Abortion is Perfectly Moral — Two Controversial Arguments
For decades, pro-choice advocates have been (correctly and eloquently and effectively) normalizing and de-stigmatizing abortion. But a man in Colorado murdered people in an abortion clinic and then explained himself by saying, “No more baby parts.” Republicans keep trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood based on videos that are now undeniably false. Violence against abortion providers increased dramatically as a result of those same videos. Donald Trump just said that women should be “punished” for having abortions. At the same time, the Supreme Court (minus Justice Scalia) has just heard the biggest abortion case in decades, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Everything is at stake right now.
Sometimes you have to engage with the crazy. So let’s cut to the chase and talk about the big, hard issues with abortion. But first, let me say this as clearly as I possibly can.
There is nothing morally wrong with abortion. NOTHING.
One more time for the record: There is no legitimate moral objection to the choice of a pregnant woman who has a legal abortion because she doesn’t want to be pregnant. No matter why she doesn’t want to be pregnant. A woman is not obligated to bear a child if she doesn’t want to, and she does not need to explain herself or apologize to anyone. So let’s stop bowing and scraping and pretending abortion is a traumatizing experience that all women regret.
Ok, let’s do this. Hard, thorny issues, coming right up.
One recent issue in the abortion rights conversation is the laws passed in North Dakota and Indiana outlawing abortion if the reason is a diagnosis of fetal genetic abnormality (such as Down syndrome). The rationale for these laws, according to the president of Ohio Right to Life, is a slippery slope argument: “We all want to be born perfect, but none of us are, and everyone has a right to live, perfect or not[.] You go to any supermarket or mall and see these families who just happen to have a child with Down syndrome, and they will tell you how fortunate they are to have those children. Pretty soon, we’re going to find the gene for autism. Are we going to abort for that, too?”
Some disability rights activists are celebrating these laws, comparing the systematic aborting of fetuses with Down syndrome to sex-selective abortions and eugenics. They predict a doomsday scenario where people with Down syndrome will be wiped off the face of the earth. At a May hearing of the Ohio bill, a mother of a child with Down syndrome testified, “with nine out of 10 babies with Down syndrome being aborted, extinction is what we are really talking about.”
But — and stay with me here — would that really be a bad thing?
Are the disability rights activists really arguing that it would be a bad thing if no more babies were born with Down syndrome? It’s important to realize that this is not the same thing as saying that the lives of people with Down syndrome are not valuable and meaningful. Of course they are, and people with Down syndrome should be afforded all the rights and dignity that comes with full personhood and citizenship, full stop.
The question really is, what if there were a way to prevent any more fetuses from developing Down syndrome? I’m not talking about aborting a fetus with Down syndrome — I mean what if you could take a pill and the baby diagnosed with Down syndrome as a fetus would be born without it. Would that be wrong? I highly doubt that disability rights activists would argue that it would be wrong to take that pill, or lobby to prevent its development. In fact, if such a treatment existed, it seems obvious to me that it would be wrong not to take it.
Now the supporters of the restrictive abortion laws will argue that there is a big difference between preventing a fetus from developing Down syndrome and aborting a fetus who already has it. But that actually makes no sense, because it assumes its conclusion — that the fetus is already a person with rights, and that it is wrong to have an abortion without a “good reason.”
Furthermore, these laws also forbid women to abort fetuses found to have chromosomal abnormalities so severe that the babies will certainly die within a few hours of birth. These are babies born without hearts, without skulls, without faces. Think of the Zika babies with microcephaly and severe brain damage, who will never live anything close to normal lives. Surely these children do not have the “right” to be born, suffer, and die without having lived.
But to be fair, there is a bit of a slippery slope here, because if it’s ok to abort a fetus with anencephaly or Down syndrome, why wouldn’t it be ok to abort a fetus with the gene for alcoholism, if we could identify it? And if we could identify the gene that produces sociopaths, wouldn’t we in fact have an obligation to abort a fetus carrying that gene?
