How do women publicly speak about their abortions? In general, they do not. Women's silence on their abortions is understandable given a culture of secrecy and stigma that remains undisturbed by public discussion of abortion regulation. On the one hand, there is a privatizing discourse, whereby liberal advocates say that we must neither ask for women's reasons for having an abortion nor should we judge those reasons. On the other hand, there is a moral absolutist discourse, whereby anti‐abortion advocates mark every abortion as morally wrong regardless of justification. In this way abortion itself is depoliticized. By depoliticized I mean that actual abortions, their contexts, and their justifications have been removed from public deliberation and contestation. When abortion does appear in public, it is primarily as a moral avatar: either women's autonomy circumscribes public morality's claim on private decisions, or the moral absolute of fetal life circumscribes individual desires.

The liberal impulse to render abortion a wholly private decision, in the context of conservative efforts to morally condemn abortion, contributes to the depoliticization of abortion by inadvertently reinforcing the stigma of abortion (Reference LudlowLudlow 2008). At the same time, the moralizing discourse of the absolute wrong of abortion cannot grapple with the fact that globally, about one in every five pregnancies ends in induced abortion, and in the United States, approximately one in four women will have an abortion at some point before they are forty‐five (Reference Sedgh, Bearak, Singh, Bankole, Popinchalk, Ganatra and RossierSedgh et al. 2016). But the failure of mainstream political discourses to account for the lived experience of abortion does not create an absolute barrier to public narration of women's abortions. Instead, public narratives about abortion navigate the active production and maintenance of abortion stigma, often working to simultaneously justify this particular abortion to recuperate the moral status of the woman who had an abortion, while leaving in place wider abortion stigmatization.Footnote ¹

This article examines how and under what conditions the recuperation of the moral status of the woman who has had an abortion often relies on the production of a tragic narrative of pregnancy. Tragic narratives are those stories we tell where there is no morally correct decision because all options are perceived as bad. I will focus on one form of the tragic abortion narrative that centers on the status of the fetus. When confronted with fetal impairment, some women are given the opportunity to recuperate their status as good or fit mothers through the constructed undesirability or nonviability of the fetus. Disabled lives are understood to be a tragedy in themselves, and thus a woman can make use of a tragic narrative of fetal impairment to recuperate her moral status in regard to abortion. Although the abortion decision is understood as tragic, the avoidance of the constructed tragedy of disability through abortion itself redeems the fit mother, producing a “tragedy with a happy ending.”Footnote ²

I begin by considering abortion stigma and the construction of ethical abortion decision‐making in its wake. Abortion stigma is intimately connected with how we imagine the connection between womanhood and what makes a “fit” mother. I will then turn to how differential access to “fit motherhood” corresponds with the precariousness of reproductive rights. Fitness becomes a category of analyzing the desirability of reproduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when eugenic concerns came to dominate reproductive politics. Because reproductive rights were understood largely through the desirability of particular types of reproduction, the rights themselves were partial and unstable. Although I do not claim that the “fitness” of early eugenic thinking continues uninterrupted in modern attempts to restrict reproductive rights, I do want to suggest that a concern with dysgenic reproduction remains a trope that mediates recognition of and access to reproductive rights.

In moving to the consideration of disability as a trope of tragic abortion, I perform a close analysis of the various narrations of Sherri Chessen (Finkbine)'s 1962 abortion, which became a media spectacle and a primary talking point for the need for expanded abortion rights.Footnote ³ Finkbine sought a therapeutic abortion after learning she had ingested thalidomide, a drug that can produce phocomelia, or shortened limbs, in fetuses if ingested while a woman is pregnant. It may seem odd to turn to a fifty‐year‐old case of fetal abnormality, especially given that a robust disability rights movement has developed in the interim to challenge the core assumptions that drove the sympathy for Finkbine's case and thus the right to therapeutic abortions. But such disability activism has not displaced eugenic discourses, where desires for a “good birth” continue to drive practices such as prenatal genetic diagnosis and genetic selective abortions. These technological changes and the routinization of fetal detection has instead normalized the need to morally grapple with disability but privately and through the guidance of medical expertise. Concomitant with a new anti‐abortion discourse that makes use of disability, the public narratives of tragic abortions rely on a new figure: the nonviable fetus. Nonviability is understood to be “incompatible with life,” denoting fetuses that, if born live, will likely not survive beyond infancy or early childhood. Although such a shift may seem like a progressive and legitimate move that delineates disability from incompatibility with life, the recourse to viability produces similar effects in depoliticizing the question of abortion access more broadly and reinforcing a form of medical authority that reproduces disability stigma.

