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
He’s preaching to you about what you do with a fetuses body – the fact that it’s connected to yours is incidental in his argument. I don’t agree with his argument, but its better that these views are expressed and discussed rather than suppressed. Are you preaching to him about what he can type with his own fingers? And why would being a woman/ potential mother/aborter give you a greater capacity for moral or legal judgements that affect everybody? That’s like saying, I have a penis therefore only people like me should get to decide on laws concerning sperm donation. Logic?
Ross
I wouldn’t say your piece is equivalent to straight up homophobia, however you are cloaking your message in familiar propaganda – it would be much more honest if you just started the piece with a message saying that you support groups X, Y and Z (e.g. the Northern Irish parliament) rather than pretending you are just a concerned individual. You support your opinions with reference mainly to other supposedly authoritative opinions – where as at least some of the activists on here have attempted to concentrate on stats. The suggestion that you are concealing your agenda is further supported by the fact that you are an expert on former communist nations and are then attempting to lump in all socialist view points with brutal communist regimes – very similar to the way that an anti-abortion mainstream politicians in America would do, to try and raise people’s anti-red sentiment. If it was not for certain socialist ideas, very few women would now have any choice on this matter, so it is disingenuous to then suggest you are merely trying to ask for moderation and informed choice – many women in Northern Ireland don’t have that option. As far as I am concerned, the scientific case is that it is medically and socially better for fetus, mother and society if unwanted pregnancy is dealt with at the contraceptive or termination stage rather than a later stage and NHS policy should emphasise the medical profession’s preference for this, while not excluding the legal civil right to an abortion as last resort at the insistence of the mother. Abortion, the medical procedure, is not the social evil itself any more than any other sad situation which the NHS has to deal with: It is the reasons which create the situation where it becomes seemingly necessary that are the main ethical and moral problem – your argument places far to much emphasis on what to do when the fetus has already developed (as if you are willing people to give birth regardless, in the same manner as some evangelicals) i.e. trying to persuade women to incubate adoption children (as happened in Australia in the 60s to disastrous effect) or live in some sort of government prescribed nuclear family. In a democracy, it is not a governments place to chastise or pressurise women in this paternalistic way, but rather to ensure the facilities and information to prevent the situation from arising are readily available – the only sort of consensus that will ever be practically achievable in this regard. You should note that while abortions have risen in the UK in recent years (against the trend of countries with better sex education like Holland), birth rate has also risen in the UK – so the issue is not that people are becoming more totalitarian about the humanity of a fetus or the desire to be parents, but rather they are disconnecting the idea of child rearing from stable relationships and community, which has the unintended side effect of more irresponsible family planning and treatment of children as possessions to be desired or rejected. You can see this also in the way that children and motherhood is ‘marketed’ as a lifestyle choice in our magazines and TV, rather than just a normal everyday process by which communities regenerate themselves – something which we must plan for and integrate into the modern bi-gender work environment as they do in places like Denmark and Norway.
bluedog
I love both of you, whoever you are 🙂
Marko Attila Hoare
It turns out ‘Unity Ministry’ doesn’t actually support a woman’s right to control
her own body or make her own reproductive choices – see this article by her in
support of forced caesarians and forced adoptions, full of sexist, Victorian- sounding references to ‘this unfortunate woman’, made in relation to a woman whose rights and whose body were brutally violated by the state:
‘That said, the point already made about this unfortunate woman’s mental state at the time remains entirely valid. There is nothing the least bit odd about not asking the woman whether she wanted the delivery of her child to undertaken by caesarian section or not if she was no fit state make such a decision or, most especially, if there was a substantial risk that any such discussion might actually make her condition even worse than it already was.’
http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2013/12/05/one-flew-over-the-hemmings-nest/
To which one might reply: ‘it smacks of “let’s pat the poor dears on the
head they don’t really know what they’re doing” rather than accepting that
women are fully independent moral agents with the capacity to make their own
rational choices.‘
So if a woman actually wants to give birth to her baby as she chooses, and to
mother it – as opposed to having it killed – then Unity is fine with her choices being denied by the state. From the systematic extermination of disabled babies to the disenfranchising of ‘unfortunate women’ – it’s eugenics and state tyranny in the name of ‘care’.
unity_ministry
Really, Marko is that the best you can do?
A pathetic and intellectually dishonest ad-hominem based on a deliberate misrepresentation of the context of my remarks on the so-called ‘forced c-section’ case in which the woman capacity to act as an independent moral agent and make her own rational choices was, to say the least, significantly compromised by her having been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the grip of a psychotic episode in which she was experiencing intrusive paranoid delusions?
As should be entirely obvious from that last statement, and from the full article to which Marko links, there are very specific reasons why the woman in this case was unfortunately deemed to incapable of making decisions in her own interests, reasons that are quite simply not applicable to the wider debate surrounding women’s choices in relation to abortion, not least because the state plays no part whatsoever in such decisions.
As such, Marko is simply outing himself here as yet another run of the mill anti-abortion zealot, not that that wasn’t already obvious from the OP.