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”
GO
“the war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad”
This seems highly implausible given that the capitalist class have an overriding interest in the plentiful availability of cheap, disposable labour. All else being equal, higher supply (more working-class babies) means bosses can pay lower wages and take less care about workers’ welfare (since workers who get sick or die can be more readily replaced).
“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.”
Complete rubbish. For a start, fertility is a property of both men and women and both men and women use various interventions (including surgical interventions) to prevent their bodies from doing what they do naturally when it comes to reproduction. (Was my vasectomy a misandry-inspired attempt to ‘treat’ my maleness? Clue: no, it wasn’t.) More importantly, though: unless we believe that whatever our bodies naturally do is necessarily desirable – a version of the naturalistic fallacy – there’s no principled reason why we should not sometimes want to prevent our bodies from doing things they naturally do.
AM Clare
She has not ‘been aborted’. If the embryo that became her had actually been aborted, she would not exist. Furthermore you can’t claim she ‘experienced’ it because depending on the stage of gestation embryos do not have the capacity to experience let alone any way of remembering what happens to them in the womb.
What happened was that she was born and when she was old enough someone told her that her mother tried to abort her. Which obviously leads to the panic of ‘OMG I might not have existed’ etc. But then *all of us* might not have existed, for infinite different reasons.
This is pointless emoting really. Of course we can all look at a fully grown woman and say we would much rather she be alive. But that doesn’t mean that we should bring into existence as many human beings as possible.
I would support this woman’s choice to have an abortion should she wish to.
Marko Attila Hoare
I was not arguing for a prohibition on abortion; I believe I made clear that women seeking abortions should not be treated as criminals. Nor should they be forced into the hands of dangerous back-street practitioners. Abortion is a social evil; a symptom of a brutal and uncaring society that fails to support or respect either mothers or babies. A social evil cannot be solved by repression (cf drug abuse); unless and until it can be cured, it needs to be regulated rather than driven underground. But that does not mean it should be institutionalised, encouraged and celebrated as it is in Britain today. It’s similar for prostitution, anorexia or social evils that affect men, such as membership of violent gangs. If an 18-year-old teenage boy wants to join a gang and fight other consenting adults, I’m not going to judge him or say he should go to prison, but please don’t ask me to celebrate him as a morally autonomous rational individual making his own choices.
In the case of abortion, a humane society should seek to regulate it in a manner that as much as possible reconciles protecting the mother with protecting the unborn child, since every potential abortion involves two people – not just one – and both of them are in need of support and protection. No solution will be perfect, but I don’t accept that one group should be written off in the name of protecting the other.
Even the statistical information that Unity Ministry provides suggests that women who have abortions are very far from being uniformly happy with their choice. On the other hand, other statistics suggest women who want an abortion but still end up having a baby generally don’t regret it either:
http://www.christian.org.uk/news/only-5-of-women-regret-being-denied-an-abortion/
Regarding Go’s argument that a fetus is not a person because they don’t possess sentience, personhood or rationality – these criteria can be used to deny the full humanity of newborn babies. And they sometimes are, e.g. by Peter Singer. In fact, at the very least, having a brain and a heartbeat should be enough to define a fetus as a person.
As regards the death of Savita Halappanavar – yes, I agree that abortion is entirely legitimate and valid when the mother’s life is in danger from the pregnancy, and I support the elements of the Irish bill that legalise abortion in such cases.
Finally, what is missing from the arguments of the pro-choicers here – apart from any recognition of the humanity of the unborn baby – is any recognition of the principle of responsibility. If you have children, it stops being just about you and your needs; you have a responsibility toward them. The chance of unwanted pregnancy is extremely small if contraception is used responsibly, but it can’t be eliminated altogether. So if you choose to engage in sexual activity that isn’t risk free, then both partners – the man and the woman – should take responsibility for any baby they create (and the rest of society should provide the necessary support as well). That means that you cannot justifiably abort a baby because it is disabled and you wanted a ‘normal’ one, or because it’s the wrong gender or has the wrong eye colour or whatever. It isn’t just about you.
leftfootfwd
He’s never sent us a pitch.
Sparky
Somehow I now doubt that’s very likely!