The purpose of the investigation into the reliance on tragic constructions of abortion stories is threefold. First, the rise of the tragic narrative of abortion enables us to apprehend how medical thinking and medical technology have constructed the range of possible reactions to pregnancy and abortion. Second, this article joins a growing literature that makes visible the historical and contemporary reliance of abortion politics on antidisability stigma (Reference Parens, Asch, Parens and AschParens and Asch 2000; Reference RobertsRoberts 2009; Reference ReaganReagan 2010; Reference PiepmeierPiepmeier 2013). Finally, unlike anti‐abortion politics that uses disability equality as the basis to reinforce abortion stigma, the article gestures toward the need to create alternatives for contextualizing and politicizing abortion decision‐making alongside the need to create plural models of motherhood and familial creation.

Abortion Stigma

Abortion is a deeply stigmatized activity in the United States.Footnote ⁴ Anti‐abortion discourses have connected abortion with deep moral failure, both of individuals and of societies that tolerate abortion. Because it is primarily women who have abortions,Footnote ⁵ the stigma of abortion accretes to the social identities associated with ideals of womanhood in the United States: motherhood and sexual morality. Or, as Anuradha Kumar and her coauthors argue,

Abortion stigma works to produce widespread silence and secrecy around abortion; many women perceive that if their abortion were to become known to various groups (family, friends, work communities, religious communities, and so on), then they would be looked down upon, labeled evil or abnormal, and would likely experience discrimination. Subsequently, these women decide to keep their abortion procedures secret (Reference Hanschmidt, Linde, Hilbert, Riedel‐ Heller and KerstingHanschmidt et al. 2016).

Two aspects of reproductive politics complicate this picture of abortion stigma. First, not all women have equal access to archetypal femininity that undergirds abortion stigma and reproductive fitness in the first place. Black, poor, unmarried, disabled, queer, and gender‐variant people are often disqualified from motherhood because of perceived incapacity or unfitness to raise children. This disqualification produces differential access to “legitimate” abortions and frames these people's reproductive capacity as tragic in itself. In the next section, I will turn to this dimension of reproductive stigma.

Second, not everyone keeps an abortion decision secret. Stigma also affects the ways in which women narrate their abortion decisions in order to reject or avoid stigma. The narratives that women develop in relation to their abortions often situate women as ethical decisionmakers, performing crucial work to legitimate women as proper reproductive subjects with unspoiled social identities. The terms of the ethics of abortion that come to constitute the public and thus (de)politicized narratives of abortion require more theoretical attention. Theorizing how stigma affects the abortion stories women do tell and the effects of those stories will be the focus of the section after next.

Fit and Unfit Mothers: Reproductive Rights as Inverted Exception

In discussing the historical trajectory of abortion politics in the United States, philosopher Penelope Deutscher has described abortion rights as “an inverted state of exception” (Reference DeutscherDeutscher 2017, 122). Deustcher argues that unlike the state of exception, where a state of emergency is constructed to excuse the suspension of the law, abortion rights are themselves exceptions to the general illegality of abortion. With the nineteenth‐century criminalization of abortion, as well as of contraception, sexual education, and pornography, reproductive and sexual control were already outside the order of the law. The history of liberalization, though, was accompanied by the language of exception. The original laws criminalizing abortion often included exceptions for abortion in the case of threats to a women's life or health. And the right to abortion, articulated by Roe v. Wade (1973), is not absolute. The right is always conditioned on the decision‐making authority of a physician; after the second trimester, abortion legality was further constrained by state interest in the health of the woman; after the third trimester, interest in fetal life sustained the possible illegality of all abortions. The pattern recurs such that each affirmation of reproductive rights is in the context of the parameters of their illegality.

