Charlotte Greig on evolving abortion considerations.

“I do remember reading Heidegger, about the subject and object relation, which is quite abstruse and in way seems to be quite divorced from one’s everyday experience. I think I didn’t understand it at the time. But then I did this course in existential psychotherapy.”

What Greig found was that, surprisingly, Heidegger threw light on the central dilemma of her novel: whether to have an abortion.

“I was interested in that abortion debate and it has changed, because it used to be, as I remember, about the rights of women, and it was about whether women could be sexually licentious and not obey their husbands. By giving women the pill you were giving them freedom, basically, and there were a lot of people who thought that was wrong. When I went to Sussex the abortion laws were only about five or six years old. We take it for granted now but it was still a very new triumph for women to have that so we were all very protective about it.

“But I always remember feeling there was something wrong about that. There’s long speech by Fiona in the novel, when she says it’s like having a tooth out, and you just don’t go into the moral dilemma of it, because it’s so easy to play into the hands of what we now call pro-lifers.

“Nowadays the whole debate has changed to the rights of the foetus, which wasn’t really considered in those days. But I still thing that whole way of looking at it, of rights, of the rights of the woman and the rights of the foetus, is the wrong way to look at it and I think Heidegger gives you a way through that. The Heidegger is in there for ontological reasons really, that’s to say it’s all a continuum, the baby is attached to you, it is one being, and then there’s the social world outside, and the environment, and this is all something which is connected and you have weigh it all up together.”

  ¶ 8:30 PM