Barbara Aronstein Black

Transcription

I want to thank Sheelagh and Jane very much for giving me the opportunity to lecture today. Speaking to an academic audience in the UK is a very welcome experience for me and this is because I think your society is not as obsessed and divided over the issue of abortion as mine. I believe that people here may hold different personal views on the subject but politically, and it would seem socially as well, in contrast to the US the matter has been settled. In the US we have a constant tumult. Some argue that the cause of this is because in our country, my country, abortionís legality was decided by our Supreme Court and not our Parliament and therefore the resolution here has greater democratic legitimacy. Others argue that the textual basis of the decision in Roe v Wade in the US was a stretch. Would the framers of the US Constitution not roll over in their graves if they knew that privacy, itself not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, now includes right to abortion. But these are critiques of Roe and I am for the most part quite fine with the decision and proceed in this lecture with abortionís legality firmly in place. I am interested, however, in the many ways in which abortion fervour in the United States is kept feverish. Some of these ways are cultural, such as the affection towards the foetus that many Americans feel or say they feel and much of this affection was brought about through the social practices surrounding sonograms, something Iíve written about earlier and I think most everyone I know has been handed and then fawned over a picture of someoneís indecipherable sonogram in a moment of celebratory sharing. But because Iím a lawyer and not a cultural historian, my interest is in the relation of law to these different phenomena. Thus Iíve written about mandatory ultrasound statutes, statutes in several American states that require pregnant women to have a sonogram and be asked if they want to look at the picture of their, by statute, unborn child, before they may legally consent to an abortion. These statutes show how conservative law makers in the US have brilliantly harnessed the social meaning of foetal imagery and put it to legal use. Today I want to talk about a different aspect of the problem of abortion in the US and I hope that some of it will be relevant to themes here as well. These are the practices of concealment and non-disclosure that regularly accompany having an abortion. As with sonograms this too requires understanding phenomena that are not entirely legal in nature and as with sonograms, Iíve been thinking about the lawís involvement. So to introduce how this works I want to start with a 1973 case in Roe v Wade and I think you are all familiar with the case; itís the one that legalised abortion in the United States and said that Texas or no other state could criminalise abortion, no longer criminalise abortion and I want to go no further than the title of the case. Wade was the prosecutor, Henry Wade, who was responsible for enforcing Texasí criminal abortion statute but a quick footnote following the courtís first mention of the plaintiff, Jane Roe, informs us only that ìthe name is a pseudonymî. This raises an interesting and little discussed aspect of the famous case. When can a party to litigation not use his or her own name but sue under a fictitious one? A basic requirement of our adversarial system, which we got from you, is that a complainant must name the parties, all of the parties. Not only does the defendant have the right to know who has sued him but the press has a right to report on it. As our supreme court explained, what transpires in the courtroom is public property. The people have a right to know who is using their courts. So what are we supposed to make then of Jane Roe? How does it come about that a party may appear in court under an alias? What characteristics of the plaintiff or the case so overwhelm the presumption of disclosure that she can manage to do this? So here courts have answered the question this way, ìthe common thread is that the presence of some social stigma or the threat of physical harm, if the plaintiffís identity becomes part of the public recordî. So under those circumstances you can come in under an alias. And suits involving abortion are among the few exceptions where court permit parties to proceed anonymously. The others, just so youíll begin to get a feel for this, are mental illness, homosexuality, transexuality, HIV status and abandoned children in welfare cases. Thatís the group weíre talking about. But even outside a public courtroom the practice of keeping oneís name distanced from abortion is as common as a matter of everyday life. Thatís to say that women in the US donít talk much about abortion as a personal experience. They donít tell their friends, except maybe a very good one who will drop them off or pick them up afterwards. They donít always tell their husbands or partners. Young women donít always tell their parents and mothers rarely tell their children. Even in so-called pro-choice families, the news can be unexpected and unsettling. One young woman described after how her middle aged mother confided in her that she had had an illegal abortion while a college student in 1972, ìit took a few years for the shock to wear offî. Her daughter had thought that a right to abortion was something that ìonly other women needed, not my family and certainly not my motherî. Now many women donít tell their insurance companies in the US - we donít have an NHS - even when their policies cover abortion. Many pay out of pocket to prevent their records from being computerised, to keep their medical records private. Women with family doctors donít