But the formation of abortion rights as inverted exception, where the legality of abortion is the exception to the rule, does not fully account for the limits of reproductive rights. The production of “states of emergency” around women's reproduction has also resulted in stripping people of their bodily autonomy on the basis of race, sexuality, and disability. Deutscher begins her analysis after abortion was rendered criminal; a medicalized state of emergency drove the initial criminalization. The American Medical Association began a campaign to criminalize abortion in 1858 on the basis of a set of interlocking concerns that constructed the decline of fertility across the nineteenth century as a threat to the “native” American stock (native here referring to Anglo‐Saxon Protestants) (Reference MohrMohr 1979). Anglo‐Saxon Protestant middle‐class women were portrayed as immoral and ignorant of their proper roles as mothers; given that the Catholic immigrants were understood to have fidelity to Catholic procreative morality, only criminalizing abortion and placing its control under regular medical professionals could return Anglo‐Saxon women to their racialized and gendered motherhood duties (Reference Beisel and KayBeisel and Kay 2004). The demographic threat of Catholic Europeans faded as other racial threats took center stage, but reproduction as a site of threat construction and reduction remained. In the early twentieth century, eugenic justifications were framed as a national emergency in the case of Buck v. Bell (1927), where the Supreme Court found that the involuntary sterilization of people who were institutionalized on the basis of “feeblemindedness” was legitimate. Their reasoning stressed the inevitable strains on the state's resources because intellectual disability was constructed as one of the primary sources of poverty and criminality. The coerced sterilization of intellectually disabled people became greatly expanded over the next few decades to include the coerced sterilization of black, Native, and Latinx women based on similar justifications of their dependence on state welfare resources and their inability to raise children (Reference RobertsRoberts 1997; Reference Hansen and KingHansen and King 2013). In the same period—the early to mid‐twentieth century—white people were being educated in their own reproductive superiority, with “Better Baby” and “Fitter Family” competitions held at state fairs and high‐school and college textbooks informing students that the “feebleminded” were outbreeding the well‐educated, and thus well‐educated people should strive to have at least four children (Reference McWhorterMcWhorter 2009). One should not interpret this gloss on reproductive coercion across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be the result of a rationally planned, coherent, and carefully executed strategy. Instead, reproductive politics broadly and abortion politics specifically have always coexisted with the threat of a national emergency, whether that threat be “race suicide” or crushing state economic burdens. Thus, the meaning of fit motherhood shares a history with the criminalization of abortion, where the reproduction of social dependency and the decline of white supremacy joins to create states of exception that render many women vulnerable to medical and state coercion.

The concern with who qualifies as a fit mother in the contemporary United States is distinct from previous articulations of eugenics and fitness but shares some conceptual affinities with the justifications of reproductive coercion in the past. Policing who is and is not fit for motherhood remains a hallmark of reproductive politics even as the reasoning shifts over time. In contemporary reproductive politics in the United States, Linda McClain has argued that three tropes of irresponsible motherhood guide dominant discourses in debates over deterring reproduction: the incapable and immature teen mother, the sexually irresponsible single mother, and the dependent welfare mother (Reference McClain, Alberton Fineman and DoughertyMcClain 2005). The trope of the teen mother constructs her as irresponsible because of her incapacity to make reasoned decisions about her reproductive future due to her youth; the single mother is irresponsible because of her immorality given her sexual promiscuity; and the welfare mother is irresponsible because her economic dependency on the state eliminates any accountability for reproductive decisions. These three tropes are based on the stigmatization of reproduction as connected with the constructed moral relation to having children (the fit mother is mature, sexually responsible, and dependent on a husband or her own labor‐market earnings but not on the state).

Ironically, the tropes of unfit mothers that justify moral condemnation of poor, young, and single women's reproduction also undergird three figures who are denied full access to abortion. Pregnant teens under the age of eighteen are understood to be incapable of both raising a child and making an abortion decision. Thirty‐seven states require teenage minors seeking abortions to have parental notification or consent. Single women are sexually irresponsible, and thus are not fit for motherhood, but their sexual irresponsibility is also seen to have to come with consequences, and thus terminating an unplanned pregnancy is seen to violate the same sexual moral code. The persistent condemnation of women using abortion as birth control enhances the stigma of single women who seek abortions as sexually immoral. Pregnant women on welfare are economically irresponsible due to their dependency on the state, and thus having children they cannot afford based on individually earned income makes them unfit mothers. But in Harris v. McRae (1980), the Supreme Court affirmed that the state has no obligation to provide poor women with the economic means to procure an abortion. Thus, the tropes of unfit motherhood do not make one fit for abortion either; reproductive stigma and abortion stigma ensure that any reproductive decisions made by women marked by race, class, disability, age, or other marginalized identities will remain deviant and discredited.

