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FOUR ROCK-SOLID REASONS WHY ABORTION SHOULD BE LEGAL
Under all the angst, the abortion debate isn’t really about when life begins. It’s a dispute over who has a right to violence, on whom, and why.
In the laws of most states, democratic or otherwise, citizens have the right to violence to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their property.
The state has the right to violence on its own citizens to maintain civic order.
But does the state’s right to violence on a woman (in this case, forcing her to give birth) override the woman’s right to violence on the embryo growing in her body without her consent? In other words, is a woman first and foremost a person—an individual with the civically protected right to defend herself—or a resource of the state (and/or of her husband, or whatever man or men beget her children)?
Clearly the answer to that depends on what kind of government you live under and how its laws are constituted. But even in a democracy, when it comes to dealing with the various injustices to which the structure of a gestatory body leaves women vulnerable, the law is a poor instrument, being built firmly on the notion of the person—in particular, the citizen—as male.
A woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy often feels it as an assault, an invasion. Even women who want to bear and raise children sometimes hate the process of pregnancy, describing the embryo as a parasite overtaking their body. If the baby is wanted, the mother puts up with the massive incursion that pregnancy constitutes—if she’s lucky she may even enjoy it. But an involuntary pregnancy is experienced by the pregnant woman as a crime against her person—a crime with no criminal, if the father isn’t guilty of violation or deception. The law struggles here—not just because it’s a punitive system that sees justice as best served by finding and punishing a culprit rather than negotiating between complex and conflicting priorities to solve a problem, but because all the principles on which the law is based are predicated on the masculine body—on the integrity of the individual and their bodily autonomy; a concept that dissolves in the face of pregnancy.
As a result, the historical tendency is to put women’s rights in the too-hard basket—if you can’t be like men, you don’t deserve civic protections. For example, the law can’t accommodate the argument that an unwanted pregnancy is an assault on the mother by the new life, because the law says that only persons can commit assault, and then only by intent or recklessness, not by accident. We surely can’t hold that the zygote has enough will to act by intent or enough responsibility to be reckless—it isn’t a person yet.
Anti-abortionists who claim the zygote is a person want it both ways: they want that potential person to have all the rights but none of the responsibilities of an actual person. But even children are subject to the law, and the forced colonisation of another person’s body for your own gain is surely a serious offence—whether you are the father, the state, or the child. Or at least, it would be, if we could get a clear sense that women, despite their more fluid personal boundaries, are as much sovereign beings as men, entitled to the same human rights, and the same citizens’ rights.
So in the end, the important question is: should a woman have the right to defend herself against the invasion of her body by a new life? There’s another whole discussion here about how patriarchy strips women of all right to violence and grants men an excess of justification, but the short answer is that if you regard women as entitled to the same basic rights of sovereignty and self-defence as men, then you must accept the utility of abortion.
Consenting to sex is not, by definition, consenting to impregnation—birth control methods fail, sexual partners lie; it isn’t always possible to manage the risks in the heat of arousal.
Sex is a powerful drive—for women in their way as much as for men in theirs. Despite strong disincentives both biological and cultural, women are impelled to have sex by desires as potent, if mostly not as violent, as men’s. I assure you, gentlemen, if your experience is that women don’t really enjoy sex, then you’re doing it wrong. Be a little humble; ask her advice, because in the right circumstances, we’re crazy for it—and those circumstances have very often less than nothing to do with wanting to conceive. Claiming that women who don’t want to conceive should simply not have sex is like saying that people who don’t want to get food poisoning should just never eat.
Because—and this may surprise you—a single act of copulation has on average only a 5% chance of resulting in conception. Depending on when during a woman’s menstrual cycle it occurs, the chance of conception drops to 3% and never rises above 42%. So we have a guaranteed more-than-fair chance of not falling pregnant any time we have sex. Losing that gamble means hard decisions down the line—it shouldn’t mean losing your civically-ordained right to autonomy and self-determination.