always tell them but travel far away, to places far away, to find a physician who doesnít know them. Not always sure about their own doctorís view on abortion, some are hesitate to jeopardise their relationship, ìeven if you never showed any sign of disapproval, I would from that day on be a lot more leery about how I was around him and things I would sayî. Even waiting rooms in abortion clinics are fraught. A high school teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas, explained ìit makes me nervous even being in the waiting room. You donít want to know whoís here, you donít want to be recognised and you donít want to see them ever againî. There are of course exceptions and Iím going to read one which I found in an article called ëSafe to Talk ñ Abortion Narratives as a Right of Returní and I just love this. It says ìone woman told people on a ëneed to know basisí, my lover who impregnated me, the man I lived with and later married, a friend who loaned me money for the procedure, women who helped me locate a clinic and finally, in an only on the left moment, the entire steering committee of a strike I was involved in during the course of the argument about who should get arrested, I couldnít risk civil disobedience and thus missed the clinic appointmentî. So one of those ëonly on the leftí moments! And while Iíll be talking mostly about women, I want to say that abortion providers ñ doctors, nurses, guards, receptionists, counsellors ñ often only wear first name only tags and donít always tell their families what they do or where they work. Now these many forms of concealment, and there are more to come, are examples of what Iím calling ëabortion secrecyí. The term ësecrecyí seems a fair description of the deliberate non-disclosure that regularly accompanies planning or having an abortion and that explains the often furtive behaviour that marks the experience in the US as something that is best hidden. There is of course another way to describe all this. One might say instead that women choose to keep their abortion intentions or histories under wraps, not because these matters are secret but because they are private. By private I mean simply that certain information, usually personal, usually important, falls within a zone of control that as a cultural practice or sometimes as a matter of law, is the personís alone to reveal, not because it must be hidden but because itís nobody elseís business. In this lecture I want to explore the difference between privacy and secrecy in the context of abortion as a way of trying to get closer to understanding why as a general matter women are hesitant to talk about the subject and eager to distance themselves from it. Iím going to build the case that secrecy rather than privacy is the more accurate characterisation and that the distinction between the two matters crucially in how women experience the decision, the procedure and its aftermath. So a quick word about what is at stake. My primary interest is in how women fare and later Iíll argue in another chapter that the burden of keeping a secret and its unbidden disclosure, are both sources of harm for women. But, secrecy at the level of individual experience has what Iím going to call an important trickle up effect, to the extent that women feel unable to talk quietly, but openly, about the particulars of an abortion, perhaps how they got pregnant, the nature of their deliberations, how they negotiated the logistics, the transportation, the childcare, the fees, the law. Under those circumstances the quality of public discussion about abortion is also compromised. This in turn, Iím arguing, makes informed political deliberation about abortion less likely. So this is the trickle up effect from private conversation to more public conversation to political deliberation. So what Iím interested in is the connections between private discussions and public discourse and between public discourse and political talk. My argument is pretty simple: itís that the absence of private discussion distorts the nature of public debate and this in turn disfigures the legislative process. Now, my claims about the upward progression from private to public to political rest on three assumptions. The first is that legislators want to have a sound factual basis for deciding how something should be regulated. Second, my claim takes for granted that what women have to say about abortion, recognising that all women do not say the same things, provides the best factual basis for what the experience of abortion is like. This is a familiar point, certainly within feminist communities which have long accepted womenís accounts of something as a touchstone of authenticity. The point is not limited to feminists. In considering whether it is possible to regard the death of a foetus in early pregnancies as the same as the death of a born child, philosopher Bernard Williams wrote that ìin the end, this issue can only come back to the experience of womenî ñ I am quoting Williams ñ ìthis is not because their experiences are the only thing that counts, it is because their experiences are the only realistic and honest guide we have to what the unique phenomenon of abortion genuinely is, as opposed to what moralists, philosophers and legislators say it is. It follows that their experience is the only really realistic guide to what the deepest consequences will be of our social attitudes towards abortionî. So, without this honest guide, facts that one might want to know rather than to surmise or imagine, are missing and this is a matter of great concern because the information considered by legislators in the US has of late seemed alarmingly partial. Consider the testimony of some 2,000 women collected by the South Dakota taskforce on abortion. This was a taskforce charged by the South Dakota legislator to study such matters as the health risks that undergoing abortion has on women, including the delayed onset of cancer, and whether abortion is a workable method for the pregnant woman to waive her rights to a relationship with the child. Not surprisingly, the women testified almost to a person about the overwhelming trauma and grief abortion has had on their lives. 