Since the potential mother is unfit both to give birth and to have an abortion, her very status is tragic; there is no moral decision because all outcomes are understood to be undesirable. Thus, if they narrate their reproductive lives, whether those narratives include abortion or reproduction, they must always confront their stigmatized status that condemns any reproductive choice.Footnote ⁶ But the same is not the case for women whose reproduction as such is not stigmatized (white, heterosexual, married, economically stable, able‐bodied mothers). For these women, it is activity, not identity, that carries potentials of stigma and tragedy. Following Deutscher, I argue that these nonstigmatized women can claim their status as the exception to the (illegitimacy) norm: they can make claims that their abortions should not diminish their status as legitimate reproductive subjects. Rather, their abortion narratives can subvert stigma by reaffirming their normative identity status as fit mothers while still leaving broader stigmatization in place.

Recuperating the Fit Mother: The Tragic Ethics of Abortion

Abortion stigma is connected to two concepts—sexual responsibility and fit motherhood—so one mechanism enabling both speaking publicly about abortion and reducing the risk of stigmatization is to narrate an abortion decision as a form of responsible motherhood. The trope of using abortion as a form of responsible motherhood is pervasive in much of the scholarship on women's decision‐making about abortion (Reference DeutscherDeutscher 2017), but it becomes especially problematic in the context of the tragic narrative of fetal abnormality.Footnote ⁷

Tragedy is the result of the contingent and paradoxical nature of human history that renders humans vulnerable to forces outside of human control. In some circumstances, action itself loses the capacity to be judged as either intrinsically or consequentially right or wrong; all action has a moral down side and will result in some death or suffering. For Bonnie Honig, for instance, thinking about tragedy in relation to states of emergency reframes the question of democracy away from absolute rights and wrongs (for example, is torture legitimate or illegitimate given the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack?) and toward the question of how democracy can survive emergency with its integrity intact (Reference HonigHonig 2009). The tragic narrative of abortion can perform a similar act of maintaining moral integrity. The question of whether abortion is right or wrong in the abstract becomes, in a tragic narrative, a question of how a woman and her family can sustain their integrity in the face of a decision where harm is unavoidable.

Within the bounds of sexual responsibility and fit motherhood, the tragic abortion narrative works to reaffirm the moral status of the fit mother and to maintain abortion as the tragic exception to an otherwise virtuous life. The use of tragic narratives of frustrated responsible motherhood reinforces the dividing principles not just between good and bad abortions, but also the division between good and bad mothers. In the context of eugenics, a white, married, heterosexual woman's reproduction is understood to be desirable in general, but if fetal impairment is present, that desirability is compromised. Women who can use their eugenic desirability and disability's dysgenic undesirability can thus navigate abortion stigma by reaffirming disability stigma.

In order to demonstrate the working of tragic narratives of abortion that both recuperate the ethical standing of a woman who has an abortion and reinforce disability stigma, I turn to three narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion. In 1962, the discussion of liberalizing criminal abortion laws (abortion at any stage of pregnancy was a crime in all fifty states) was alive in medical circles and in some feminist enclaves but was not yet a national conversation. Even when abortion was a crime, some women could attain so‐called “therapeutic” abortions, where a psychiatrist or physician determined that the pregnancy threatened the life or the mental or physical health of a woman. Such therapeutic abortions also included “eugenic” abortions where fetal abnormality was presumed to compromise the pregnancy.

Sherri Finkbine was a TV host on a local children's show, Romper Room, and a married white mother of four who was two months pregnant when she heard of the possibility of birth defects associated with thalidomide, an ingredient in sleeping pills her husband had brought back from England and that she had ingested. Thalidomide, an ingredient in over‐the‐counter sleeping pills and cough syrups in England and West Germany (though never approved by the US Food and Drug Administration), was a teratogen that sometimes resulted in stillbirths and other times resulted in shortened limbs and sensory impairments in fetuses when ingested by pregnant women.

