Let’s Talk About Abortion
Published by Lisa Kansas August 14th, 2008 in Bodily Autonomy, Reproductive Rights, Rights? What rights?, Shame on you for being a woman, We caught a troll and he was THIS DUMBMaybe it’s because it’s an election year, but I’ve been feeling outright pounded by abortion news lately. To wit:
WSJ:
The American Psychological Association said Wednesday there is “no credible evidence” that a single, elective abortion causes mental-health problems for adult women.
The report, which came after a two-year review of published research, was anticipated by both supporters and opponents of legal abortion.
Women’s psychological reaction to the procedure has become a key issue in the abortion debate, with some judges and lawmakers citing mental-health concerns as reason to impose restrictions on abortion.
Two years after a strict abortion ban [in South Dakota] was overturned by voters, backers have brought a similar measure — but one laced with complexities that could bode well for its passage, and ultimately could bring about the challenge to Roe v. Wade desired by abortion foes nationwide.
The Democratic Party is planning a convention designed to soften the edges on the party’s support for abortion rights, with a revamped platform and a speaking lineup that reinforces efforts to broaden Democrats’ appeal on the hot-button issue.
In a statement fraught with symbolism for those on both sides of the abortion debate, Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., an abortion-rights opponent, will be given a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Denver later this month.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt has denied that a controversial draft regulation would redefine common birth control methods as abortion and protect the rights of doctors and other health-care workers who refuse to provide them.
According to the language in a draft of the regulation that leaked last month, the rule would apply to anyone who participates in “any activity with a logical connection to a procedure, health service or health service program, or research activity. . . . This includes referral, training and other arrangements of the procedure, health service, or research activity.”
One section of the draft regulation defines abortion as “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”
John McCain yesterday said he would not rule out picking a pro-choice running mate, a move seen as a boost for former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who joined the presumptive GOP nominee for two days of campaign events in his home state.
In Colorado voters are being asked whether human “personhood” begins at conception. If passed, that measure would make Colorado the first state to outlaw abortion outright since the Roe court ruling.
The Colorado ban has secured endorsements from “over 70″ anti-abortion physicians, according to its backers. But in the state’s closely fought Senate race, both Democratic candidate Mark Udall and self-described “pro-life” Republican Bob Schaffer are opposing the ban.
“I think there are other strategies and tactics that get us far closer to advancing the cause of human life,” Schaffer told a local Colorado radio station this month.
I have known many women in my lifetime thus far well enough to know intimately and truly how each felt about abortion and what role abortion played in her life. I have known a 15 year old who got an abortion and a 42 year old who got an abortion. I have known women who have never had an abortion; I have known some who say they never would and some who say they always would and some who say they maybe would and maybe wouldn’t. I have known women who’ve had one abortion. I have known women who’ve had two or three abortions. I have known a woman who had over ten abortions. I have known women who thought it was murder and women who thought it was the moral equivalent of a root canal and women who thought it was every shade of gray in-between. I have known single women who had an abortion; I have known married women who had an abortion. I have known childless women who had an abortion and women with children who had an abortion. I have known women who wept in the night over their abortion, some with regret and some with relief. I have known women who rarely thought about theirs at all for either good or ill. I have seen women screaming in each others’ faces across picket lines, placards splashing bloody horrors of corpses both fetal and female adult.
This is how I feel about abortion. For me, it flows quite naturally from my feelings about rape, and capital punishment, and end-of-life issues, and any number of other situations that impact the holy grail that is our bodily autonomy.
No one has any right to your body but you. Your body is the one and only thing in your life that is unquestionably yours, that absolutely can never be “made up” to you in any way, shape or form should you lose it or should it be taken from you in any way. Your body, and everything inside it, must belong absolutely and only to you. There is no way that anyone else’s “right” to any part of your body whatsoever can ever trump your moral right to always and forever at any moment in time whatsoever decide what is being done with it.
What that means is, if you give someone permission to touch your body, that permission can be withdrawn at any time. There is no permission that gives anyone a right to the use of any part of your body that you can’t withdraw instantly and forever if you so choose. If you want to end your own life, nobody has any right whatsoever to prevent you from doing so; it’s your body. Nobody else has any right to ever end your life against your will; it’s your life. If you want to donate organs, you should not be hampered in the slightest; if you don’t want to, absolutely NOBODY gets to require that you do so by force. And most notably in the context of abortion, if you choose to use your uterus to cultivate another human life, that is ONLY and ABSOLUTELY and FOREVER your own choice, and as long as your uterus is being used for this situation, you have complete and total control over the course and duration of its use. If at any point you decide you are done with the situation, then that’s that. There is no further moral argument that can be brought to bear that supercedes your absolute right to control of your body, your organs, your life.
