Abortion and Birth Control in Literature

At Issue

For centuries, abortion, artificial termination of pregnancy, was one of the few ways to prevent the birth of an unwanted child. In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, researchers made tremendous progress in understanding the physiology of reproduction, and other methods of birth control gradually became available. Abortions are still practiced as a means of birth control, but people also have access to a wide variety of reliable birth control methods, such as condoms, diaphragms, IUDs, birth control pills, and surgical sterilization.

During the last two hundred years a controversy has arisen between proponents of birth control, who emphasize its beneficial effects, and its enemies, who oppose birth control on moral, religious, or political grounds. Birth control advocates argue that it benefits society at large because it limits population growth and therefore helps to ensure against widespread starvation and political unrest. Advocates also argue that birth control benefits families because it gives them the ability to control the number and spacing of offspring, and hence maximize the family’s economic resources and ensure the greatest amount of personal freedom for parents, particularly mothers, by making parenthood a choice. Opponents of birth control contend, however, that it encourages lax standards of sexual behavior, and that these in turn undermine the strength of the family and trigger a general decay in public morality. Conservative Christians and others have opposed the use of abortion—and in some cases other means of birth control—on religious grounds as an unjustifiable deprivation of an unborn infant’s God-given right to life.

History

The modern debate over birth control first took written form with the publication of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by the English clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that population always increases faster than the food supply, so that every society must eventually face overpopulation. For the human species, overpopulation results in civil unrest, disease, and warfare. Thus Malthus was the first to describe the correlation between human population growth and human misery. Malthus himself, as a clergyman, did not advocate contraception or abortion as a means of dealing with this problem, but others in Europe and America did. Partly as a result of their efforts, birthrates fell in the industrialized countries of the West throughout the nineteenth century. Even so, knowledge of the various means of birth control were largely confined to the upper and middle classes, and information about it spread slowly, by word of mouth. In Great Britain, for example, it was illegal to publish or distribute information about birth control devices and techniques until after 1875, while in the United States it remained illegal until the twentieth century had begun.

In the early twentieth century Margaret Sanger finally broke the long-standing American silence about birth control. Working as a trained nurse among poor women in New York City in the early 1900s, Sanger became convinced that they could have economic and social equality with men—as well as a far greater amount of personal happiness—if the women were free from unwanted pregnancies. Sanger successfully challenged the laws against the public dissemination of information about birth control, set up clinics, and founded the American Birth Control League, the organization which eventually became known as Planned Parenthood. Sanger wrote an important series of books that influenced public opinion in favor of birth control. Perhaps the most important of these was Woman and the New Race (1920), a powerful argument for the “necessity of setting the feminine spirit absolutely free” to enjoy a “voluntary motherhood,” by using an appropriate method of birth control and without having to suffer the negative physical side effects of surgically or chemically induced abortions. This in turn, Sanger argues, “implies a new morality—a vigorous, constructive, liberated morality . . . [that will] prevent the submergence of womanhood in motherhood.”

Thus, unlike Malthus, Sanger puts the rights and freedoms of the individual at the center of her argument. She makes it clear, however, that society—indeed the entire world—will eventually benefit from the enhanced individual status of women. In effect, Sanger was reiterating the English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s view of the importance of the individual as the motive force of historical change, and especially of social and technological progress. She was reiterating it with an important difference, for she claimed that universal access to birth control would enable women, for the first time in history, to act fully as individuals rather than merely wives and mothers. Birth control would enable women to become individuals in Mill’s sense, and thereby to become a motive force in the making of human history.

Later in the century the American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich returned to the arguments of Malthus in his influential book The Population Bomb (1968). For Ehrlich the rights of individuals pale before their responsibilities, particularly in reproductive matters. Unless every family on earth manages to limit itself to producing two children to replace the parents, Ehrlich argues, the original Malthusian trajectories of rapid population growth and slow food production growth would soon prevail in the developing countries of the world. By the 1970s, he predicted, this pattern would trigger international epidemics and armed conflicts that would engulf and destroy even those developed countries that had managed to tailor their population to their food supply. Ehrlich called for a massive worldwide program of birth control education and medical clinics staffed with specialists in birth control methods and techniques. He helped found Zero Population Growth, an organization that promotes this philosophy throughout the world.

Ehrlich’s Malthusian doomsday did not arrive as planned, but his powerful vision of crisis and collapse resulting from overpopulation stimulated a positive response, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the idea of birth control, including the legalization of abortions. At the same time feminists, including Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1971), argued that women could only achieve individual identity if they were free, whether they were married or not, to make motherhood the product of a conscious choice rather than the result of biology. Taking up Margaret Sanger’s vision of setting the feminine spirit free through the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, feminists sought to extend that quest for freedom by advocating a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Women began to promote legal abortion as an important means of guaranteeing a woman’s social, economic, and personal freedom. Groups interested in social and political reform promoted acceptance and use of all forms of birth control, and as a result in the 1970s many countries—including the United States—liberalized their abortion laws.