Even though abortion was illegal in Arizona at the time, Finkbine sought and was granted a therapeutic abortion from Good Samaritan Hospital. She contacted the editor at the Arizona Republic in order to warn other women of the threat of thalidomide, who then reported the story without using Finkbine's name. The publicity and opposition led to the hospital reversing its decision, thus refusing Finkbine's requested abortion. Litigating the reversal resulted in the release of Finkbine's name, and after she was unable to procure an abortion in the United States, she and her husband flew to Sweden where she terminated her pregnancy at twelve gestational weeks. Finkbine lost her job and was faced with threats on her, her husband's, and her children's lives after her abortion (Reference GreenhouseGreenhouse 2012).

The publicity surrounding Finkbine's abortion is acknowledged to have contributed to the shifting political context that made abortion‐law liberalization a priority across the United States (Reference ReaganReagan 2010). I will analyze three key accounts of Finkbine's narrative: a cover story in the August 10, 1962 edition of Life Magazine,Footnote ⁸ Reference LaderLawrence Lader's 1966 book, Abortion,Footnote ⁹ and Finkbine's own account, delivered as a 1966 speech at a conference sponsored by the Society for Humane Abortion and later reprinted in Time Magazine and in Alan Guttmacher's The Case for Legalized Abortion Now.Footnote ¹⁰ Because the narrative makes strong use of tragedy, both in painting the impossibility of the decision and in abortion's importance for maintaining the integrity of Finkbine's status as a fit mother, closely reading the operation of the narrative forcefully connects fit motherhood, disability stigma, and reproductive rights. Finkbine's narrative displaced abortion stigma onto disability stigma, working to normalize therapeutic abortion while leaving intact the more generalized stigma of both nontherapeutic abortion and the supposed tragedy of disability.

From Fitness to Viability: Reproductive Rights and Medical Authority

More than fifty years after Finkbine's narrative and even after the successes of the disability rights movement, the routinization of genetic screening in pregnancies has normalized disability stigma even while the category of nonviability has become the new public face of late‐term abortions. The eugenics of the contemporary age are vastly different from those that constituted the state of emergency that justified coerced sterilization and criminalizing abortion. Instead of people with disabilities constituting a public threat, now, grappling with the desirability of fetal impairment and disabled children has become a private decision of medical professionals and individual families. The responsible mother in the genetic age is one who takes on the disability status of her fetus as a part of her experience of pregnancy (Reference RappRapp 1999). From regular ultrasounds (which have been socially transformed from a medical diagnostic tool to “baby's first picture”), to chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis, to pre‐implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD), knowledge of potential fetal abnormality has transformed pregnancy into a liminal period of ethical decision‐making regarding disability. This routinization of the ethical decision of disabled fetuses is accompanied by genetic counseling, where potential parents are informed by statistics of likelihood and risk, constructing disability as primarily a medical condition that requires medical expertise to establish the truth of disability. Now, bioethicists refer not to the negative eugenics of the era of forced sterilization and explicit antidisability stigma but rather to noncoercive eugenics, where individuals are still encouraged to have the “best” children possible, often with the assumption of the nondesirability of disabled fetuses (Reference RobertsRoberts 2009).

At the same time as the routinization of genetic screening, legislative attempts to render genetic selective abortion as illegal discrimination are proliferating (North Dakota passed such a bill in 2013 with Indiana following in 2016). These two transformations—the routinization of genetic screening and the move to legally prohibit abortion on the basis of disability—suggests that what was once an exceptional tragic circumstance is now part of the regularity of depoliticized abortion conflict. This shift in the relation of disability to abortion is neither complete nor so straightforward. In what follows, I highlight two ways in which the trope of disability as tragedy still plays a central, if contradictory, role in redeeming reproductive politics through the recuperation of “fit” mothers without challenging broader abortion stigma or disability discrimination.

On the one hand, the trope of tragic disability as a recuperation of a woman who has an abortion has narrowed in focus. In the final debate of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump objected to late‐term abortion with a graphic and inaccurate description of the procedure as “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby” (Reference BluestoneBluestone 2016). Trump's comments were met with a swift media rebuttal of the description of late‐term abortions, with dozens of women recounting their own late‐term abortions (Reference KannKann 2016). These narratives include several consistent elements: the pregnancy was wanted and was often the result of intensive effort, everything in the pregnancy seemed normal until it wasn't, and, in the cases where it was not the pregnant woman's health at risk, medical assessment of the fetus determined that it was “incompatible with life,” such that if the baby were born alive, it would suffer a short, painful, and unfulfilling life.

