Abortion is one of the hot topics du jour—unfortunately one of ten or twenty that are now crowding each other for center stage. Indeed, America is riddled with social problems and plagued by a tearing of the social fabric that holds this heterogeneous and highly class-based country together. Though gun violence, the vast Right-wing conspiracy to subvert democracy in 2020-2022, and economic troubles do prey on my mind, I think abortion is quite relevant to values—and therefore it concerns me here on this blog.
Indeed, abortion is all about values: First and foremost, the right a woman has to control her own body (autonomy, or privacy, or freedom, or equality, perhaps).
Secondly, the so-called rights of the unborn child. I don’t think that is a cut-and-dried use of the phrase, and I think it is arguable if we are talking about “a life that is so legally and physiologically sound that it has rights under natural law, or the United States Constitution,” but I’m adopting the dubious verbiage used by conservatives for the time being.
These values conflict. Whether it is right for government to be involved in this decision is a live question (let’s face it, what the 2022 SCOTUS did was very heavy-handed, and smacks of “judicial activism”—a term the Right tried to saddle the Left with for many decades now). However, I would say that whether government has a justification to interfere with the freedom of a woman to choose (note the use of the word freedom, which is a cardinal virtue to conservatives and libertarians) is based largely on whether or not the fetus is “a child, a person with rights of their own.”
That is, if the fetus is an as yet unborn human being, a person, a viable entity deserving of full rights under United States law, then it is wrong to euthanize it. This is more complicated than it even seems (and it did seem complicated!) because of this fact: if a woman is forced to carry a fetus to full term (or viability, perhaps) then the woman has proportionally fewer rights than the fetus because she has to suffer through a pregnancy in order to serve the best interests of the fetus. This “duty to act as host to a lifeform” was brought to the fore in the haunting look at the rights of a woman, The Handmaid’s Tale.
When values conflict, it is complicated. When today’s Republican Party gets involved in such spaces, things can get pretty bizarre pretty quickly.
Much of this whole issue hinges on whether the fetus is an “unborn child; a human being; a future citizen deserving of a right to be cared for that impinges on the rights of the host (the mother).” If someone came up to you on the street, handed you a little gizmo and said, “Inside this tiny machine is a tiny life form. It is alive and it is a future United States citizen, but it cannot yet live on its own. You are now responsible for caring for this entity, and if you fail you will be considered a murderer,” you would flip your lid. You would feel used and abused. It is like a head-spinningly absurd version of the task most of us had back in Home Econ in high school: carry around an egg for a week without losing it, breaking it, abusing it, or forgetting about it.
The mandate by the capital-S State that a class of citizen be mandated to carry a fetus to viability (at which point what, they are also required to raise it until at least age 18) is a heavy, heavy burden. It subverts the rights of that class of citizen (i.e., women) big-time. It makes the unborn entity of the highest level of rights and benefits: being cared for for approximately 19 years, financially, morally, and in all other ways. To do this to a person requires an overriding principle…..
And that overriding principle can only be one of two things (well, let’s say one thing: 1.a. and 1.b.): First, that the fetus is a human being, is viable, is a person, is a future American citizen. And second, that God mandates that this is a life that must be held to be sacrosanct. And then there are three corollaries also worth noting.
Point #1: The viability of the fetus is certainly in question. Otherwise, as soon as the zygote began to divide (day 1) it is “a life” and therefore though it could fit into the circle of the letter “p”, it is overriding of the rights of the female—inarguably a person, and a United States citizen.
Point #2: The vast majority of folks who are against the right of a woman to choose, in concert with her doctor, base their opinion on emotion, and on religion. That is, they picture in their mind’s eye that this is a viable human being, a person, not a kind of growth on the uterus of a female citizen. As well, they get their value system (by and large) from the Christian religion. They believe that God has spoken to mankind through the Old and New Testaments, and through the Q’Uran, and is involved in the lives of each life form: every rat, every cat, every bat, every fetus, and every human being. They believe that God impregnated Mary with baby Jesus, and they believe that the Earth is 6,000+ years old, and they believe in miracles and divine intervention and all that. READ: very tenuous material (from a philosophical perspective, and certainly from a legal standpoint). Yet, this stuff is the animating force behind most of the emotion-laden nuances in the mind of anti-abortion partisans in this country.
To sum up: it is not ethically clear that it is a person we are discussing here, but it is clear that the rights of the female United States citizen are being usurped. It is not clear that it is wrong to do a first- or second-trimester abortion because the woman has the ultimate right to her body—save for any justifiable, overriding claim that is in opposition to that. The claim never comes from a person who can speak or argue or be represented in a court of law because the fetus cannot speak, it cannot see, it cannot read, and it cannot pay for representation. It comes from a mass of cells that has life, but not viability.
Note that newts have life, yet their rights do not supersede those of the woman. Heck, according to many conservatives, no animal has rights—save for Homo sapiens. Us, not coincidentally. You can tell this by virtue of the fact that almost all big game hunters (those jerk-offs photographed with a dead lion or other precious wild animal) are conservatives, and that environmental protections and species conservation is typically opposed by conservatives (in favor of the competing interests of profit, and the rights of autonomy claimed to belong to humans who have capital to invest).
Corollary 1 is worth noting. That is, those on the Right who would find it justifiable to force a bona fide person, a citizen, to carry a dubious life to full term, often do not make exceptions in the case of rape or incest. This really strains the theory of usurping the rights of the woman in favor of the fetus!
