Who Can Afford Complexity? The Promise and Peril of Psychoanalyzing the Abortion Decision

Abstract

This paper situates psychoanalytic exploration of abortion within a politically polarized culture, in which claims of psychological and moral hazard are weaponized to undermine women’s reproductive freedom. Reflecting on these political perils and building on Sullivan’s notion of consensually validated experience as central to reflective functioning, the author locates psychoanalytic silence around abortion as part of a broader socio-cultural disavowal. Without a framework in which to describe the abortion decision as an ethical choice, rooted in a sense of responsibility for self and other, dissociation of these complex dimensions becomes a tool of political expediency. Yet the costs of splitting off the ethical and psychological complexities of the abortion decision are significant: Little support is provided to women faced with this decision, and conversations about ethical complexities are shut-down, creating a void that has been filled by the anti-abortion movement. The urgent question for psychoanalysts is: How do we help women formulate abortion narratives – including the healing, traumatic, and ethical dimensions – when the cultural debate around not just abortion but women’s decision-making power, generally, precludes such complexities? This is a question that has implications far beyond the consulting room: Listening to women on their own terms is crucial if we are ever to build a socio-legal framework that better reflects and protects their lived experience.

Keywords:

• Consensually validated
• abortion
• dissociation
• reproductive agency
• political

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Naomi Snider

Naomi Snider, LL.M., LP, is a practicing psychoanalyst and graduate of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology, where she currently serves as President of the Psychoanalytic Society. Her published works include the 2018 book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, coauthored with Carol Gilligan, and the co-edited volume (with J. Petrucelli and S. Schoen), Patriarchy and its Discontent: Psychoanalytic Perspective (2022). She is currently part of a research team from NYU’s Radical Listening Project that – in collaboration with three girls’ schools – is investigating how to help girls develop the skills they need to resist pressures to self-silence, in the name of inclusion and success.