99% of them strongly believed as a result of their experiences, abortion should be illegal. Now these figures are important. Following feminist methodology they claim to take womenís experiences seriously yet the pervasive secrecy around abortion makes it difficult to evaluate the taskforceís numbers against or alongside the testimony of women for whom legal abortion was not traumatic and who, one imagines, were well pleased that the procedure was legal. The final assumption about the relation between private conversation and more public or political ones is that there is a trickle up effect. For my claim about the movement of information must be something more than a hunch or a grown-up version of Chinese whispers. Just exactly how does taking an issue, talking about an issue among family, friends or close friends, open the way for wider consideration of an issue, particularly the tricky issue of abortion. The answer requires identifying the mechanisms, the processes or structures of transmission that explain this migration once secret information moves into more public realms and Iíll conclude my talk by looking at some of those mechanisms. Right now Iím getting ahead of the story and the question here is simply to consider whether womenís reluctance to talk about abortion is best characterised as privacy or secrecy. OK, so letís just ñ Iím getting very nervous already with the time. OK, so letís turn to abortion privacy. Iím using the word ëprivacyí in a slightly different sense than itís often associated with abortion as in the right to abortion. That was what the Supreme Court decided in Roe v Wade, that there was a constitutional right to abortion. It was a form of privacy that respects the personal autonomy embodied in the right to make oneís own decision about important matters and it applies this kind of privacy to other personal decisions as well, but it is generally known as decisional privacy. Itís the right of privacy that lets you make the decision. There is another dimension to privacy though and this is that ñ and Roe said nothing about this at all ñ which was about a womanís right to control publicity around the decision once it was made and this is called informational privacy and thatís what Iím going to focus on here. I think you can see that decisional privacy and informational privacy protect different interests. One is the right to make the decision, the second is the right to keep the decision to yourself and itís clear to see how one would influence and how informational privacy would affect the way you make a decision. A woman who knows that her intentions to have an abortion will become public might be concerned about attempts by those who find out about it to prevent her from acting on it, whether through physical or emotional force or threat. This is why in the US the Supreme Court has said ëstates may not condition a womanís right to have an abortion on getting her husbandís consent or on even notifying himí. Both of those were ruled out. But the relationship between decisional and informational privacy goes beyond sort of brute pressure or prevention that might literally block a womanís access. I have in mind the possibility of disclosure which relates to the stigma attached to having it be known that youíre having an abortion and as one of our Justiceís observed in a case involving pregnant minors, it is inherent in the right to make the abortion decision that the right be exercised without public scrutiny because without privacy oneís choice is effectively made by others. So decisions about abortion are complicated by womenís awareness of the possibility of exposure by one means or another. In a 2004 decision quashing a Government subpoena seeking patient abortion records, a federal court described the situation this way, ìAmerican history discloses that the abortion decision is one of the most controversial decisions in modern life. It is with opprobrium ready to be visited upon the woman who so decides and the doctor who engages in the medical procedureî and the public is also more sophisticated in finding out confidential things. In refusing to order even redacted medical records of late term abortion patients to be turned over to the state, Judge Richard Posner took note of the technological advances of snooping, taking that ìskilful Googlers might well be able to sift the information contained in the medical records concerning each patientís medical and sex history, put two and two together and out the women, thereby exposing them to threats, humiliation and obloquyî. Moreover, the threat of disclosure is not time limited but can lurk over an entire life. In the US questions about a womanís past abortions have turned up in connection with all sorts of things; employment applications, political campaigns, custody fights. Thus abortion is not simply, abortion disclosure is not simply a matter of enduring momentary opprobrium but it augurs a more protracted threat. And that is some of what is at stake with abortion privacy. So what do we mean by privacy? Privacy scholar Alan Weston defined it as ìthe claim of an individual to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them will be provided to othersî. This is a good start but what is it about this particular information, as opposed to all