Working towards the understanding of a complex ethical issue
Bringing up the topic of abortion is almost always guaranteed to incite strong responses from either side of the debate. It is often cast in terms of polarized views, and incites concerns of ethics and moral judgments.
Karen Houle, Associate Professor in the University of Guelph’s philosophy department, has broached the topic of abortion in a new book, Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical Thought, published in December 2013. A book launch, featuring readings from each section of the book, was held at eBar on Tuesday, May 20.
The book is not technically about abortion – rather, abortion serves as “an example of a fraught, contested and sort of fear-inducing moral issue” that illustrates some of our habits of ethical thinking, explained Houle.
“I am interested in abortion as a really complex phenomenon, and its something that I have a variety of relationships to. So as an ethicist, as a philosopher who teaches ethics, abortion is going to be one of the topics you would find in of those intro to social and political issues [classes].” In teaching these classes, Houle encountered limitations in how the topic of abortion is broached in academia.
Houle noted that there were important pieces missing in the articles that students read about abortion. “I also noticed the expectation is that students take a position, and argue for it, and in that way sort of shut out the grey areas, or the subtleties of what’s right about the so-called oppositions position.”
Houle was also influenced by her students and their own personal stories and experiences, and over a couple of decades of teaching, these grey areas became more concrete. For instance, for a transgender student approaching the topic of abortion, the discourse tends to focus on men and women in binary categories that may exclude “people whose bodies and lives don’t fit very neatly into the categories that are being talked about.”
Making space for these grey areas became important.“I wanted to write a more nuanced book of philosophy that had space for the real variety and diversity of people’s lives,” said Houle.
Houle chose to include personal anecdotes derived from her own personal experiences – the work is both feminist and philosophical.
“I’ve chafed against the way that philosophy eschews the personal. Its tendency is to talk in universals and general terms, and to think that the concrete details of the everyday life are banal or irrelevant – or they’re only relevant in so far that they illustrate some wider principle. So I’ve always felt like that misses something important,” explained Houle.
“I’m a feminist philosopher, and feminism has worked really hard, in philosophy, to try to say there’s some value and something philosophically significant about the concrete details of the everyday and what actually happens to people, not just what happens in general,” said Houle.
Houle also wanted to examine the language used to discuss abortion and how this shapes attitudes towards abortion – and how it affects us on a personal level. “Largely it’s what I call a medical idiom […] the actual words that are used to describe abortion are medicalized, they’re evacuated of any kind of moral or spiritual or even personal words.”
In abortion discourse, and in examining abortion from a philosophical perspective, it is important to make space for the personal and affective aspects, and to acknowledge the grey areas that often are overlooked in our entrenched ways of thinking about abortion.
In drawing from her own bodily experiences, Houle noted, “I have to let myself be confronted, in ways that my training as a philosopher, or my politics as a feminist, have hived off a bunch of the dimensions of that confrontation,” said Houle. “I wanted to let myself be affected by the weird complexity of the whole experience, which is something that I don’t think we tend to do.”