Of course, alcoholism, anencephaly, and sociopathy are not the problems. The real worry is that people would choose to selectively abort fetuses that may be gay, female, or mixed-race. In fact, sex-selective abortion is already widely practiced all over the world, especially in China and India.
But again, the horror over selective abortion assumes its conclusion, which is that fetuses have rights and abortion is the same as killing a baby you don’t want.
It actually makes more sense to think of selective abortion in the context of adoption. Say a couple wants to adopt a child, but they are only willing to adopt a healthy baby. If they are offered the chance to adopt a baby with Down syndrome, they will decline. Have they done something monstrous? Does that particular baby have a right to be adopted by that particular couple? Of course not.
The decision to continue a pregnancy — phrased in the affirmative rather than the negative — is analogous to the decision to finalize an adoption. A women who carries a fetus to term has made an active decision to become a mother to that particular baby. If she knows she is having a girl, she has made the decision to have a daughter. If she knows she is having a baby with Down syndrome, she has made the decision to have a child with special needs. We might say that people who actively choose to adopt babies with special needs have done something heroic, but we would never demand that everyone take on that unique burden. Just as no one would force a couple to adopt a baby with special needs if they do not want to, a woman should not be forced to give birth to a baby with special needs either.
More controversially, we can even extend this argument to sex-selective abortion. A couple seeking a baby for adoption can determine that they only want to adopt a boy. Another couple may be indifferent as to the sex of their child. But we do not say that the couple seeking a boy only has done something wrong. We may hope they would be willing to adopt a girl, but again, we would never force a couple to adopt and parent a child they do not want.
Having an abortion when you find out your fetus has Down syndrome is not a slippery slope to eugenics, and there is no reason to ban it other than as one more way for Republicans to chip away at the right to abortion.
Moving on.
A few hard-core pro-lifers argue that abortion should be illegal except when the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. This argument is wrong, but at least it is coherent. But most pro-lifers argue that abortion should also be allowed in cases of rape or incest — and that position is not coherent. If the fetus is a person with a right to life that can only be trumped by the mother’s right to life, then there should be no exception for rape or incest.
Think about it. Just for a minute, let’s conceptualize abortion from the perspective of someone who truly believes life begins at conception — as actually killing another human being. Adult to adult, you are allowed to kill another human being only in self-defense or defense of another. Therefore it makes sense that abortion is always legal if the mother’s life is in danger. Abortion in such situations would be killing the fetus in self-defense (or in the case of the doctor performing the procedure, in defense of another’s life).
But we don’t allow people to kill each other for reasons other than self-defense or defense of others. A mother may, legally, kill her child to save her own life (even if we despise her for it). But she may not kill her child because that child was conceived as a result of rape or incest. So if pro-lifers really believe that a fetus has the same rights as a fully formed and born person, it does not make sense to make exceptions for rape and incest.
The rape and incest exceptions prove that the anti-choice agenda is really not about babies at all. It’s about controlling women’s bodies.
If a woman is the victim of rape or incest, she shouldn’t have to carry that baby as punishment, because she did nothing wrong. (Putting aside for a moment the fact that 99.9% of rape victims are blamed or disbelieved, so really this only applies if the victim is a 15-year-old virgin who was wearing a burqa when she was attacked by a strange man in a church parking lot in broad daylight, and there were three male witnesses who can back up her story.) But if the pregnant woman got pregnant because she had consensual sex, then she’s just an irresponsible slut and needs to be punished.
Worse yet, she represents a danger to society that has to be viciously squashed before it can spread. If women can have sex for fun without getting pregnant, it’s the first crack in the patriarchy’s armor.
Pregnancy and motherhood used to be the leading cause of death for women, and now they contribute significantly to keeping women out of the workforce and/or dramatically under-compensated. Restricting abortion is right in line with restricting access to birth control — it’s about maintaining the world order in which the men run the world and the women pop out the babies.
It’s not about the babies. It’s about the patriarchy.