Naturally there are a multitude of individuals who don’t agree with me at all, generally referred to as “pro-lifers.” I’d be completely fine with their non-agreement, as I am all about free speech and diversity and suchlike, if they weren’t so interested in forcing their non-agreement down my throat via the power of law. Most of their arguments are absolutely meaningless to me–no, I don’t believe in your particular mythology and it’s laughable that you’d think I’d ever agree to follow rules based upon it; no, I am not willing to believe in your assertions that abortion is worse for my health in any number of ways than staying pregnant would be, given that the actual peer-reviewed medical research contradicts those claims in nearly every possible situation; no, I don’t believe that you know better than I do how I would feel if I had an abortion and I should therefore follow your dictates in that situation rather than my own–the vast majority of the time you don’t even know me as a person on a casual level, much less a deeper one. However, once in a while, said “pro-lifers” make an argument that lands somewhere near enough my own moral beliefs that it does seem actually worthwhile to address it, though I usually doubt that the argument’s really being made in good faith–I strongly suspect there’s some Goddie-driven reason behind the apparent attempt to address the situation as a logical and secular moral issue.
Over at Pandagon they have caught a troll with the charming name of “Progressive Prince.” (Gotta love it. Oh Sigh!) He put forth the following argument against abortion:
Virtually every woman who is pregnant is in that state because of a choice she made - the consequences of which she was very likely aware. On the other hand, if you need precious life-saving blood from me I am in no way responsible for you being in that situation of need. If for some reason I am responsible I should be forced to provide you with that blood.
Let’s take a look at that.
One thing that these types seem to regularly forget is that virtually every woman who is pregnant is in that state because of a choice they made. Not a choice she made. It’s sad that the they does require spelling out, but I’m willing to do so for the sake of total clarity…human beings don’t engage in spontaneous parthenogenesis. Behind virtually every pregnancy is indeed a woman’s actions leading up to it…and a man’s. (Seriously, folks, isn’t it sad how many of them need to be regularly reminded of this?) I am a big fan of justice and fairness and so forth, and his argument here is that because a specific woman caused this embryo to exist, she then owes it the use of her body in the name of said justice and fairness. A fine argument. However, the exact same amount of owing is incumbent upon the man fathering said embryo. Which means that the situation is NEVER going to be “fair” or “just,” any more than if a couple, a man and a woman, were both equally responsible, both held the knife that cut another person’s throat, but we only ever punished the woman for it–would anyone ever agree that such a situation was ever “just?” So, since the situation cannot ever be judged in terms of consequences in any way that would EVER be fair, I’m afraid that we can’t base how we choose to handle the morality of the situation on this “fairness.”
The second problem with this argument is that we don’t currently use that criteria to judge what anyone owes anyone else, either–if you do go and cut someone’s throat, and they need massive blood transfusions to survive, regardless of what impact that might or might not have on your health, there is no one anywhere who will ever attempt to force you by law or outside of it to provide that blood to that person. I cannot follow the moral reasoning that makes a singular exception out of the situation of a woman having sex, which is not even a CRIME, folks, and getting pregnant, which is not even a voluntary biological function under her control as, for instance, putting a knife to someone’s throat and slitting it is, as the one and only situation where the individual’s actual body is required as “payment” for that action.
In the past I always preferred to believe that the majority of “pro-lifers” were simple and misguided types…but I notice as I get older, my patience at the lack of any real, deep thought on the topic displayed by them makes me less and less sympathetic towards them and more and more likely to simply walk away from any one-on-one interaction and confine my energy expenditures to fighting against them on a legal and political basis only. I also used to wait for that one argument that really made sense, that was not fairly easily answered with full moral comfort and logical progression–but I haven’t yet enountered that either. Maybe it doesn’t exist…and I’m right and they’re wrong–not just a kind of wrong but completely wrong, and THEIRS is the immoral point of view. Now, there’s a novel idea.
It’s the election. They’re hammering out the platform on this in the Democratic Party, it’s one of the most contentious issues, so it’s everywhere. Everyone is just sure that with the right wording, they’ll win over the mushy middle. Sadly, there’s truth to that—the mushy middle is easily distracted and is pro-choice when you say “women” and anti-choice when you say “baby”.
