Abortion is something so horrible it has to be described with euphemisms: ‘a woman’s right to control her own body’; ‘a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices’. But the most common is ‘a woman’s right to choose’.
Abortion is something so horrible it has to be described with euphemisms: ‘a woman’s right to control her own body’; ‘a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices’. But the most common is ‘a woman’s right to choose’.
The sentence is left incomplete: it is short for ‘a woman’s right to choose between a pregnancy she fears may destroy her financially or professionally, possibly even physically, and the killing of the baby in her womb.’
In other words, many if not most women who have abortions feel they have no choice. Overworked women with low incomes, unsupportive families, unsympathetic employers, no partners and/or existing children to care for may simply be unable to cope with a baby; nursery care in the UK is prohibitively expensive – on average around £50 per child under two per day in London.
Women may find their careers or education derailed by pregnancy. Not to mention the stigma attached to unplanned pregnancy, particularly for teenagers; this may literally be fatal for those whose relatives are of the ‘honour killing’ variety.
A woman-friendly society would readjust itself to support pregnant women and mothers, removing the shame of pregnancy and alleviating the burden of childcare.
And yet contemporary Britain despises fecund low-income women. When Mick and Mairead Philpott were convicted of killing their six children, conservatives from chancellor George Osborne to the Daily Mail seemed to feel the problem was not just that they had killed them but that they had had them in the first place.
Tory politicians such as Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith have suggested limiting child benefits to the first two children.
In a culture where children are viewed, not as the citizens and taxpayers of the future in whose support the current generation has a stake, but as a luxury to be supported only by parents prosperous enough to afford them without burdening the taxpayer, it is unsurprising that the extermination of unwanted babies through abortion is effectively encouraged.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, abortion was rightly viewed by almost all first-wave feminists as a terrible symptom of women’s oppression. According to Sylvia Pankhurst:
“It is grievous indeed that the social collectivity should feel itself obliged to assist in so ugly an expedient as abortion in order to mitigate its crudest evils. The true mission of society is to provide the conditions, legal, moral, economic and obstetric, which will assure happy and successful motherhood.”
It is a great coup for Moloch when the ugly expedient can be passed of as a ‘choice’ for which women should be grateful; still more when supposed feminists, instead of seeking to free women from it, celebrate it as their totem.
For some women – financially better off, with supportive family and employers – abortion might really be a ‘choice’. But it is a ‘choice’ whose exercise increases the burden for other women. If an unplanned baby is viewed not as the responsibility of both parents, but purely as the woman’s choice alone, it effectively absolves the father of any moral responsibility for it.
It also absolves society of the duty to support her. So abortion undermines women who don’t want it.
Our culture fetishises personal freedom, choice and self-gratification but despises concepts like duty and responsibility. So the idea that when two adults conceive a child through consensual sex, then find themselves faced with an accidental pregnancy, they should both take responsibility for the baby even if they didn’t want it, is not popular.
And it really is a baby: anyone who has seen an ultrasound scan of a twelve-week-old fetus and listened to its heartbeat, but still claims that it is merely a ‘clump of cells’ rather than a tiny human being, is in denial; turning their eyes and ears away from the evidence and clinging to an unscientific (libertarian, pseudo-feminist) dogma.
Dehumanising the unborn baby (‘fetus’) turns it into a disposable commodity with no value except as an extension of its parent’s desires, after which all liberal values go out the window. In the UK, an unborn baby after twenty-four weeks is legally protected from abortion – but not if it is disabled, in which case it can be legally killed right up to birth.
Thus in the UK, the overwhelming majority of unborn babies detected as having Down’s syndrome, spina bifida or cerebral palsy are aborted; even a ‘defect’ as minor and correctible as a cleft palate or a club foot can spell a baby’s doom.
This murderous discrimination is taking place in the country that indulged in an orgy of self-satisfaction last summer when it hosted the Paralympic Games.
In other countries, other groups are disproportionately killed off through abortion. In the US, as well as the poor and the disabled, it is Hispanic and particularly black babies. In India and China, it is baby girls: abortion is popular in both these extremely misogynistic societies, greatly contributing to their huge gender imbalances in favour of men over women.
Women, of course, have the right to control their own bodies. But it is questionable if this principle encompasses a procedure that in the UK is performed by largely male NHS doctors, paid for by largely male taxpayers. And for every body so ‘controlled’, another is destroyed or mutilated.
As a result of failed attempts to abort them, Gianna Jessen was born heavily disabled with cerebral palsy, Ana Rosa Rodriguez was born with her right arm missing, while Carrie Holland-Fischer was born with a facial disfigurement, as a result of which, she recalls, ‘society had labelled me as ugly and unacceptable. I was made fun of all during school, and even the teachers made fun of me.’
These women were at least lucky enough to survive.