other things we might like to keep private, that privilege it as a matter of privacy? Certainly not everything a person might prefer to keep to themselves when age, true hair colour, criminal or marital record, is regarded as private so that norms of non-intrusion attach. So thereís a general consensus across disciplines that for information to be recognised as private, it must in the first instance be very personal and also very important. One measure of privacy taken from taught law is whether the disclosure is such that a reasonable person would feel justified in feeling highly aggrieved by it. Thus the courts ñ OK, but there are certain exceptions and one of them is that the information must be of ìno legitimate concern to the publicî. So in a Michigan case Doe v Mills, anti-abortion protestors argued that because abortion was an issue, abortion itself was an issue of legitimate concern to the public, two Doe plaintiffs had no protected privacy interest in their actual names being displayed on large signs held up for public view as the plaintiffs arrived at an abortion clinic. In that case the protectors had obtained clinic appointment records from a dumpster ñ what do you call it, a bin? Yeah? A waste bin. And the trial court said yes, abortion is so controversial that it is a matter of great public concern. Happily the appellant court said they could distinguish between abortion as an issue of public concern generally but that did not require the identity of particular patients. There have been other examples. Public records are another exception, so that if something is in the public record it is not confidential and this has created some other problems. In some states driversí licences have been considered public records. Anyone can go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and through a licence plate, track the owner of the car. Certain anti-abortion groups have done just that with patients who park their cars at abortion clinics or doctorsí offices. In one case a woman visited a clinic only to find black balloons and anti-abortion literature on her doorstep. Another woman received a venomous letter discussing ìthe guilt of having oneís own child killed and Godís curse for the shedding of innocent bloodî. This led to the passage by our Congress of something called the Driverís Privacy Protection Act, so that thereís a limitation on the public record of driversí licences being able to provide that information. In addition to information in public records, claims to privacy are also compromised when someone has made the information publicly available themselves, like a posting on a social media page. There's also no claim to privacy if something occurs in physical space, public space. The idea is, as you know from torts probably that you can have no expectation of privacy when anyone on the street could see you with their own eyes. This is a difficult problem because you have to walk on a street to get to an abortion clinic. There's no way to go there other than on public space and there also seems to be a US version of postcode lottery. In one case from California, a city in Chico, the abortion clinic health centre sought to bar protestors standing at the entrance of its parking lot. Chico was so small they argued that the protestors would be likely to identify the patients as they entered but the court held for the protestors, noting that plaintiffs, ìhaving chosen to live in the environment of a small city, cannot expect the courts to guarantee them the kind of anonymity they might find in a large metropolitan community such as New York Cityî. Interesting. So what counts as, what your expectations of privacy may differ according to where you live. We also have to take seriously the vaguely voluntary relinquishments that have become part of our contractual relations with internet providers, retailers and credit card companies. I put aside for now the massive involuntary data collected by the National Security Agency and here the GCHQ. For example, Target, which is a large sells-everything store in the US, now uses something called ëpredictive analysesí to decide what their buyers would like to buy and this led to a headline in 2012 called ëHow target figured out a girl was pregnant before her father didí. Using predictive analysis they had reviewed her purchases and made the assessment she was probably pregnant. Just so youíll know, things they can tell that youíre probably pregnant ñ home pregnancy tests, scent free items and certain vitamins ñ are three of the 25 data points to detect for pregnancy. Target then sent coupons for diapers and cribs to her home address, to the fury and puzzlement of her father. Sadly she was pregnant. They had it right but thatís not the point. And certainly the meta-data collected by the NSA and other security agencies could be mined for abortion related data and when there was testimony before the European Parliament on what did it mean to have all this information collected, one of the witnesses listed many things that if you just call for certain locations and so on, would identify abortion clinics, drug counselling centres, you know, the things you would probably like to keep private. But even in the face of these quasi-consensual and non-consensual forms of surveillance thereís still an idea of the right to be left alone. Now I realise many people donít want to be left alone. As a culture and I think I am speaking here of the US, we have become hugely confessional and massively indiscrete. And so even amidst these public often outpourings, but not everything has become the stuff of prime time television and Iím suggesting that abortion is one of them, that people prefer to keep private. Now why is privacy valued? So in her