Behind virtually every pregnancy is indeed a woman’s actions leading up to it…and a man’s.
Yeah, but his behavior is irrelevant. Or, to put it another way, in the eyes of people like PP, sexual intercourse is a reenactment of male dominance. A man—the dominant one, the one who conquers your body with his penis—wins, and a woman loses. And she knew that she was going to “lose” (be penetrated, perhaps impregnated) when she yielded her body to her new lord and master. It’s her fault for being so stupid.
The idea that women have sex with the idea of it being an egalitarian sharing of pleasure is beyond the imagination of men like that. I think it’s because those sort of women don’t sleep with them, out of a reasonable sense of self-preservation. Of course, that only makes guys like PP more desperate to get someone pregnant so she has to marry him. How else is he going to lock it down with his repulsive personality?
One thing that these types seem to regularly forget is that virtually every woman who is pregnant is in that state because of a choice they made. Not a choice she made.
Men don’t have a choice but to stick their dicks into women. It’s up to the woman to make a moral choice and say yes or no (preferably no), so it’s her decision and hers alone.
…that said, ‘my body, my choice’ arguments have it that the ultimate choice about abortion rests with the woman, because anything else would be a horror. My body is not a democracy. So, if we do want to talk about the choice men make at the time of intercourse, how best can the pro-choice movement frame that?
I usually hate to play this game because it implies that there are conditions under which a woman can be deemed to have not been “trying hard enough” not to get pregnant, but I must object to the Prince’s statement.
“Virtually every woman who is pregnant is in that state because of a choice she made - the consequences of which she was very likely aware.”
Huh? Virtually every woman I’ve ever known or heard of who wanted an abortion in the USA:
was raped.
had a condom break.
had sex with a man who wasn’t as good at pulling out as he thought he was.
had hormonal birth control or other medical intervention aimed at preventing pregnancy fail.
had no knowledge of the facts concerning her own body as a result of poor sexual education and therefore thought that birth control/condoms didn’t work so she shouldn’t bother.
had no knowledge of the facts concerning her own body as a result of poor sexual education and therefore thought that non-penetrative sex would not result in pregnancy.
had no knowledge of the facts concerning her own body as a result of poor sexual education and therefore thought that pulling out was sufficient birth control.
was afraid to ask their boyfriend to use a condom.
was being controlled by a domineering partner who managed to imply that she wouldn’t use a condom if she really loved and trusted him.
was convinced by a lying and/or confused partner that she would have help and support in raising any resulting babies only to be abandoned shortly thereafter.
wanted a baby but discovered that the fetus she was carrying would have become a baby with severe congenital emotional/mental problems.
didn’t know how much time and money it would take to care for a baby at the time when she got pregnant.
had a change in circumstances between conception and becoming aware of her pregnancy that left her less able to care for another human being.
was really a kid and wasn’t really emotionally mature enough to make an informed decision.
was really a kid who didn’t want her parents to find any condoms or birth control in the house
was really a kid who was too embarrassed to buy condoms in a store in a country where their decision to have sex meant that everybody was judging them
was poor and didn’t live close enough to a place which provided free or cheap condoms or birth control to have real access to either
was so brainwashed by religion that she literally believed she might be tortured by a pointy-eared red guy for millenia after death for using a condom
was going through a pretty tough time emotionally and had unprotected sex which might result in pregnancy or STIs as a way of engaging in self-destructive, risky behaviors.
was a street-level or otherwise extremely vulnerable and underpaid prostitute and needed the extra money she got from unprotected sex.
__________________________________________________________________
The list goes on, but you get the idea. To say that women who didn’t want babies made the free and informed choice to engage in completely unprotected sex ignores how unfree and uninformed these choices actually are. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, The Prince’s statement is not all that different from saying “Women use abortions as birth control.” It just tries to paint the women who get abortions as careless stupid sluts who wouldn’t even need this procedure if they could just wise up and learn to take the proper precautions.
I know I can’t be alone in thinking that even if abortion did cause mental health problems in a significant number of women, that’s not in itself a good enough reason to restrict it.
Women choose to get pregnant by choosing to have sex just like men choose to have wrecks by choosing to get behind the wheels of those automobiles — therefore, obviously, no fella should be treated for any sort of automobile accident. Hey, they wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel if they didn’t want to die on the highway! Harvest their organs instead, I say. (How is Prince’s argument different, exactly?)
