the third and most important category into which pregnancy might fall: social. Pregnancy is not political or personal. It is social.
Women don’t get pregnant by themselves. It takes two people, a matched set of male and female, to procreate. Even if the father drops out of the mother’s life, or even if he is known only as an inventory code from a sperm bank, he remains a fact. Making a child then is not personal; it’s social.
Human Potential
In a similar way, every child is born into a family. It may be a dysfunctional family or one that abdicates its role in the child’s life; it may even be unknown. Nonetheless, every child is born into a family. He or she has parents and grandparents. There may be siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There are ancestors who supplied the child’s characteristics, ethnicity, and often the place of birth. We all are born into communities with networks of relationships that have established cultural practices and activities.
“No man is an island, / Entirely of itself,” wrote the sixteenth-century poet John Donne, “Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”
Because of this, he went on, “Any man’s death diminishes me.”
In the same vein, we could say that any child’s birth enriches me — enriches us all. Similarly, any child’s death by abortion diminishes us all. It does so not because it’s political or personal, but because every birth and every death is a social event.
We humans crave community since most of the important things in life are neither personal nor political, but social. Forgetting that leads to huge problems.
We Can Help
In 1953, Robert Nisbet wrote Quest for Community, pondering how the explosion of individualism in the nineteenth century could possibly have given birth to the twin conformist evils of National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism. Why would individuals willingly offer the personal to vast, impersonal political machines?
In his introduction to the book, columnist Ross Douthat summarized Nesbit’s insight:
It seemed contradictory that the heroic age of nineteenth-century laissez faire, in which free men, free minds, and free markets were supposedly liberated from the chains of throne and altar, had given way so easily to the tyrannies of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But it was only a contradiction, Nisbet argued, if you ignore the human impulse toward community that made totalitarianism seem desirable — the yearning for a feeling of participation, for a sense of belonging, for a cause larger than one’s own individual purposes and a group to call one’s own.
The pro-abortion sign offering the false dichotomy of political or personal is a poor argument for abortion — which is not the same as saying it’s an ineffective argument. As at the beginning of the twentieth century, today most people see the individual and the government, the personal and the political, as our only two options. So the yard sign sounds reasonable.
At the same time, however, we are social by nature, hardwired to connect. That causes individuals to search for community. And if the choice I perceive is between the isolation of the personal and the ersatz community of politics, I’ll pick politics. That, in turn leads to government power under which both the personal and the social are subsumed into the omnipresent state.
Women distressed over being pregnant don’t need dangerous false dichotomies. They don’t need to feel it’s all personal and the entire burden falls on them. They need communities, social fabric that will help them with a something that is by its very nature social.
You and I through our churches, pregnancy care centers, and simple neighborliness can — and should — make all the difference in the world.
James Tonkowich is a freelance writer, speaker, and commentator on spirituality, religion, and public life. He is the author of The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today and Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life. He is Instructor Emeritus at Wyoming Catholic College.