on abortions

Yesterday night I had dinner with a friend interested in bioethics. We
got involved in a conversation on abortion. He thinks it could be an effective strategy, for promoting the right to choose abortion freely, to attack the current iconography of the "suffering woman who must have an abortion, and
harshly suffers for that, and lives an awful trauma", and so on... He
claims that progressive perspectives fail to account for the several
situations in which all this pain and sufferance is not present or is
very reduced, and above all he complains that this idea seems to
become a normative ideal of how to face an abortion. I agree almost on
everything. Personally, I take abortion to be traumatic, and I tend to
consider a woman, who doesn't live an abortion at least as
problematic, as failing to feel something relevant for her emotional
life. However, I agree that all the drama concerning abortion even in
liberal context is not useful to the cause, and above all must not be
normative at all.
This could seem contradictory with what I have just said on my
personal judgment, so I need to clarify better my point: what really
is often missing in these debates, from both sides, is the real
listening and attention to the persons involved. If they really listened to the
singular experiences, maybe they could realize how different the
perspectives can be, and how often dramatic they are, but in
completely different ways. And this is totally understandable! We all
think that the loss of a beloved, like the death of a parent, is a
very traumatic event, but I think it would be hard to find two
different persons with different family histories, personal
biographies, and individual psychological profiles, who grieve in the
same way.
A second point I consider important in this regard, from a
liberal point of view, is the following: we should not completely
reject a certain kind of "physiological" and "metaphysical" kind of
arguments, but we should rather project on them the kind of
particularistic and listening attitude that I'm proposing, in order to show how every
woman lives pregnancy and subsequent abortion in a different and often
equally legitimate way (even if, as I said, I do not exclude that some
ways are more appropriate than others, and that some are just not
appropriate enough). Biological facts are not meaningful per se. Only giving a look to the particular lived experiences, we can discern among meanings, and therefore utter a sensitive judgment.
Fetuses are certainly not "mere agglomerates of common cells" as
anti-abortionists obsessively repeat. This is exactly the reason why
they can become intrusive, alien creatures growing in our bodies,
claiming for nutrition and care that we can be not disposed or
able to provide.
And yes, fetuses certainly can become children, our children. This is the
reason why we have the right to decide whether we want to love and
nurse them.
What grows in our female bellies (and I'm sorry, guys, but this makes
and will ever make a difference that both men and women cannot fully
understand) is a very big deal, and women who have an abortion,
unfortunately, most of the time perfectly know it.