Forgetting and Remembering: A Brief History of State and Religious Interference in Reproductive Choice

Abstract

This paper contextualizes the Dobbs v. Jackson decision within the history of how children have been used, literally and symbolically, as commodities, to serve political, economic and religious goals. Also examined are attitudes toward women and moral decision-making, and motives behind state interference in reproductive choice. Focus is placed on the promotion of adoption, by some anti-abortion activists, as the moral alternative to abortion. The recent activities of some evangelical Christian groups to deploy adoption as a way to increase their numbers, as well as the Spanish government’s history of stealing babies from anti-government mothers, and the history in the U.S. of the use of sterilization as a purported means of reducing poverty, are offered as evidence. Suggestions are made for how psychoanalysis might expand theory to include the role of the social unconscious, particularly in understanding the development of female subjectivity and a woman’s capacity to make moral/ethical choices for herself.

Keywords:

• abortion
• adoption
• female gender identity
• social unconscious
• subjectivity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sally Bjorklund

Sally Bjorklund, MA, is a psychoanalyst, supervisor and consultant practicing In Seattle, Washington. She was co-founder and faculty member of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Seattle. She is on the editorial board of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives and Supervisor for the National Training Program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. She was a contributor to Clinical Implications of The Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Kuchuck, 2013), and has written and presented on topics including sex and gender, adoption, aging, working with hard-to-reach patients, treatment by telephone, and erotic transference.