As with the earlier disability narratives, normative motherhood is restored in the nonviable‐fetus narrative as women can relate the tragic narrative of their frustrated motherhood and unwanted abortions as contingent upon uncontrollable events of deep suffering. But a clear distinction between the 1960s narrative and contemporary narratives seems to exist. A child can survive and thrive with shortened limbs and sensory impairments, but the medical determination of conditions like trisomy 13, trisomy 18, Tay Sachs, and anencephaly as “incompatible with life,” meaning a significant chance of stillbirth or short and painful lives, seems legitimate. Such a conclusion would interpret Finkbine's tragic abortion to be the product of antidisability stigma, while nonviable‐fetus, tragic abortions are genuine tragedies that invalidate the political restriction of late‐term abortions. But such a conclusion is ill‐founded.

The narrative of the tragic, nonviable (late‐term) abortion produces two problems, both of which depoliticize abortion access. First, the tragic narrative obscures that, like abortions in general, most late‐term abortions are the result of frustratingly normal circumstances. In a 2005 study, Lawrence Finer and his coauthors interviewed 1,209 abortion patients who were asked why they were seeking an abortion. When asked what the most important reason was, they found that only 3% of women named fetal health as a primary consideration (Reference Finer, Frohwirth, Dauphinee, Singh and MooreFiner et al. 2005). Furthermore, the majority of late‐term abortions are not performed because of fetal health but because the slow chipping away of access by anti‐abortion advocates has rendered poor, rural, and women of color most vulnerable to delays in accessing abortions (Reference Jones and JermanJones and Jerman 2017). A 1988 study found that over half of the women interviewed who had abortions after sixteen weeks' gestation did so because of troubles arranging for the procedure; one‐third delayed the procedure because of fear of telling a partner or parents, and seventy‐one percent attributed the delay to ignorance of pregnancy or how far along they were (Reference Torres and ForrestTorres and Forrest 1988). Furthermore, a 2013 study found that women who receive abortions after thirteen weeks tend to be those who experience logistical delays in terms of time, travel, and money, and women who experienced major life disruptions, such as loss of employment, loss of one's partner, or intimate partner violence, while pregnant (Reference Foster and KimportFoster and Kimport 2013).

The class, age, and racial dimensions of late‐term abortions typically do not appear in media accounts, mostly because poor, young, racialized women lack access to the recuperation of nonstigmatized motherhood through tragic narratives. As reproductive‐justice advocates like Loretta Ross have demonstrated, the characterization of the reproductive‐rights movement as largely white and middle‐class has resulted in a lack of recognition of the experiences and demands of women of color and poor women, including discussion of how abortion restrictions work to make abortion care more dangerous and expensive for those who are most marginalized (Reference Silliman, Fried, Ross and GutiérrezSilliman et al. 2004). Instead of dealing with the prosaic reality that it is lack of access to abortion that pushes women to have later‐term abortions, many popular accounts of late‐term abortion focus on tragic abortions, where the woman's health or life are in danger or the pregnancy was either nonviable or the fetus had genetic abnormalities that would result in a shortened life.

The nonviable‐fetus, tragic abortion narratives also reinforce the terms of moral (and political) deliberation set by medical experts. Given the continued eugenic assumptions that undergird much of the expansion of genetic testing as part of the medicalization of pregnancy, a bit of circumspection about medical judgments based on a fetus's nonviability or “incompatibility with life” is warranted. The conditions often considered nonviable are not guaranteed to result in stillbirth, perinatal death, or even infant death. Trisomy 18 results in about 50% live births, but of those born alive, 90% do not live past their first birthday (Reference Janvier, Farlow and WilfondJanvier et al. 2012). Although some would describe such statistics as indeed tragic, some people with trisomy 18 live into adulthood, and thus the description of the condition itself as “incompatible with life” dangerously replaces the uncertainty of outcome with categorical medical judgment. Women who have decided to continue pregnancies where their fetuses were determined to be nonviable or “incompatible with life” have reported poor responses from medical professionals, from repeatedly being urged to terminate their pregnancies to medical staff treating the pregnancy as “normal” and thus providing inadequate resources for their unique circumstances, such as psychological counseling (Reference Lalor, Devane and BegleyLalor, Devane, and Begley 2007; Reference Janvier, Farlow and WilfondJanvier et al. 2012). The inability of medicine as an institution to incorporate moral ambiguity in the context of what seems like certain negative outcomes continues to structure hostility to forms of familial belonging that exceed fit motherhood, understood through the promotion of eugenic families.