study of privacy in 18th century novels, Professor Patricia Spacks notes that the concept of privacy protects what she calls an ëinner uncoerced realmí, or what has been called a ëprivate sphere evaluationí. One develops oneís own values from the repertoire offered up by society and then tries them on to see what fits. And putting it another way, legal sociologist Kim Scheppele observed the ability to reveal or to hide information is crucial to an individualís ability to shape the social world in her immediate vicinity. So thereís something empowering, something else-defining about exercising privacy in this sense. It explains in Patricia Spacksí phrase privacy ìself-evident desirabilityî. But this is the very point on which I want to distinguish privacy from secrecy. If privacy embodies a self-evident desirability, Iím arguing that secrecy appears a more ominous proposition. It suggests that it is best to keep the matter to yourself, not simply because all things considered you prefer to do so, but because of the apprehension that if you do not, harm will follow. In her book, ëSecretsí, Sissela Bok discusses why revealing the secrets of others is morally wrong. She says ëitís not only the secret contains matters legitimately considered private, but because the revelation will ëhurt the individual talked aboutíí. And my argument is that the pervasive silence around abortion, a silence found even between intimates, is often a matter of secrecy in just this way. It anticipates harm to individuals that the disclosure is understood to bring. Now insisting that there is a difference between abortion privacy and abortion secrecy, I recognise that the two forms of concealment have things in common and this may explain why theyíre often blurred in ordinary conversation. Thereís no suggestion of anything clandestine or furtive when the answer to the question ëare you having a boy or a girl?í is ëitís our little secretí. Also the practical results may be the same. If something is kept secret it remains private. If itís kept private, it may also stay a secret but not necessarily. As Sissela Bok has noted, ëa private garden may not be a secret gardení. The analogy is not perfect but itís the thatís helpful in getting at this distinction. A truly private garden, over which one has control, doesnít need to be secret in order to afford the chosen seclusion that its privacy benefits. No-one enters a private garden without the ownerís consent. But while ñ Iím just going to skip a little bit here and if thatís the benefit of privacy, I want to say something about the harms of secrecy. I think that secrecy, the decision to keep something secret for fear of harm has an element of duress about it and thatís the element that Iím interested in. Iím not using duress in a completely or strictly legal sense of an unlawful threat that deprives a person of her free will, but rather to suggest a set of social pressures that push the motivation for abortion non-disclosure from the preference for privacy into perceived need for secrecy. Now Iím not claiming that privacy is always good and secrecy is always bad. We know that in the not so distant past, privacy was used to shield practices of violence from outside scrutiny and we know that not all commitments to secrecy are motivated by fear. One may be obligated to keep information secret as a matter of private contract - trade secrets - or by statute state secrets or professional ethics ñ client and pastoral secrets. And there are also voluntary secrecy packs which Iíll give over some interesting examples of. But why does it matter whether we say something is secret or private? Iím contending that while individual cases will certainly different from one another, in the context of abortion the concealment tends to align more with secrecy than with privacy and that abortion secrecy is much darker, more psychologically taxing and more socially corrosive. So why is it felt the need to keep abortions secret? Bok suggests that secrecy operates as an added shield in case the protection of privacy should fail and in her study of Victorian Family Secret Keeping ñ a fabulous book ñhistorian Deborah Cohen describes secrecy as ìprivacies indispensible hand maidenî. What occasions the need for shields and for hand maidens? The answer is the negative consequences, the perceived disaster produced by revelation. Enlisting the sorts of secrets that Victorians kept secret ñ illegitimate birth, a son with a propensity for unnatural crimes, suicide, insanity, adultery, bankruptcy ñCohen notes that the exposure of any of these was catastrophic, subjecting the family to legal disability and to social scorn. Now the subject of these 19th century secrets may now seem quaint or unnecessary to us, but only just. Consider by analogy a decision to acknowledge oneís sexual orientation at a time when homosexuality ñ to use the best language of the period ñ was grounds for dismissal from work, losing custody of oneís child or arrest on morals charges ñ these were all lawful responses. It isnít hard to see why, when being openly gay was regarded as illegal, immoral and disgusting, and with the advent of HIV and AIDS, as being murderous, that a closet, preferably a locked one, was a safer place. But locating closets within the domain of privacy doesnít quite capture the nature of closetedness [sic]. A form of concealment that is quite debilitating as the fear of exposure looms over daily life. I want to suggest that the same phenomenon now plays out in many places with abortion. Even though abortion is no longer a crime, like homosexuality is no longer a crime, an aura of wrongdoing still attaches. Some of it draws from the language of criminality. Abortion providers in the US are not called