Feminist Health Psychology and Abortion: Towards a Politics of Transversal Relations of Commonality (original) (raw)

2012, Advances in Health Psychology

In 1992 Speckhard and Rue argued in the Journal of Social Issues for the recognition of a diagnostic category, post-abortion syndrome (PAS). This term was first used in 1981 by Vincent Rue in testimony to the American Congress, but was only formalised in a published paper a decade later. Speckhard and Rue (1992) posit that abortion is a psychosocial stressor that may cause mild distress through to severe trauma, creating the need for a continuum of categories, these being post-abortion distress, post-abortion syndrome and post-abortion psychosis. PAS, which is the main focus of their paper, and which has taken root in some professional language as well as lay anti-abortion discourse, is described as a type of posttraumatic stress disorder. These moments (the testimony to the American Congress by Vincent Rue, the formal academic paper by Speckhard and Rue (1992)) epitomise the psychologisation of abortion that took root in the 1980s. Portrayals of the woman undergoing an abortion shifted during this time from somebody selfishly denying the foetus its right to life, or alternatively exercising her right to control her body and fertility, to somebody who unwittingly subjected herself to psychological harm through terminating her pregnancy (Lee, 2003). As such, the woman, who previously had been circumscribed by moral, health or gender narratives, started to be described in psychological terms. Her body, self, emotions, and psyche were rendered visible within psychologised discourses (Rose, 1990), which mostly constructed her as the victim of inevitable depression and grief following a necessarily traumatic abortion event. This process of psychologisation started in the United States, but has been taken up in a range of forms in other parts of the world, including the United Kingdom (Hopkins, Reicher, & Saleem, 1996) and South Africa (Macleod, 2011). It has resulted in vigorous scientific debate regarding the psychological consequences of abortion (see, for example, the exchange between Reardon and Cougle (2002) and Schmiege and Russo (2005) in the British Medical Journal and the letters that followed each article), and has become part of the overt politics of abortion with anti-abortion activists using PAS to 'redefine the terms of the debate so that abortion is represented as contradicting women's interests' (Hopkins, Reicher & Saleem, 1996, p. 545). The psychologisation of abortion has, however, mostly occurred within the context of relatively liberal abortion laws where abortions are performed relatively safely. While women in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States have, for the most part, had access to safe legal abortion for decades, it is estimated that in 2003 about 20 million unsafe abortions took place, 98 per cent of which were performed in developing countries (World Health Organisation, 2007). Debate about the psychological consequences of, and hence a psychological discourse concerning, abortion is virtually non-existent in these contexts,