The American Psychological Association report finding no increased risk of mental health problems post-abortion should put the fiction that women can't be trusted to make healthy decisions for themselves to rest.

Some time ago, probably while

cooking up the oxymoron "compassionate conservatism"

in the propaganda dungeons of the right, it occurred to anti-choice

forces that their image was suffering from the (correct) perception that

they want to curtail women’s rights because they don’t have very

warm feelings for women. Clearly, they needed to put some lipstick

on that pig and convince the public that, all evidence to the contrary,

they do give a damn about women. It was a momentous task indeed.

After all, women themselves–with their paychecks, right to vote, and modern ideas

about controlling their own lives–were the problem.

The solution, as it

has been throughout history, was to construct a mythological Good Girl

to defend against all those Bad Girls, with their sex-having, paycheck-drawing

ways. The Good Girl is sweet, submissive, religious, maternal,

and self-sacrificing. She doesn’t like sex and doesn’t want

to be in that scary world of work. But she does love marriage

and babies, and is willing to tolerate sex to get the marriage and babies. Bad Girls

like sex, and want to have it even if they can’t get pregnant.

Bad Girls think about other things besides marriage and babies, even

if they do want to get married and have a baby or two.

The clever contribution anti-choicers

made to this millennia-old Madonna/whore dichotomy was the theory that

all women are, deep down inside, baby-loving, sex-reluctant, marriage-crazed

Good Girls. Bad Girls only exist because they’ve been broken

by feminism and legal abortion. Bad Girls are mentally ill, and

just need to be forced into motherhood by losing access to abortion

and contraception to turn them into Good Girls, who may not be happy,

but are well — in the sense of functioning properly.

Because this is a silly theory,

there’s been a long-standing hope that science would come in and save

the day, by proving once and for all that women who have rights and

use them are broken, especially if they use their right to abortion.

Anti-choicers concocted a fake mental illness called "Post-Abortion

Stress Syndrome," and hoped that the psychological establishment would

one day validate it, and their beliefs. The idea was that Bad Girls

who do the most Bad thing you can do — get an abortion — would be

more likely to be mentally ill than other women, demonstrating that

having rights is damaging to women.

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Well, anti-choice activists,

who are well-stocked with science-wary fundamentalist Christians, will

be telling themselves that they should have known those liberal college

science types were never on their side, because the American Psychological

Association has once again determined that abortion poses no risk to

women’s mental health.

The reality of the Madonna/whore dichotomy was not discussed in the

report, but it was implicitly debunked. It turns out that women

are actually not stupid or crazy as a rule, but perfectly capable of

making their own decisions. Like men. Like citizens.

It was clear to me that if

the APA had found anything for anti-choicers to cling to, they would

have immediately moved on to creating a mental illness to describe women

who use contraception. Artificial Infertility Disorder, maybe?

Symptoms: Sleeping through the night, a bank account of an unseemly

size for a woman, a stunning lack of shotgun weddings, an unfeminine

enjoyment of her sex life, and a really unfeminine loss of stress in

her sexual relationships with men.

It’s hard to celebrate this

news, though, because the idea that women are, as a class, less competent

than men and unable to make important decisions about child-bearing

without threatening their especially fragile mental health has taken

off in the mainstream discourse even as the APA finds it scientifically

unsound. Women-as-fragile-incompetents instead of as citizens

has been enshrined in the Supreme Court

decision Gonzales v Carhart.

Even, distressingly, pro-choice

politicians are beginning to feel they have to pay lip service to the

idea that women are especially incompetent and that our rights have

to be considered in that light. Linda Hirshman counted

out the ways.

The Hyde Amendment pulled

Medicaid financing for the poorest and most desperate women. In 1992,

the Clinton campaign reframed abortion as an unpleasant last resort.

Last term, the Supreme Court finally broke, affirming the criminalization

of certain late-term abortions. And Democratic candidate Barack Obama,

in The Audacity of Hope, compared women’s regrets over their past abortions

to white people’s regrets about past bigotry. This Clintonian compromise–that

abortion was a necessary moral evil–had become the most progressives

could hope for.

Every time a pro-choicer tries

to appeal to the "mushy middle" with these tactics, they reaffirm

the idea that there are Good Girls who have lots of children and not

lots of sex, and Bad Girls who are just Good Girls who’ve lost their

way. It might win votes–no one could accuse Barack Obama at

this point of having a poor political compass–but it ultimately comes at the cost of undercutting

abortion rights. Because if abortion is always wrong, always the

bad choice, always a regretful action–that is, if there are so many

broken Bad Girls out there–then it becomes impossible to really defend

women’s rights.

How? Well, Good Girls

are fundamentally defined as those women who realize that they are powerless

to run their own lives and have to submit to men and to their traditional,

submissive roles in order to hold their fragile female selves together.

Bad Girls are hot messes, who didn’t submit and therefore are falling

apart. What they have in common is that they, being women, can’t

make their own decisions, and only do well when controlled by others.

In other words, every time

you wax poetic about women’s regret, or frame abortion as the terrible

last resort of the terminally incompetent, then you’re reaffirming

the belief that women can’t handle freedom, and therefore shouldn’t

have it. And the first freedoms to go will be reproductive freedoms.