doctors or physicians, but ëabortionistsí and the word ëproviderí is used to avoid the connotation of being an ëabortion doctorí. Some of the taint also draws from the general practices of deception that surround abortion. For many women it involves lying about where theyíre going and what theyíre doing and subterfuge, organising days and nights away from home when one is up against a mandated waiting period and the nearest clinic is hundreds of miles away. I live in a very big country and something like 87% of counties donít have any abortion providers. Now I have to say, a lot of those counties donít have anything except some tumbleweed and, you know, a cactus here and there! But nonetheless, you see the picture. Mississippi is proudly announced as now an abortion-free state because theyíve gotten rid of all the clinics. But back to what Iím saying, thereís also an overlay of sneakiness. Why would anybody go into court using an alias? What exactly are they ñ why is this necessary? I think for some the ideas that theyíre sneaking around the very wages of sin by being able to have an abortion. There's also a character logical dimension at work. Information about a prior abortion is taken as proof of bad character, with implications about other aspects of a womanís life. Just to name one case, a case where a plaintiff brought a malpractice action against the hospital because her newborn son had died at the hospital due to negligence. At the trial the hospital introduced evidence showing that Mrs Garcia had had three abortions prior to the birth of her son. Their claim was that ìif a woman has voluntarily consented to an abortion, she is less affected by the pain of the loss of a child than a woman who had never voluntarily terminated a pregnancyî. Happily the appellant court declined to accept this ruling and ordered a new trial but as an abortion court stated in 1919, ìsuch evidence serves only to debase and degrade the defendant and to inflame and prejudice the minds of the jury against herî. I found quite a trove of criminal law cases where a womanís prior abortion is brought in to show her character and why it is more likely than not that she committed a particular crime. Sometimes the evidence is permitted, sometimes not. But one thing to think about is even if it's later thrown out on appeal, one is still exposed during the process, so the actual legal rule that one cannot admit such evidence may be less important than the fact of exposure. OK, Iím going to ñ oh no Iím not ñ Iím going to keep going. So I want to make an analogy because there are some problems with secret keeping and one of them is that the secret may ñ the law may change the secret to be exposed and let me tell you the example Iím thinking of. It is the example of birth mothers who in decades past surrendered their newborns for adoption, secure that as a matter of state law, their secret was safe and I donít have a firm handle on adoption law in the UK but I think it follows a similar think. I also forgot, I meant to apologise at the beginning, I canít help saying ëprivacyí and I know it must grate on your ears but ñ no? OK, OK. Maybe only in Oxford they say privacy only, I donít know! But I tried it and I couldnít do it, so my apologies. So, for the longest time the schema of adoption was sealed and closed adoptions. If you gave up a baby for adoption, you didnít know who the adoptive parents would be. The record was sealed, put away, a new birth certificate was issued in the name of the child with the adoptive parents put in instead of the birth parents. Throughout the 1980s this began to change for a number of reasons: birth mothers began to come out and organise; also with the advent of abortion there were fewer babies available to be adopted so birth mothers got a little more political power; and adoption agencies said ëbirth mothers, what do you want? What does it take for you to give us your babies?í and they said ëoh, weíd like a little more control over it and weíd like to know where our child goes and maybe even who the parents are. So it was a shift from closed adoption to what is called open adoption and all agencies, except some Mormon agencies, offer open adoption. This was good news for some birth mothers and disastrous news for others. In an 1989 case from Oregon called Does 1-7 v State of Oregon, seven women who had put their babies up for adoption over a period of thirty years ñ so some were now in their late 70s ñ Oregon had just passed a law saying that an adult adoptee was entitled to un-seal their adoption record. So these women said ëwe proceeded with our lives, relying on the state law that said our identities would be secret. Weíve moved on, weíve had other children, we have husbands, we donít want that part of our life dredged upí and the court said ëweíre very sorry but you were never promised total confidentiality and we have to balance your needs with the needs of adult adoptees and in their right to find their own biological parentsí, something some of us were talking about earlier. Now Iíve lingered on this case because itís useful to compare the nature of the Does predicament, alongside the predicament of others with secrets to keep and I think three aspects are particularly important. First, the Does initial decision to insist on secrecy was not some sort of feminine delicacy or social skittishness, it was a considered response to contemporary social values and their manifestation in law. During the decades in which they surrendered their infants, the stigma around unwed motherhood and premarital sex was real and stinging. One case describes their situation as ëa life-wrecking disasterí. ëBastardsí, as there were then called, were entitled to no financial support from the