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.
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75 Responses to “Abortion is a tragic choice no woman should have to make”
GO
The author of this piece is trying to have it both ways. If he genuinely believes that fetuses are human beings whose lives have the same value as the lives of other human beings, and that abortion is therefore a ‘murderous’ act, he should come out and condemn the people who have or perform abortions as murderers – preferably on some faraway blog where I don’t have to listen to him. If, on the other hand, he believes that terminating a pregnancy should not be seen as a criminal act, and that women who have abortions have a moral right to do so and should not be stigmatized for it, he should drop the language of ‘murder’, ‘extermination’ and ‘killing babies’ and discuss e.g. issues around abortion and disability in a measured and reasonable way.
SarahAB
Well I have been pregnant, and I am prepared to go along with the suggestion that this is a reasonable contribution to the debate even if I don’t fully agree with it.
David Lindsay
Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer’s Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement, London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002, ISBN 1 901157 62 8.
In addition to its unyielding racism, the war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.
Furthermore (this bit is Lindsay, not Farmer – but I’m sure that she would agree with it), the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome.
I can think of nothing that is actually more misogynistic than that, although some things are equally so, notably the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman’s body. Is it the whole of a woman’s body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?
In America, and increasingly also in Britain, the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield.
A reader
Well done to LFF for having the courage to confront this issue.
Marko Attila Hoare
Go’s argument suggesting my piece is equivalent to homophobia is ridiculous, as he is the one who in this debate is attempting to dehumanise an oppressed group of people. The starting point for any genuinely progressive, liberal politics is that all individuals and groups of people have rights and should be defended when threatened or oppressed: men and women, LBG and straight; transsexual people; Muslims and Jews; Israelis and Palestinians; working class, middle class and upper class; the disabled, children, etc. Denying the humanity of unborn babies is ultimately no different from portraying gay people, Jews or other sections of humanity as flawed or less than human.
(Even if unborn babies are considered less than fully human, they would still need protecting; after all, even animals receive some legal protection against abuse, though not nearly as much as they should)
Of course, the left has a sorry record of abandoning whole sections of humanity as ‘unworthy victims’ – most notably the victims of Communist regimes – then reacting with hysterical denunciations of anyone who breaks ranks with them over this hypocrisy. So I’m really deeply unimpressed by the hectoring, bullying tone of some of the comments here. So you oppose the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plan ?? You must really be a capitalist lackey who hates the working class, mustn’t you ?!
As to Go’s more reasonable question of how to reconcile the idea that fetuses are human beings with the rejection of the idea that women who have abortions are murderesses – it’s the system I’m condemning as brutal and murderous, not the individuals. When the deaths are legal and sanctioned by society and authority, the people doing the killing are not murderers. Workers in the armaments industry are not murderers, for example. Nor are ordinary soldiers fighting in unjustified wars.
Unity Ministry’s link to her article is really worth following; it’s a very rambling, dissembling attempt to justify the fact that the law treats disabled unborn babies differently from ‘normal’ babies, on the grounds that a) a fetus is not a human being and b) even a cleft lip on a baby might be a symptom of something much more serious. She says ‘It’s just not that simple a matter once you understand that a cleft lip is not always just a cosmetic issue.’ So her aggressive language simply masks an attempt to legitimise discrimination against the disabled. The unborn baby’s humanity is denied, therefore discrimination becomes legitimate. It’s a very dangerous thin end of the wedge.
No, activists like Unity Ministry do not have any right to claim to speak for all women, and their assertions about how happy women are with abortions should not be taken at face value. She writes: ‘To suggest otherwise is not only wrong but patronising and misogynistic – 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.’
It’s an argument that reminds me of the one made by some conservative Muslims, who claim that many Muslim women are happy wearing the veil and the burkha and being housewives in polygamous marriages to much older men. Well, maybe some are, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their ‘choice’ was entirely unconstrained.
NB I’m an atheist not a Catholic.