Women don’t choose to be born with a uterus, so we can dispense with the nonsense that women choose to be at risk.
It is quite evil to suggest or advocate that women should have no legal recourse to seek medical care to mitigate harm to their bodies and an infringement upon their liberty. That this is even a matter of “discussion” is repugnant and demonstrates how little we have advanced in our quest towards civilization.
“My body is not a democracy”
Yes. I have been trying to put into words why it pisses me off to even call it “the abortion debate.” Because it is not an area where debate is relevant. You can bloviate about what you think I should have for lunch but you don’t get an ACTUAL VOTE and if you think you should have some ACTUAL POWER over the decision then there is something very wrong with how you see me and yourself in relation to me. I am a soverign human being and my decisions about my body are unilateral, thank you very much.
My body is not a democracy. I’m gonna use that.
“I know I can’t be alone in thinking that even if abortion did cause mental health problems in a significant number of women, that’s not in itself a good enough reason to restrict it.”
Couldn’t be more of a risk than pregnancy itself. Postpartum depression anyone?
Sorry I’m late to the discussion, but…
Well, the obvious devil’s-advocate rejoinder here is: why doesn’t that apply to the fetus (or, at what point does it start to apply)?
Clearly the right to life of a recently-implanted egg patch on a uterine wall doesn’t trump a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, but it would also clearly be wrong to terminate a pregnancy a week before the due date.
There’s clearly a transition from “moral equivalent of a root canal” towards “murder” as the pregnancy hums along, and there’s not really ever a sharp dividing line, a turning point where one can say “Aha, yesterday it would’ve been fine but NOW it is wrong to abort!” Even using viability-outside-the-womb as the standard doesn’t take away the shades of gray.
Actually, there’s nothing “clear” about that statement. It is far too blanket of a statement: there are health decisions to make about the mother in the fetus. Now, the real question from the legal stance is when does the court’s interest in the developing life trump the bodily autonomy issues. It sucks, but that’s what the court’s determination ends up being.
Delagar said
“Women choose to get pregnant by choosing to have sex just like men choose to have wrecks by choosing to get behind the wheels of those automobiles — therefore, obviously, no fella should be treated for any sort of automobile accident. Hey, they wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel if they didn’t want to die on the highway! Harvest their organs instead, I say. (How is Prince’s argument different, exactly)?”
response:
It is easy. Would we treat the injuries of a drunk driver who caused the need of another for blood? Yes. Does that negate his obligation to provide the blood he caused the need for (according to Prince’s view)? No.
We can mitigate the natural consequences of our actions as they affect ourselves. However, this does not negate the obligations towards others that arise from our actions.
Since the woman is the only one who can provide for the child’s neediness, she must be the one to do it. Perhaps nature is not fair, but that does not negate her obligation.
Laws against abortion are not punishment for sex anymore than child support laws are. The sacrifices are different, but illustrate the same principle. Neither are retributive. They both merely require one to fulfill a need one created.
I agree with Prince. I have never understood absolute bodily autonomy. It only makes sense that since we are free-willed creatures, we can incur responsibilities than trump our rights.
JB said
“Women don’t choose to be born with a uterus, so we can dispense with the nonsense that women choose to be at risk.
It is quite evil to suggest or advocate that women should have no legal recourse to seek medical care to mitigate harm to their bodies and an infringement upon their liberty. That this is even a matter of “discussion” is repugnant and demonstrates how little we have advanced in our quest towards civilization.”
response:
The only reason this is up for debate if because another life the woman induced the existence/neediness of hangs in the balance.
Intent has no relevance here. To argue that one can opt out of responsibility if one lacks absolute control over every aspect of the outcome would to effectively end personal responsibility. A speeder does not choose to have other people to be on the road, but he/she is still responsible if he/she hits them.
Likewise, the fact that the woman did not choose for her body to be ordered towards creating beings that depend on her uterus has no effect on her obligation to assist the beings she induces the creation of (regardless of her intent).
Mike-
That drunk driver that causes another to need blood? He is not legally responsible to give it. That is the long and short of it: we have NO OTHER situation where the law compels you donate your organs and fluids to someone else (giving to you the idea that a fetus is another person, which I honestly don’t think it is).
Antigone-
The law should compel the drunk driver to give the blood (or the kidney). The reason it does not happen is that the situation is very rare and one must worry about compatibility and suitability of the organs or blood (making it even less applicable).
I have never seen a convincing moral argument against forced donations in those cases (merely asserting “bodily integrity” is not an argument).