Abortion as the Gateway to Recognizing Lived Female Experience

Abstract

For 49 years, the right to abortion was taken for granted—inhaled by every girl, every woman—by all people assigned female at birth in the United States. This right no longer exists. In 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, the Supreme Court removed federal protection for the legal right to abortion and therefore women’s agency over their bodies. This paper will contextualize abortion as part of a continuum that encompasses gender, motherhood and the meaning of reproduction and reproductive rights as sociocultural and intrapsychic phenomena. The expectation that mature female-bodied people are child-desiring women persists and is not conceptualized as optional. It is the original choice women do not have. The next choice women no longer have, if they become pregnant, is whether or not to continue a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision means the cultural reinstatement of female de-sexualization, along with the suffocating and silencing of agency—a negation of women’s voices, desire, power and subjectivity—a recipe for psychological destabilization. Personal and clinical material will illustrate these points.

Keywords:

• abortion
• feminism
• gender
• motherhood
• subjectivity

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hillary Grill

Hillary Grill, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is a supervisor, faculty member and training analyst at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Expressive Analysis, and is on the faculty, supervises and co-directs the Seminar Series at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She writes and presents widely, and is Executive Editor of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Areas of interest are the psychological aspects of women’s reproductive health, contemporary family-making and the impact of the socio-cultural environment on the individual.