The Haunting of History: Why Abortion Remains Unresolved

The modern abortion debate relies on a fundamentalist fiction: the idea that history is a straight line toward progress that legal precedent can settle. By reducing the visceral, specific reality of abortion to abstract slogans like "choice" or "life," we disconnect ourselves from the actual historical record. This gap allows legal systems to weaponize a sanitized, originalist version of the past to justify current restrictions. Readers who look past the binary political rhetoric will find that history is not a steady progression but a series of recurring, painful cycles. Accepting that abortion is a persistent, deeply human experience that resists total legal or moral containment is the only way to navigate the current state of reproductive rights with clarity.

The Failure of Abstraction

Our current political language for abortion, such as "choice," "rights," or "healthcare," deals in virtualization. It treats the body as a site of abstract legal negotiation rather than a physical vessel experiencing a profound, often brutal, transformation. Erin Maglaque notes that this abstraction isolates women, stripping away the context and circumstances that define the experience.

There is no abortion that takes place in the imagined world of either pro or anti-abortion language. No abortion that is pure murder, no abortion that is pure healthcare. There is only abortion in all the particularity of history.

-- Erin Maglaque

When we force abortion into the rigid framework of pro or anti, we ignore the messy reality of the past. History shows that abortion was rarely a binary legal issue; it was a communal, often shared, necessity. In early modern Europe, the distinction between a wanted pregnancy and an unwanted one was often managed through quiet, private channels, including herbal concoctions, the advice of midwives, and the tacit cooperation of partners. By ignoring this, modern discourse creates a vacuum that fundamentalist legal theories are happy to fill.

The Myth of the Deeply Rooted Past

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs relies on the premise that rights must be deeply rooted in the nation history to be valid. This is a systems level failure of interpretation. The Court constructs a historical narrative that ignores the actual, documented practices of the 16th and 17th centuries, where abortion was often treated with leniency or as a private matter, in favor of a selective, moralizing originalism.

This approach requires the erasure of the particular. It ignores figures like Lucia, a 17th century woman who stood defiant against tribunals, or the ordinary couples who sought abortions as a matter of household survival. By creating a fictionalized past, the legal system attempts to impose a moral uniformity that never existed.

The court's history of abortion is equally astonishing, for the moral authority placed upon it. Can any history bear that weight?

-- Erin Maglaque

When the law attempts to act as a definitive arbiter of life, it creates a feedback loop of control. In the 18th century, the Church attempt to mandate post mortem cesarean sections to ensure baptism was a direct attempt to extend jurisdiction into the female body even after death. Today legislative efforts to monitor and restrict pregnancy mirror this desire to exert control over the private, internal realities of the human body.

The Comfort of Being Haunted

The most non obvious insight here is that the haunting of abortion, the memory, the pain, and the lingering sense of what might have been, is not a bug in the system; it is a feature of the human experience. Modern political discourse tries to solve abortion by making it either a right or a crime, but these solutions ignore the reality that abortion is an experience that stays with the individual.

The comfort of being haunted lies in acknowledging the truth of the experience rather than burying it under political slogans. When we treat abortion as a purely political problem, we lose the ability to support the people actually living through it. The past teaches us that while laws change, the necessity of abortion persists. The aberration was not the struggle over rights, but the brief window of Roe v. Wade that suggested the issue was settled. It is not settled. It is ongoing.

Key Action Items

• Shift the Narrative: Stop treating abortion as a debate over abstract legal rights and start framing it as a historical and physical reality. (Immediate)
• Invest in Local Networks: Recognize that in the absence of broad legal protections, the private history of abortion, mutual aid, support networks, and community care, is where the most critical work happens. (12-18 months)
• Challenge Originalist History: Support historical research that highlights the particularity of the past, rather than the sanitized versions used in legal opinions. (Ongoing)
• Accept the Complexity: Reject the comfort of binary slogans. Acknowledge that the experience of abortion is wordless and enfleshed, and resist the urge to compress it into a simple political anecdote. (Immediate)
• Prepare for the Long Cycle: Abandon the idea that history is a steady and progressive march. Prepare for a reality where reproductive rights are contested across decades, not just election cycles. (3-5 years)