On the other hand, the construction of the nonviable fetus as exceptionally tragic in the tragic abortion narrative is replicated in the anti‐abortion appropriation of disability vis‐à‐vis abortion. The belief in “tragedy with a happy ending” and fit motherhood remains closely tied to some anti‐abortion defiance of medical judgment in the case of pregnancies with fetuses diagnosed as “incompatible with life” who are brought to term. Anti‐abortion politician Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, have written about their daughter, Bella, who has trisomy 18 and is now ten years old. Their book, Bella's Gift, is in some ways a tale of the redemption of Rick Santorum, who began resigned to Bella's tragic and impending death but is brought to full love of his child by his wife and their faith (Reference Santorum, Santorum and SantorumSantorum, Santorum, and Santorum 2015). Santorum claims that “Bella gave me the ability to talk about the dignity of every human life without talking about abortion, because there is a bigger issue” (Reference Tumulty and ItkowitzTumulty and Itkowitz 2015), though abortion is mentioned over a dozen times in the book. As such, Bella, much like Finkbine's abortion, becomes an avatar of disability that gives moral certainty about abortion rather than being part of the complicated picture of reproductive decision‐making that requires a wider political view.

The text acknowledges the benefit of having Karen, a former neonatal intensive care nurse, as Bella's mother, especially in moments of medical crisis at home.Footnote ¹¹ What remains unmentioned in the book is that the Santorums had a household income of over $1 million in the years when Bella's yearly out‐of‐pocket medical expenses totaled $50,000 (Reference Tumulty and ItkowitzTumulty and Itkowitz 2015). This tragedy has a happy ending, not just because of the religious faith of the Santorums but also because of their vast wealth and expertise. In this way, the choice not to have an abortion when faced with medical judgment of bleak outcomes is possible given the fitness of the family (rich and well‐educated). But even further, Bella's story is used to produce moral certainty that replaces disability stigma with a reinvestment in the stigma of abortion. The Santorums' story demonstrates the instability of moral redemption for even “fit” mothers who choose abortion, but nonviability as tragedy remains one of the only ways these women can morally redeem themselves when publicly claiming their abortions.

To be clear, then, both the appropriation of Bella's life for anti‐abortion claims and the notion that an individual's abortion can be justified publicly because of the disability status of a fetus are part and parcel of the same occlusion of what it means to live a disabled life. Most people with and without disabilities do not have annual incomes that are sufficient to pay for $50,000 of out‐of‐pocket medical care (in 2010, the median annual income for people with disabilities was about $20,000—about $10,000 less than the median income of nondisabled people [Reference BraultBrault 2012]). The Santorums and anti‐abortion disability legislation do not stigmatize disability as unlivable and tragic, but they do not acknowledge what makes disability livable either. Indeed, Sarah Palin, whose son, Trig, has Down syndrome, argued that it was a cultural problem that convinced women that they are “not capable of being able to handle and nurture and love and raise a child with special needs” (Reference HymsonHymson 2015). The notion that women must be deluded to believe that they do not have the requisite abilities to fully care for a child with disabilities ignores the reality of financial austerity and antiwelfare politics in the United States that renders many disabled lives precarious.

Widening the view to include welfare politics, a different picture emerges. As Michael Bérubé, father of Jamie who has Down syndrome, argues, “the danger for children like Jamie does not lie in women's freedom to choose abortion; nor does it lie in prenatal testing. The danger lies in the creation of a society that combines eugenics with enforced fiscal austerity. In such a society, it is quite conceivable that parents who ‘choose’ to bear disabled children will be seen as selfish and deluded” (Reference BérubéBérubé 1996, 52).Footnote ¹² Bérubé's concern is that people like the Santorums will be judged negatively for their reproductive decision‐making (and many are), but financial austerity also makes consideration of what it means to raise a child with disabilities much more complex than anti‐abortion positions can acknowledge. Anti‐abortion politics thus reinforces that some women are unfit mothers (if they are unable to privately afford the necessary care of their disabled children) while heightening the stakes for the tragic narratives that recuperate some women's integrity in the face of abortion. In both anti‐abortion appropriation of disability and the tragic narrative, disability itself remains a trope, stigmatized by medical practice and wielded to render women guilty by anti‐abortion advocates.