state or from the natural father. So against all of this, closed adoption offered a way out and a way forward yet things change and this is my second point. Over time, single motherhood began to look somewhat less scandalous and the theories of child development that favoured secrecy switched as ideas of identity formation began to edge them out. So there was a social change in how people thought about unwed motherhood and the process of adoption and this really leads to my third point which is that law itself can be the source of both secrecy and disclosure. In the Oregon example, it was the law that authorised the disclosure of mothersí identities, just as the previous law had protected them. Now these features map onto abortion in interesting ways and as with adoption, the need for felt secrecy around abortion is similarly hinged to existing social judgements about abortion and the bundle of behaviours it reveals or is thought to reveal, the underlying sex, reproductive responsibility, parental disobedience and murder. So in both adoption and abortion the law has operated to protect secrets and to expose them and we see this that the law protects plaintiffs by hiding their identities under a doe alias but I describe in the next chapter ways that the law also exposes women whoíve had abortions and thereís no time to talk about that now. But now I come to a main point. Why do things change? Thatís what I want to figure out. We kind of have an idea of why the social background to adoption changed but what would it take to have attitudes towards abortion change so that it were not such a perceived need to keep it secret was not so great and the perceived harm, which is actually a real harm often, would be reduced? And my answer is that a starting point is a kind of coming out by women and I donít mean this in an activist way but in a very small and private way. Unlike the critiques of adoption that came out in the 1980s, newsletters, appeals to state houses, press releases, there is much less talking about abortion at the ground roots level. So there isnít much for legislators or folks in general to go on. We have a lot of statistical information about abortion ñ one million abortions a year in the United States, 18% are among teenagers, half are among women in their 20s, 61% are obtained by mothers who have one or more children, so itís a maternal issue. But although all this information is perfectly clear and not disputed, it has not texture, it has no narrative, it has no face. Any more intimate or personal representation, weíre deprived of that by the unwillingness of women to speak up. So here we see the authority of abortion secrecy and the importance of understanding the processes by which the release of secrets takes place or doesnít take place. So my argument is we canít get to the trickle up process that I was talking about until we have some discussion at the quiet, private, intimate level, and certainly in the US that doesnít exist. Now why would ñ am I right, Iím going back to one of my earlier questions - that there is a trickle up effect, why might there be a change in social attitudes if there were more discussion about abortion, about womenísí individual abortion experiences and I donít mean going on television, you know, I donít mean in the kind of vulgar self ñI donít know if you have these terrible programmes that we do. You do? Yeah, OK. So I donít mean like 16 and Pregnant, you know, I donít mean those shows. I mean at the levels I was talking about earlier, being able to talk to your mother, being able to talk to your sister, just that it was acceptable within the family that we werenít in the kind of Victorian secret keeping situation. So I have a few suggestions. One is a few methods by which this could happen and one is called the contact hypothesis. Thereís a new book out called ñ well itís not even out, itís an unpublished dissertation so all of you who are working, hurry up and get your good work out there or youíll have to be sited as an unpublished dissertation, called ëSecrets and Social Influenceí by a sociologist named Sarah Cohen and she connects a number of important dots and very quickly she says that ìsecrets are selectively revealedî, that when you have a secret, because you think youíre going to be harmed by its disclosure, you tend to tell people who you think will support you. You donít normally tell someone whoís going to judge you and criticise you. So when you want to confide in someone, most people choose to confide in someone they trust. That empirical finding sort of makes intuitive sense, so she found out that far more women tell others about having a miscarriage, which is also a highly kept secret, than having an abortion. But what she says is that, ìthe contact theory is that when you have contact with someone who has a stigmatised characteristicî, like having an abortion or being a smoker or whatever these days counts as a stigmatised characteristic, that person tends to change their mind about the stigma. That is when you meet an actual person who has the bad quality and you see that tactually itís your next-door neighbour or your Ministerís wife or your professor or your daughter, people tend to re-think wow, this isnít the way I thought that kind of person would be and you may think about this with other stigmas, that you may have changed attitudes when you see ñ oh, disability is another one. The problem is, if you only talk to people who are going to support you, the people who most need to hear it will never do it. So a strong anti-abortion advocate whoís talking to someone whoís had an abortion ñ letís say his secretary or his wife, I donít know ñ will not know that theyíre talking to somebody with the stigma and so their