Women who seek abortions are victims of a society that does not respect them or their babies; they should not be stigmatised or treated as criminals. But let us stop pretending that this ongoing bloody tragedy is a manifestation of their emancipation.
75 Responses to “Abortion is a tragic choice no woman should have to make”
Ross
I would be against the whole use of the word ‘natural’ in any discussion that involves sex or fertility. Our bodies don’t spontaneously reproduce themselves, like self-fertilisation and we don’t actually have small brains in our genitalia. We have to make a choice who to pair up with, whether that be for primitive physical reasons or more intelligent higher brain-function reasons or a combination – and we will make mistakes. If a woman finds herself attracted to the idea of mating with a 14 year old boy, that is possible according to nature, but that doesn’t make the decision ‘natural’ and thereby the law a regulation of ‘nature’ – there is still some sort of decision to be made as to whether an instinct can be trusted or not, even before the moral issues that crop up. If any fertility is deemed ‘natural’ we would also have to conclude that the increasing sperm infertility of modern men is also ‘natural’ and nothing to be concerned by, despite the fact that it does not appear to associated with any particular genetic traits that would be undesirable in future generations, but rather environmental factors in the womb and beyond e.g. the inactivity of the modern lifestyle. Cause and effect is natural, and that’s about it – if you eat, you will shit. There’s nothing inherently ‘natural’ about anything an individual human chooses to do. I seem to recall fascist speeches from the 1920s and 30s often referred to what was ‘natural’ – its the kind of vague concept that can fill any void and absolves people of responsibility for their actions. More recent political movements have also misused the idea of natural in relation to the male and female contraception drugs – e.g. the idea that it’s ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ to have much more sex than previous generations because supposedly our body is telling us to, therefore we need powerful hormonal drugs to convert our bodies into the pleasure devises that our sex drives need them to be, ‘naturally’. Any large scale political intervention in private sexual behavior is loaded with some sort of agenda to direct people towards some perceived better world or more stable status quo. The level of divorce, infidelity, STD’s and depression in the countries that have easy access to contraceptive and sexual performance drugs should tell us that what we have moved towards is no more ‘natural’ than religious repressal of sex in the past. The pharmaceutical industry has resorted to lobbying psychiatrists to invent sexual disfunctions so they can sell fem-viagras to women for the sex they are ‘entitled’ to expect ‘naturally’, It is true that the first people who get hit by the worse effects of social experiments in industrialised countries are often poorer communities due to the learning of lessons through experience rather than education (which is deliberately devalued in those parts of society in order to maintain a status quo). If maleness or femaleness is concerned with the ability to choose as an individual whether you feel the need to reproduce, in a sense these things are under threat – there have never been so many organisations and conferences as in the last decade concerning population control justified by environmental problems – some of these utopian intellectuals would resort to any propagandist means to achieve their ends, which may involve decoupling the idea of femininity from motherhood in some contexts i.e. in Africa, although I don’t detect a unified message globally – in developed countries the emphasis is more on control and planning rather than outright limits. In Israel we see one of the most blatant and disturbing example of why govt, should not interfere with fertility – the long term contraceptive injection given to the majority of Ethiopian Jewish women, but only a tiny percentage of ‘white’ Jews.There does seem to be a pattern of birth rates being inversely proportional to economic development, a hopeful pattern if it is considered that a fairer system of world trade would mean a less erratic and extreme variation of birth rates – but positive effects of this pattern are cancelled out when corporations and governments endorse hormonal contraception and pregnancy cancellation as means of sexual expression and choice, rather than simply one of a number of options which should be used sparingly, not least because of the health risks involved in repeated use of either. The comment about comparing femaleness to a ‘XX Syndrome’ is not just a sweeping generalisation – it also assumes that most governments with an abortion policy of some sort have the same concept of femaleness – in fact they are not driven by a one particular form of sexism – they will define femininity in whatever way suites the particular agenda of that time. So, we could again easily experience a period like the 50s of promoting the idea that femininity equals realised motherhood – that may be happening now in some sense with the obsession with celebrity babies and pregnancies such as the Duchess of Cambridge. Any sort of attempt to pigeonhole femininity as one thing should be treated with suspicion. If everyone is well educated in the consequences of sexual choices, most individuals will make relatively sensible decisions for themselves and the small number that have serious psychological problems can be helped by a NHS – the current British approach doesn’t seem to be about a free choice but rather, if you fit the model of affluent informed parents then you are encouraged at the cost of the tax-payer and if you go to the NHS with any doubts or woes then counselors will tend to discourage giving birth. In other words, there is a patronising tendency rather than encouraging people to take responsibility for their own actions one way or the other – in particular, the fathers. In the meantime, doctors and nurses find themselves doing some things which will disturb and haunt them for the rest of their lives, perhaps just as much if not more than the patients.