Corollary 2 is also important. By and large, the conservatives who wish government to now tell women what it can and cannot do kind of flies in the face of other claims to rights made by conservatives, does it not? That is, with the right to own all manner of weaponry, the Right says, essentially, “The United States government (and the governments of the fifty states) have no justification to prohibit citizens from buying an unlimited number of these devices made of metal and plastic that can be used for hunting or sport, but can also be used to kill children, cause suicides, and commit the rising tide of mass murder/domestic terrorism!” They base this on the dubious, mostly debunked rights read into the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Or they say, “The rights of the many do not outweigh the rights of the few!” You can see this clearly in regard to the way that laws are generally written and upheld by courts to favor the wealthy and powerful, or the way in which the rights of all life on the planet are subordinated to the rights of those who own cars, own cows, own coal-fired power plants, etc. If the Right cared to conserve the planet for habitation in the future, they would curtail the rights of the makers of cars and oil extraction outfits and fracking companies in favor of the rights of the citizens (and, ironically, the rights of future, unborn citizens).
Finally, I would note that conservatives have made very little effort (or sacrifice) when it comes to helping those women whom they essentially are making into “involuntary hosts of the unborn” to successfully raise the fetus to a human being, age 18. Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor-Greene are not going to do jack shit to make the lives of the mothers easier. They are happy to have their adolescent children fight in the military (typically, to further the Right’s or corporations’ best interests), or put the adolescent children in prison, or for the youngsters to work menial jobs at their country clubs and coffee shops—but ample birth control and sex education are not provided to children and adolescents; subsidized or free daycare for kids is a “No”; good and well-funded public schools is not typically a high goal in the minds of conservative lawmakers; universal healthcare or paid parental leave are not being clamored for by anyone with power on the right.
In short, George Carlin was not far off when he satirized conservatives with these ideas:
Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach “military age”. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life… pro-life… These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it. They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state. Pro-life…! You don’t see many of these white anti-abortion women volunteering to have any black fetuses transplanted into their uteruses, do you? No, you don’t see them adopting a whole lot of crack babies, do you? No, that might be something Christ would do.
I also couldn’t say it any better than the following, also by Carlin (which can be read in its entirety here):
Now, is a fetus a human being? This seems to be the central question. Well, if a fetus is a human being, how come the census doesn’t count them? If a fetus is a human being, how come when there’s a miscarriage they don’t have a funeral? If a fetus is a human being, how come people say “we have two children and one on the way” instead of saying “we have three children?” People say life begins at conception, I say life began about a billion years ago and it’s a continuous process. Continuous, just keeps rolling along. Rolling, rolling, rolling along.
You can go back further than that. What about the carbon atoms?? Human life could not exist without carbon. So is it just possible that maybe we shouldn’t be burning all this coal? Just looking for a little consistency here in these anti-abortion arguments. See the really hardcore people will tell you life begins at fertilization. Fertilization: when the sperm fertilizes the egg. Which is usually a few moments after the man says “Gee, honey, I was going to pull out but the phone rang and it startled me.”
And here is his coup de grâce:
Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.
Ah, I miss that man!
It is inarguably true that more unwanted children equals more stress on mothers, and can lead in five, ten, or twenty years to more expenditure needed to combat issues like poor educational performance, higher crime rates, and the perpetuation of single motherhood. We’re spending more money later to deal with problems that never had to occur in the first place. And, of course, a certain percentage of women in states that criminalize abortion will be unable to travel to another state for the abortion procedure, and a sizable minority of women will choose to induce an abortion at home (which can lead to awful outcomes). To conservatives I would say: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES my friends, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
All this is to say that it’s pretty shaky ground on which today’s conservatives stand (and those from the 1980s, when Carlin was making his points) when criminalizing abortion: religion, revealed knowledge, dubious claims about what a person is, beliefs that once a zygote forms life is sacrosanct and the woman becomes essentially a host, that rape and incest are not exceptions, etc. etc.
I would admit that the strongest points conservatives make about outlawing the right to choose an abortion are the following: third trimester abortions are inappropriate and unnecessary, that more women should be discouraged from having abortions, that a fetus is technically alive (in the same sense that an amoeba is alive). I acknowledge that women tend to be emotionally (and sometimes, physically) scarred by the procedure. I totally understand when conservatives point to the fact that some women who have multiple abortions are just not getting it. I do appreciate that if one were to visually witness a 28-week-old fetus just after it was extracted from the uterus of the woman, it would be mind-blowingly shocking.
Those points do hold some water. However, in general the Right just cobbles together dubious biological science claims, tolerates hypocrisy, appeals to religious dogma, moves toward outlawing the “day after pill” and even contraception (source), doesn’t drastically increase social services and such in the wake of pretty draconian usurpations of the liberty enjoyed by female citizens, and an interest in subordinating the rights of female citizens to a few males with more political power. I get it, it fires up the base—and a fired up base will come out to vote, allowing the conservatives to run the rest of their benighted (and now largely corrupt) agenda. It’s about power and money and minority rule more than it is the rights of unborn children.
Indeed, it strains credulity to say that five conservatives in the most elite institution in the country (i.e., the SCOTUS) (and note that conservatives typically disparage elitism, and “big government” moves) should decide what over one hundred million fertile women in this country can and cannot do with their bodies—in concert with their health care provider (with whom they have confidentiality). This amounts to a kind of outlawed–abortion-based apartheid for women.
Save for the few concessions I made in the maroon-colored paragraph above, none of the quintessential views espoused by so-called pro-life individuals which underlie the recent moves to strike down the legal right to an abortion rest on terra firma—ethically/philosophically, legally, or politically.
Here is an article from Pew Research, and here is an article about why abortion is good for society to remain legal.