I do not share the assessment of some disability scholars or Rick Santorum that genetic selective abortion always constitutes a moral failure (Reference Hubbard and DavisHubbard 1997; Reference AschAsch 1999). As I argue in previous work, a more nuanced view recognizes the economic and social conditions that surround the experience of raising a child with certain impairments (Reference McKinneyMcKinney 2016). The purpose of the above examples is not to demonstrate that there can be nothing tragic in these abortion decisions or to argue that there is a right and wrong decision when confronted with fetal diagnoses. The examples are meant to raise the question of whether abortion is best thought of as a private moral decision or as a medical decision, guided by medical expertise. The recuperation of women as ethical mothers is still accomplished by placing the decision not only out of their hands (in terms of the frustrated desire for a wanted child that cannot be guaranteed) but also by placing that decision in the hands of a physician. Thus, not only does abortion remain a viable ethical decision only for women who are thought of as fit mothers, it remains viable when her decision‐making is anchored by medical authority that provides a seemingly unequivocal medical judgment of the futility of the pregnancy itself. So long as medicine remains wedded to conceptualizing disability as undesirable, the reinvestment in medical authority remains a dangerous prospect. This reinvestment in medical authority to exempt the individual from ethical decision‐making both works to reduce legitimate abortion to its medical determinants and further displaces women as the subject of reproductive rights.

I hope to gesture, then, toward the need for abortion decision‐making, especially in the context of disability, to be political. A politicization of abortion decision‐making sounds odd as abortion feels like the most political of issues. But as I have demonstrated in this article, what we take to be the politicization of abortion is actually the moralization of politics, where the moral certainty of either eugenic medical knowledge or anti‐abortion absolutism replace grappling with the reality of deciding to have an abortion. In this article, I have used depoliticization to refer to the fact that abortion decisions and the contexts of those decisions remain outside of public acknowledgment, contestation, and interrogation. To politicize abortion would require pluralizing the abortion stories we hear, listening to those stories, and grappling with how to contextualize those stories to make political judgments. The notion that abortion itself is always tragic must be abandoned. Such abandonment would enable a recognition that many abortions are experienced as a relief even while in some cases, social circumstances can make some abortions problematic from a feminist perspective. For instance, in 2013, New York Magazine published the stories of twenty‐six women who have had abortions. The stories range from women who felt financially coerced to have abortion, women who felt mistreated by the medical establishment or by crisis pregnancy centers, women who regretted their decisions, woman grappling with controlling partners, women who fear their secret being exposed, women who were sure, women who were unsure, and women who say their abortions saved their lives (Reference WinterWinter 2013). Reading twenty‐six portraits of abortion decision‐making reveals that the conversations about abortion that we could be having could include questions of lack of financial security, intimate‐partner violence and reproductive abuse, the need for better reproductive health care, and an appreciation of the importance of abortion to forming and keeping a life.

We should also grapple with the economic reality of raising a child with a disability in a society that provides little financial support and continues to subject people with disabilities and their families to ableist social conditions that can be psychologically and socially fraught. In this way, concern for ending disability discrimination, which entails grappling with the costs of medical care as well as higher rates of unemployment, lack of social services, and lack of educational opportunities, can intersect with a more politicized abortion debate. Support for families with children and parents with disabilities is part and parcel of creating an abortion politics less beholden to eugenic medical judgment. But for any of these expansions of the public question of abortion to take place, a recognition of the validity of the experiences of women and their own decision‐making must be recognized and acted upon. Even if women abort for reasons that are judged problematic (including disability stigma), the source of the political problem is not the abortion as such but how and why disability stigma remains a salient decision‐making criterion.

Finally, we must continuously acknowledge the difficulties of poor, racialized, and other women to procure abortions and the difficulty to resist medical judgment of the undesirability of disability. If abortion is a morally fraught decision, that moral fraughtness should not be displaced on either “unfit” mothers or onto disabled fetuses. A politics of abortion decision‐making would enable critique of the institutional and discursive contexts that make some abortions tragic but morally intelligible, that judge some mothers as unfit, and that judge some lives as not livable. Simultaneously, such a politics of abortion decision‐making would make it possible to imagine how most reproductive decisions are partially responses to the enabling conditions of and constraints on living lives free from deprivation. But any such politics must contest abortion stigma directly instead of seeking exceptions to its rule.