Its about time I brought up the A-Bomb again. The A word that is everybody’s favorite polarizing political talking point: Abortion! If you haven’t already, please review my opinion on this issue.
I was reading an article (and here) on how bans on abortion don’t actually decrease the amount of abortions actually occurring. Based on the statistics in the above shown graph, we can see that there’s still a pretty large number of abortions occurring even when it is illegal.
The article goes on to talk about the dangers of unsafe abortions to women which many pro-Choice are bound to pick up and use as a reason to have legal safe abortions. To me, that’s a pretty weak argument. Its akin to the argument for legalizing drugs so that people won’t incur any danger in attempt to procure them. I’m all for keeping women alive and healthy, but you can’t use that as leverage for gaining support for an act that is essentially a tragedy for all involved.
Josephine Quintavalle of the anti-abortion Comment on Reproductive Ethics in the UK is quoted in the article as saying:
“Abortion – back street or front street – is not the answer. Ensuring women have the means to end their pregnancies is not liberating them – they should be able to make real choices before they fall pregnant in the first place.”
Pro-Choice and pro-Life in the US should be picking this up, but likely won’t. When it comes to mainstream discussions of this topic most people seem to forget that something has to occur before a child is conceived. Pro-Choice gets wrapped in arguments over women’s rights and pro-Life can’t seem to stop themselves from yelling “baby killer!”.
But if this strategy of contraception is going to be embraced by anyone, it will be the pro-Choice. I doubt pro-Life will ever get behind it in significant numbers because it goes against their unrealistic sexual world view. Abstinence is wonderful and totally realistic, but abstinence only is not. Sometimes, it makes me roll my eyes and wonder if the majority of pro-Life don’t really want to save babies, they just want to make sure the women who want them get severely punished.
I invite you all to prove my cynicsm about your respective camps unjustified. Please, tell me what you’re doing to protect women and stop abortions from occurring. You can tell me off too, but please be nice to each other.
Filed under: American Life, Christianity, Ethics, Social Issues | Tagged: abortion, pro-choice, pro-life
Surrealist, transitioning environmentalist, faux-liberal, wanna be artsy indie hipster, occasional self-hating Neo-Luddite, post-Orientalism constructivist, pro-theist agnostic(ish) Christian and Miami native gone rogue in DC.
Hey — this is ellydisapproves from Twitter.
I think you’re right that the argument about unsafe abortion is incomplete. I personally agree with the “harm reduction” argument for drug decriminalization, but that’s because I also don’t believe illegal drug use is inherently evil. If I did, I *might* be more willing to accept the value of taking a symbolic stance against it. Same with abortion.
The quotation from Josephine Quintavalle is also an incomplete argument to me. She’s right that a lot of pro-choice people (particularly young, white, privileged people) can focus on the right *not* to have children rather than other reproductive rights and issues, like the right to have children at all, the right to refuse obstetric interventions you don’t want, the right to decent medical care, the ability to provide for your children’s basic needs. This has long been a criticism levelled at white feminists by women of colour and there is a lot of validity to it. (I recommend a book called “Killing The Black Body” — kind of a classic on these issues.)
But the thing is, denying women abortion rights didn’t solve those other problems before and it won’t solve them in the future. It will probably make them worse.
Although single-issue abortion-rights organizations exist, most pro-choice organizations and people aren’t single-issue. Planned Parenthood is a major promoter and provider of contraception, for example, despite anti-choice rhetoric about how all they do is push abortions on women and watch the cash roll in. Most pro-choice people do not think of themselves as pro-abortion. I have never met a pro-choice person who was not also pro-contraception and pro-comprehensive sexual education, or who thought having an abortion was preferable to not getting pregnant by accident.
I’ve met lots of anti-abortion people who opposed contraception and science-based sex ed, despite significant evidence that those things reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and hence the number of abortions. This is because for a lot of anti-abortion people, abortion is a symbolic issue: it’s really about sex and about women’s role in society.