The legalization of abortion as a means of birth control catalyzed an intense public controversy in the last decades of the twentieth century. Typically, liberals and feminists supported abortion on the grounds that it benefited and empowered the poor, minorities, and women, while political and religious conservatives opposed it on the ground that it was a form of murder and therefore unconscionable. The idea of birth control through contraception (that is, the prevention of pregnancy rather than its termination) is not an issue in the abortion debate. The abortion debate does, however, engage the issue of personal freedom versus social responsibility that has marked discussions about birth control since the time of Malthus.

In Literature

Although abortion and birth control have constituted an important theme in relatively few mainstream works of literature, extreme forms of birth control have figured prominently in three of the twentieth century’s most important and controversial novels of social criticism: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Central to the vision of each of these novels is the issue of direct societal intervention and control of individual sexuality. Brave New World, a critique of modern Western culture, depicts a world state that has succeeded in completely separating sexuality and reproduction. Lower-caste women have been sterilized, while upper-caste women have been trained always to use contraceptives. All fetuses are produced through artificial fertilization of eggs, which are then placed by the state in huge, assembly-like incubators until gestation is complete. The newborns are “decanted” and raised in state-run nurseries and schools. The family has ceased to exist. Only the individual human being remains, freed from the physical and emotional pain that has always marked the traditional family. This new individual is ready to enjoy physical and sensual pleasure to the fullest, through government-sponsored games, entertainments, and orgies. Ironically, the price of this individual freedom is a striking lack of individuality: The members of each caste are conditioned and trained from the time of conception onward to feel and think alike. Huxley then introduces a character, John Savage, who was born to his own mother, has lived in a traditional society, and has taken part in religious rites. Savage is alienated from the carefree, sexually unrepressed, and materially affluent life of the world state. Savage, horrified by the lack of individuality and sickened by the moral and spiritual degradation of those around him, eventually commits suicide. In effect Huxley argues that individual sexual freedom without the counterbalance of reproductive responsibilities requires the extinction of true individual identity, for identity is developed only through the individual’s engagement with societal and familial limits on the gratification of desire.

In contrast, Nineteen Eighty-Four envisions a socialist totalitarian state devoted to the destruction of individuality rather than to its preservation and exaltation. Everything in Nineteen Eighty-Four is controlled for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual. The state must erase the individual identity of each of its subjects in order to control them completely and to harness all their energies for the ends of the state. Since sexuality lies at the core of identity and is a powerful energy source, it must be controlled by the state as well. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, the method of control is not physical control of sexuality and reproduction through technology and conditioning, as in Brave New World. The control is repressive rather than too freeing; the citizens of Oceania are constantly told that human reproduction is a duty owed to the state, but that it should be mechanical and joyless. Sexual pleasure is considered evil and dangerous, and it is actively suppressed by the state-sponsored Anti-Sex League. Making love is an act of political rebellion, and Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, seeks to rebel against the state through a love affair. He and his lover are caught, brainwashed, and finally freed when they love only Big Brother and no longer have any interest in each other or in sex. As in Brave New World, the separation of sexuality and reproduction becomes the means whereby individual identity is made vulnerable and capable of being destroyed.

The Handmaid’s Tale makes extensive and searching analysis of the connections between sexuality, gender, and individual identity. The novel has little to say about the mechanics of birth control or abortion. As in the two preceding novels, however, the central theme is the preservation of individual identity in a world in which reproduction and sexuality have been officially separated by the state that seeks to control its populace. In contrast to the total annihilation of individual identity depicted by Orwell, or the severe diminution of it envisioned by Huxley, Atwood’s heroine, Offred, preserves her sense of her specifically female individuality through a passionate love affair. As do Smith and his lover, Offred and her lover risk death for their transgression. Moreover, the Commander himself turns out to need sexual and personal intimacies he officially deplores, suggesting that the forms of female bondage that the Republic of Gilead officially promotes and countenances as healthy, sane, and moral ways to free women from sexual exploitation and sex crimes are unnatural. The novel does not let readers know whether or not Offred and her lover escape from Gilead, but their attempt is suggested at the novel’s end. Thus Atwood, like Orwell and Huxley, sees state-sponsored separation of sexuality and reproduction as inimical to the existence of personal identity and freedom. She is more optimistic, however, about the inability of such repressive states to succeed in the long run.

Bibliography

Capo, Beth Widmeier. Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2007.

Feldman, Ellen. "A Brief Literary History of Birth Control." Literary Hub, 23 Mar. 2017, lithub.com/a-brief-literary-history-of-birth-control/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2019.

Millar, Eloise. "The Best Abortion Debate Is in Books." The Guardian, 25 Oct. 2007, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/oct/25/thebestabortiondebateisin. Accessed 19 Aug. 2019.

Weingarten, Karen. Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940. Rutgers UP, 2014.