Re: Arcana and Cooney

In “Abortion is a Motherhood Issue”, Judith Arcana argues that although we don’t always associate motherhood and abortion together, abortion is in fact a motherhood issue.  Arcana had worked in an abortion clinic at the same time that she was having kids.  She saw kids as young as eleven and adults over fifty walk in there to have an abortion procedure.  At first, Arcana’s views on abortion are a bit unclear.  She starts out by saying that maternity begins at conception, that there is really no difference between a baby and a fetus when we discuss abortion, and that having an abortion is like choosing a school or religion for your child to practice.  However, she then goes on to say that every woman is justified in her decision to have an abortion, no matter what her reasoning is, and that her work at an abortion clinic made her more aware of her womanhood.  By the end of the piece, Arcana argues that we cannot put matters of life and death solely on women.  Furthermore, there needs to be a healthy space where women can express their choice, rather than being shamed by our anti-abortion society. 

Cooney’s “The Way it Was”, would agree with Arcana’s final remarks about creating healthy spaces for women to express their choice.  In Cooney’s piece, a much more visceral approach is taken in her discussion on abortion, shedding light on some very dark realities women have faced in the past and face now in regards to abortion.  For me, the most disturbing story in the piece was the one about the 1964 photograph of the naked female corpse in a Connecticut motel.  The picture was taken after her lover tried to perform an abortion on her, ultimately failing and ending in her death.  The picture was distributed and used to counteract the ruling of Roe v. Wade.  The photograph is not only disturbing because of the horrific content, but also when you start to think about how desperate some women are to have an abortion and how difficult it is given the restraints in our society.  All the pressure and blame is essentially put on women while men can flee the scene, like her lover literally did after she died, or choose to be as involved in the matter as they please.  The fact that several thousand American women had to be treated for botched abortions in one year in the sixties is astonishing because women are actually risking two lives—their own and the baby’s—by attempting to perform their own abortions.  Cooney admits that her situation was a lot luckier than most women’s who have a lot more baggage than Cooney did, but the unnecessary ill-fates of some of these women should be enough to prove that abortion should be legalized.