attitudes will never change. So there wonít be this affect of learning that people are not quite as you think they are by virtue of who people confide secrets in and the fact that thatís good but it leaves out the people who might most possibly re-think their attitudes by knowing. So that is, as Cohen says, ìAmericans who have heard abortion secrets understand abortion differently than those who do notî. Now, I donít think that women whoíve terminated a pregnancy think in terms of social influence theory or consider themselves political actors. For many it was enough to end the pregnancy and just move on with regular life yet it may not be bad for these millions of women to consider themselves not necessarily as activists, but as women with the potential for influence on others. Now thereís not much of a movement like this afoot and one of the reasons is that many women who end their own pregnancies through abortion oppose the same decision when made by others. That is thereís very little solidarity among women who have abortions. In fact when Iíve spoken on other topics with abortion doctors/providers, they have said to me didnít I know that there were only three acceptable reasons for an abortion, and I fell for it the first time. I said ëwell no, I didnít, what are they?í, she said ërape, incest and mineí, which was very interesting. But I do think that knowing that aborting women have at least the potential to change opinions of others by virtue of shaking free from the secret and being, without wanting to sound too much like Bridget Jones, being exactly who they are, is a positive thing to keep in mind. Itís a very quiet sort of activism. Since thereís so little time left I will just tell you that the other area are open secrets. Itís very curious, abortion is an open secret. That is there are abortion clinics in the US, there are cars outside of them, there are people going in and out. People know women are having abortions, itís just they donít think itís anybody they know. So itís a strange thing, itís both a kept secret and yet as a social phenomena or practice, itís widely understood that it exists and so part of what I think is interesting is to try to move it out of being ñ is to have it be less of an open secret and more of a subject thatís acceptable to talk about. Now, this may sound like a burden on women who have had abortions but thereís a very interesting new website in the US called ëExhaleí. Anybody heard of it? So Exhale is an anonymous website, I mean a website that you go on anonymously and you can just talk about how you feel about having had an abortion, whether you feel guilty, whether you feel relieved, whether you think God is punishing you, whether this was the best day of your life, you know, whatever it is, you can just talk, post anonymously and I find that very interesting. Itís kind of mid-way between secrecy and disclosure, that maybe people have to begin disclosing anonymously and then it will become less fearsome and that youíll see there are more people who have done the same. So thatís ñ the final thing is social movement theory, that there's a whole ñ Iíll quickly say, in a book on cancer the author was telling about a woman who wanted to form a cancer support group in the 1950s and she wrote to the New York Times because she wanted to place an ad and she was sloughed off onto the society editor and said she wanted to put this ad in about a breast cancer support group and she was told, ëIím sorry Mrs Rosenthal but the Times cannot publish the word ëbreastí or the word ëcancerí in its pagesí. Very interesting. I then move to May 14th 2012 where there was an op-ed piece by Angelina Jolie using both the word ëbreastí and the word ëcancerí and so what happened? Well you can study the process of how something changed. We had a Presidential wife named Betty Ford who had breast cancer, she announced it publicly and some of the ads at the time said ëdonít die of embarrassmentí and I think that matches up with one of the slogans from the 80s, also from the AIDS epidemic which was ñ I think you had it here too ñ ësilence = deathí and so the big question, Iíll almost end on this, is Iíve looked at a number of social movement theories with regard to depression, with regard to divorce, with regard to homosexuality and in many cases, thereís been progression. Slow, but progression, so that thereís now same-sex marriage. That couldnít have happened if the closet had stayed locked in that way. And so there is hope for social movement theory, although itís a very tough one with abortion. Abortion is one of the few things people still keep private and I think thatís because it involves the body, it involves sex, itís deliberate and voluntarily undertaken as opposed to a miscarriage and also it is thought to harm someone else. So many would argue itís not a victimless act. OK, so to conclude, my claim is not that any one of these mechanisms of social change ñ contact theory, social movement theory, the migration of family secrets pushing harder on the paradox of open secrets ñ not any one of them will itself engender a more capacious view towards abortion as the subject of regulation. But I think two things. The first is that each works part of the street and so each stands to make things somewhat better. Second, each of these mechanisms is dependent on more open discussion about abortion as a regular practice in womenís lives and it is that conversation I want to bring about. This lecture is not intended as a manifesto or action plan, but it is meant to re-orient how we think about the meanings of concealment. It is no good for women to feel empowered by exercising their privacy rights when secrecy is masquerading as privacy. So, I will stop there. Thank you.