For decades, a staple among pro-life arguments and slogans has been “adoption, not abortion.” It was on the first pro-life bumper sticker I put on our family’s car back in 1973.

Pro-abortionists are now trying to coopt “adoption, not abortion,” turning it into “no adoption without abortion choice.” Lest you think it is just the ravings of a pro-abortion fringe (though one would be hard pressed to identify anything like a “middle position” on the pro-abortion side), consider the argument appears in no less a forum than the March issue of the prestigious Hastings Center Report.

Katie Watson, a lawyer, bioethicist and long-time abortion activist, advances a twofold argument in her “The Insult of Involuntary Adoption and the Moral Seriousness of Motherhood.” First, she maintains that the availability of adoption without the equal availability of abortion is “coercive” because it forecloses a choice based on one’s personal beliefs about the nature of the child (or “clump of cells,” in the pro-abortion view) one is carrying, a choice that — an autonomy of values and belief that a democratic and pluralistic society must respect.

That set of concerns cannot, however, be separated from her second argument about “motherhood.” According to Watson (channeling her inner Harry Blackmun), resolving when life begins is not necessary to this question (and would infringe the values of autonomy and pluralism we should cherish). Rather, the “motherhood” question arises because by giving birth one inevitably becomes a mother. To become a mother and then have to forego the exercise of that maternity by surrendering a child for adoption constitutes coercion. It is coercion because a woman should not have to be a parent absent her consent, which the lack of an abortion option abridges, even if the practical consequences of her parental duties are assumed by another.

Watson’s argument raises a question broached during oral argument in one of the pre-Dobbs abortion cases before the Supreme Court. The question that was tossed around was what exactly the “right to abortion” included. Did it encompass “the right no longer to be pregnant?” or “the right to a dead fetus?” Pro-abortionists argued the latter, essentially on lines like Watson’s: how would a woman know her adopted child is not being abused by those who adopted him/her? That sense of “maternal uncertainty” somehow ranked higher than the continued life of that child.

(We should not imagine these to be just some theoretical musings. Speaking at the 2024 Georgetown Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life, then-Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley noted (here at 49:30) that studies showed no small percentage of women opt for abortion over adoption precisely because of uncertainty over the child’s possible fate, deeming adoption a “worse” outcome than abortion.)

If we are to take Watson’s argument for post-birth motherhood to its logical conclusion, does a woman have a right — borrowing Giubilini’s and Minerva’s language from their infamous 2013 Journal of Medical Ethics article “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” — to an “after-birth abortion?” De facto, we know such things happen in cases of eugenic infanticide, as former Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam reminded us and as 47 Democratic U.S. senators affirmed (vote record here) last Jan. 22 when they voted against mandating post-birth medical care for a baby surviving a late term abortion.

Hiding in the background of this whole discussion are the irreconcilable contradictions on which Roe was built. That ruling nominally allowed states to outlaw abortion after viability — until the Court wrote so broad an exception for maternal “health” into its rulings that in fact abortion-on-demand was legal under the pretense that, in theory, a pregnancy could be ended without fetal death, e.g., induced delivery.

In the 50 years of the Roe regime, viability as fetal survival had receded almost 20%, from 28 weeks in 1973 to around 20 in 2022. As Sandra Day O’Connor noted back in the 1980s, the viability rule was a criterion ‘on a collision course with itself.” Why? Because if our reproductive technologies ever became sophisticated enough to support extra-uterine gestation (e.g., artificial wombs), then a woman could cease being pregnant without “fetal demise.” Which brings us back to the question of what the “right to abortion” entailed: an end of pregnancy or a dead fetus?

Finally, the last contradiction Roe identified that stalks the adoption/abortion debate is what Harry Blackmun called the relational aspect of the abortion decision. “The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy” (410 US 113 at 159), he opined — before he (and Watson) did exactly that.

Watson rightly recognizes, like it or not, that pregnancy creates relationality: at least at birth, a woman is forever a mother. The error of Roe, which Watson wants to perpetuate, is thinking that abortion can somehow erase that fact. If only she reverts to abortion, she need not endure the forced but removed motherhood adoption brings about. That, of course, requires the stubborn denial of the fact that so many women suffer from post-abortion syndrome precisely because they cannot erase their maternity, even if Watson tries to assuage things by characterizing it merely as “potential motherhood” before birth. Of course, erasure of the relationships pregnancy creates continues: is it not surprising that, even with the barrier of Roe removed, states have hesitated to affirm paternal rights vis-à-vis the abortion decision?

As in the effort to fearmonger among women of reproductive age that getting pregnant in post-Dobbs America is inherently risky business absent the availability of abortion-on-demand, the spreading such disinformation as adoption requires abortion is a conscious effort to forge a nexus of mental necessity between pregnancy and abortion. Just as the pro-life movement seeks to make abortion not just illegal but unthinkable, so abortionists are busy trying paradoxically to make motherhood unthinkable without abortion.

Catholics, of course, are unsurprised by the stubborn fact of pregnancy relationality. They affirm it every day when they recite the Ave: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.” It is only an obstinacy in egocentric isolation, the ‘I’ that considers no relationships but those willingly chosen to be of significance, that imagines those ties can be put asunder.