I disagree that it’s a bad thing to “get wrapped up in women’s rights.” To me women’s rights are central. In order to force a woman to get pregnant, not get pregnant, stay pregnant, have an abortion, have surgery, etc., etc., you have to believe that principles of bodily autonomy that apply to other people under our legal regimes don’t apply to women vis-a-vis reproduction. This to me is a really big problem.
I hope this link works: http://tinyurl.com/yhexrbz
To me it (an essay called “Are Mothers Persons?” by Susan Bordo) is the best explanation of why I’m pro-choice, and why I think abortion rights are inextricable from other reproductive rights.
The reason I say pro-choice gets wrapped up in women’s rights is because I don’t feel that abortion is strictly a woman’s issue. I think it has the potential to also be a human rights issue. I really liked the link you gave me. It has some really fantastic arguments about informed consent and surgical procedures. I disagree slightly in that the fetus does deserve some kind of legal personhood.
There is most likely a strain of racism in most legislation this issue today, but I’d like to talk pure theory for a moment.
I am of the opinion that a pregnant woman has a dual identity. She is two persons in one body, and the rights of both persons must be respected. It poses a sticky legal situation, but I think a balance can be achieved. I support a woman’s right to choose under special circumstances, but not under any or all circumstances.
If there is a racial inequality in this, which actually sounds more like inequality among classes, then we have to fix it. But the rights of mother and child must be acknowledged in conjuction. For example, if a woman must choose to sacrifice her own life for her child, then that is her choice alone. If we force her to make that sacrifice, then we are the ones doing the killing.
While I support any woman in special circumstance’s choice, I want to make life the better more attractive choice. Which is where all kinds of other rights come in. Abortion rights are fused with reproductive rights, but in the US its also fused with a right to medical care, the child welfare system, and the rights of LGBT families. That’s why I say its more than just a feminist issue.
“I support a woman’s right to choose under special circumstances, but not under any or all circumstances.”
I don’t think this is tenable. If you give the foetus the legal right to remain in another person’s body, using her organs against her will, you are giving foetuses rights that no other person in this society has. I don’t think that can be justified under our current legal system. Doing it in a way that didn’t give foetuses special rights, or severely abridge the rights of people who can get pregnant relative to people who can’t, would require overruling a great deal of jurisprudence about bodily autonomy.
Furthermore, as Bordo writes, giving a foetus legal personhood opens a can of worms. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has detailed a lot of the ways such laws have caused problems for pregnant women. Is drinking alcohol while pregnant an assault against the foetus? Is it serving alcohol to a minor? If a woman doesn’t get proper nutrition or prenatal care while pregnant, should she be charged with child endangerment? If she drives recklessly, gets into an accident, and miscarries, is that negligent homicide?
This isn’t abstract: women are being charged criminally right now for acts that would be legal or carry much lesser penalties if they weren’t pregnant. I just don’t see how this is productive or just.
Most laws these days are not racist on paper, but in application. I disagree that these are really class issues. Sterilization abuse, for example, has been much more rampant against women of colour, and there is evidence that pregnant white women and pregnant women of colour are still treated differently in ways that have little to do with income.
I’m not clear on what abortion rights specifically have to do with the rights of LGBT families, except inasmuch as there are people in LGBT families who get pregnant.
You pose some very good legal arguments. Perhaps a legal status of personhood is not practical. The fetus has to have some sort of legal status. If a pregnant woman is murdered, I would want the killer to be charged with 2 murders. But then that might go back to the idea of consent.
But about a fetus using the mother’s body against her will, I assume that would apply to any woman with an unwanted pregnancy. Are you saying that any unwanted fetus can be aborted under any circumstance?
I ascribe to the philosophy of nonviolence. I wouldn’t say that I am nonviolent, because I think it is a process of unlearning a lot of things and I am in very early stages. I have a lot to figure out. But because of this conviction, I cannot support abortion indiscriminately. A fetus is a life and life must be affirmed. I will support a victim’s right to choose, and a mother in danger’s right to choose. I would want them to choose life, but I can’t judge their decision. That may not fit into nonviolence exactly, but that gives some background to my personal conviction.
LGBT families factor in because of gay adoption. But that might just fall under the category of the child welfare system.