Ross
While I don’t really agree with the author of the article, surely ’emancipation’, as you put it would consist of a state of being whereby you didn’t have to worry about having an abortion, rather than ‘on-demand’ abortions? i.e. the answer is in prevention of the situation arising through education and alternatives, rather than being dismissive of the fact that many people find abortions, particularly large numbers of them in one country, fairly disturbing and a sign of some sort of general moral decay in both genders? I would never want to prevent any woman who felt she needed an abortion from having the operation, however there’s a big difference between saying that and presenting it positively as a good option in family-planning/fertility (which in turn influences young women long before they face the rather more grim reality). What’s emancipated about a society where many women resort to protection free sex with men that care nothing for them and employment with companies that actively discriminate against their choice if it is in the affirmative? It’s a bit like saying, ‘Would you like shot quickly or drowned slowly?’ It worries me that abortion is presented as either a form of contraception by ‘pro-life’ or a legitimate ‘choice’ of every woman – I can’t see it as either of those. Statistically, the vast majority of abortions appear not to be rapes or to avoid the birth of a seriously disabled child, meaning the main reason behind them is that the father is basically such a bastard and the woman’s opportunities so crappy that rearing a child has zero appeal. That’s pretty depressing for our society whatever way you look at it. If men have no intention of being fathers, why don’t they get a vasectomy in their 20’s? Or why don’t young women have their ovaries removed and eggs stored? Or as a bare minimum at least ensure the correct usage of a condom or other contraceptive or morning after pill? It appears that there is some sort of desire to have children in most, but when presented with the reality of it, something is making it deeply unappealing. And many assume that this is a free choice mainly influenced by the aspirations of the mother – that’s a big assumption. What if, it was more like, women felt pressured into aborting by the apathy or discouragement of those around them – that would not be so ‘liberating’, would it? In fact, it could be seen as simply another form of misogyny. There’s little doubt that some political groups love to try and form all manner of theories around the totemic single mother on child benefit – why is that the only grim option presented as a vision of young motherhood? As if they were the ones too ‘stupid’ to get an abortion, as some would see it?
Ross
Equally, are you spelling out the view that fetuses are non-humans? In what way are they not humans? They are at least potential humans or primitive humans, are they not? There is little doubt that a fetus of over 20 weeks must have some perception of distress and pain – so are we really saying that we don’t care about that, essentially because the fetus cannot answer back or tell us that they are in pain? So then, by extension, we could perform medical experiments on mentally retarded people because they are not able to object, right? Being uncaring about the death of a fetus may not be murder as such, but it’s not far off, and I find the suggestion that the normalising of that behavior does not have some social effect on people’s sexual behavior is highly unlikely. We could read differing statistical reports on that over the next 50 years and it would still not change the basic logic of the argument – it is surely wise to take a precautionary principle when it comes to the value of genetically human lifeforms.
Ross
Whether or not a fetus is ‘human’ is not really the heart of the debate – the main issue is when is it justifiable to end human life. If someone is running at me with an axe and wants to kills me, I would probably be justified in using fatal force to defend myself – that would not be murder. If a person has no brain activity or chance of recovery and we remove them from life support, that would not be murder. If a woman takes a pill which uses her hormones to prevent the full fertilsation of an egg, only nutcases would regard that as murder. However, when you deliberately refuse to consider the formation of a primitive human lifeform in the womb, then at some random point that suites you, decide that you no longer wish your body to support the body of that other lifeform – that is less clear – it’s certainly not a ‘necessary’ killing. This is why I am somewhat worried by the repeated use of the word ‘choice’. While civil rights and choice are related, I don’t see any reason why a right to choose should be absolute, unquestionable and supreme to everything. It is a basic socialist principle that the rights afforded to some individuals to ‘choose’ can deny other people opportunities and rights in some situations, or have some detrimental effect on the choices of the wider community. If you have a child and choose you don’t want it, someone will take it – but you must go through the proper channels – it is right that you should be prosecuted if you just dump a baby in a bin (which actually happened to a boy I went to school with – he has had problems with arthritis and brittle bones ever since). Unquestioned abortion on demand is the moral equivalent of dumping a mentally retarded baby in bin.
Ross
morally or ethically, I cannot see any major difference between terminating a late stage disabled child, regardless of the disability, and allowing it to be born then shooting it or smothering it (as was practiced in Nazi Germany). What is the difference? The child is conscious, it feels, it experiences – it has perhaps somewhat limited intelligence, but is still considerably more intelligent and aware than an animal in most cases. So the real difference is in that the parents don’t have to face the horrific image of the act. Only 12 were based on cleft pallet only, but how many on other non-fatal disabilities. This is where ‘choice’ hits it limit for me – that should be a decision made by a medical professional, not the unqualified and potentially irrational decision of parents. And in a world where some people do want to try and control the appearance or gender of their child, I don’t think that’s being unfair to all parents.