But there’s an even more insidious aspect to the argument that sexual abstinence is a proper substitute for abortion. It places all the responsibility for prevention on the woman—to override her own libido and that of any interested man, to manage the terms and the timing of every sexual engagement, and to bear the consequences of any and every failure. Hardline anti-abortionists refuse the termination of a pregnancy under any circumstances—in Alabama in the United States, a 12-year-old girl raped by her father must bring the baby to term—but even making an exemption for rape depends on proving the crime. Do you know what percentage of reported rapes result in a conviction? In Australia it’s around 1.5%. In England it’s below 1%. In practice, the abuse of women is far better protected than the safety of women.
The “life begins at conception” argument depends on several false assumptions.
We value different kinds of life very differently—we think little or nothing of killing plants, insects, animals bred for their meat, or animals that threaten us—but, as a first principle, we generally agree that every human being has the right to life. In some charters this is elaborated as the right to life, liberty and security of person, and straightaway we see again the unexamined gendering of rights: not everyone agrees that women are entitled to either liberty or security of person. In fact, some people take the right to life so seriously that they mandate the violation of a woman’s right to liberty and security of person in order to protect the right to life of a clump of cells.
According to the Modern Fertility blog, “Most medical professionals agree that a fertilized egg does not equal successful conception.” The sperm usually meets and fertilises the egg in one of the woman’s fallopian tubes. It then takes around six to ten days—cells dividing and multiplying all the time—for the fertilized egg to travel down into the uterus where it digs itself into the uterine lining, and only once that implantation has occurred is conception complete. But the womb sets a chemical test that scientists describe as an “entrance exam”, designed to detect embryos with significant genetic abnormalities and refuse them implantation. Human embryos are genetically very diverse, and a significant proportion have mutations that impair normal development. If the womb’s “entrance exam” is set at the right level, these unviable embryos are refused implantation; if it’s set a little low, implantation may occur only to result in miscarriage later. Between one-third and half of all embryos do not implant, so a fertilised egg is evidently not the sacred vessel of a human soul that anti-abortionists like to claim.
It is entirely unreasonable to prevent a woman from making the same decisions about viability consciously and with regard to her circumstances that her body is making unconsciously.
When I fell pregnant in my early thirties, it was the worst possible time. I was in the middle of a divorce, and halfway through a university degree. I was using contraception; it failed. There was no question of having this child—I did not want it, I could not accommodate it in my life, and I did not for one second believe I should have to. Do not let anyone tell you that abortion is always traumatic—it is not. There are really only three circumstances that can make abortion traumatic: if you really want the baby but know your situation makes it impossible or unsafe; if the process you have to go through is illegal, unsafe, unclean or degrading; or if people convince you that you don’t have the right to manage your own fertility. I was very fortunate not to be in any of those situations. I had time to think. I had excellent medical care. I knew my options and my rights. I had a solemn conversation with the emerging soul that had mysteriously taken up residence in my belly, expressed my respect and my regrets, and sent it back where it came from.
Even the Bible says there is a time to kill.
Banning abortion leaves human women with less control over their lives or the health of their offspring than animals in the wild have.
Lacking the means to prevent conception or gestation, female mammals in the wild will kill their own young when they find themselves giving birth in circumstances that make raising young impossible, or dangerous to the mother. This crude but essential level of family planning is entirely natural and instinctive—a normal and healthy parental response to crisis that shows how much power mothers have when society doesn’t get in the way. Of course, society hasn’t always been anti-abortion; in fact, even patriarchy left women’s business largely to women until the emergence of doctors, who got it into their heads that the management of pregnancy was their business and not to be trusted to women.
The truth is, abortion by various methods (mostly herbal abortifacients) has been practised for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, and, in English-speaking countries at least, it was legal (or effectively legal) until the 1800s. I could do an entire video just looking at why this timeless and essential procedure happened to be outlawed just a few years after the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and remained widely illegal until second wave feminism was in full swing in the 1970s. It would seem that the loss, or threatened loss, of women’s right to manage their own fertility today is a resurgence of the repressive, imperialist patriarchy of the Victorian era—intended not to protect new life but to maintain and entrench the civic disempowerment of women.