“I must speak, not because it is the best thing to do, but because it is so hard to refrain. Reason advises me to keep silent; an indignation which, if I am not mistaken, is proper and dignified, and a just grief exhort words from me.” Francesco Petrarca, On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others (1367)
Petrarca was not talking about abortion. But that’s what I’m going to talk about, and the sentiment is the same.
On Monday, I read post after post on Facebook celebrating the Supreme Court overturning a law in Texas that regulated abortion providers to a point where the majority of the abortion clinics in the state had to close. The law had purportedly been passed to protect women’s health, but it was obviously meant to curtail abortion itself. Because abortion is currently legal in this country, it seems proper to me that the highest judicial authority in the U.S. ruled as they did, the dissent of three justices notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, as I read each jubilant reaction, I found myself feeling a mixture of sadness, nausea and panic. The panic I believe came from realizing that I was going to end up expressing myself to my little corner of the world on this issue, and I knew consequences of judgment and mistrust were possible, most likely probable. But I have remained silent in a general sense about abortion for most of my adult life. And it really has reached a point where I cannot in good conscience stay silent any longer. I speak freely on my thoughts about gun rights and poverty and immigration and access to healthcare and equal rights for homosexuals and other such controversies (on all of which, as it happens, my beliefs align with the liberal end of the continuum). But I feel no less strongly about abortion. If I do not speak openly about abortion, it is only due to fear of reprisal. Fear of being seen as anti-woman or sanctimonious. And I will be seen as both. But I’ve decided that’s fine. My fear doesn’t matter. My opinion doesn’t matter. But my self-respect matters. And I’ve concluded I can no longer stay silent and retain my self-respect.
I do not claim to know at what point after conception “life” as referenced in the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” begins. And for anyone who believes that it does not begin until the moment that fetus emerges from the womb and takes its first lungful of air, I fully understand your argument for abortion on demand at any point in a pregnancy. The problem is that our society seems not, in anywhere near a majority, to believe life begins only then. Our laws allow for a person who murders a pregnant woman to be prosecuted for double homicide. Our medicine allows for huge sums of money to be spent performing “life”-saving surgeries in utero. And the age of viability for premature babies has gotten earlier and earlier, with more huge sums of money being spent to keep those preemies alive. I’m fairly sure there are even laws allowing women who use alcohol or other drugs during pregnancy to be prosecuted for child abuse. And a child born positive for opiates can and will be taken from its mother for things she did to it while it was a fetus and, per the arguments of those who support abortion on demand, it was devoid of rights. No, I cannot get around the reality that two fetuses of the same gestation could be terminated on the same day in the same city and one be called an abortion and one be called a murder victim if its mother were killed too, while a third fetus the same gestational age could have millions of dollars spent to be operated on in utero to correct a life-threatening anomaly or be sustained for months in the NICU until it is safe to go home.
I cannot deal with the inherent contradictions and lack of logic. And I’ve read so many defenses of abortion rights and not one has given a reasonable explanation for them. Not one.
I fully support birth control. Emergency contraception even. I accept that abortion may be the lesser loss when carrying a child to term will result in the death of its mother. Rape is a harder one for me to reconcile, but I accept that exception too. Aborting because of birth defects is a slippery slippery slope.
Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t have one. Pithy. Except why doesn’t that apply equally to gun owners? Don’t believe in guns? Don’t have one. Somehow that doesn’t seem to fly with most abortion rights supporters, who seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of some kind of restrictions on guns.
The thing is, I think most Americans would support some kind of restriction on how late an abortion can be performed. Just as most Americans support some kind of gun control. But somehow those at the extreme of both issues continue to prevail. We’ve found some middle ground on so many things. Although, let’s be honest- there are in fact restrictions on guns. Some people cannot have them. Some types cannot be legally purchased. Abortion has been made harder to get, it is true. Especially for lower income and therefore less mobile women. And that is not in keeping with what Roe v Wade intended. But there is no one who is legally barred from terminating their pregnancy. (I know there are laws about parental consent in many states, and those laws no doubt are like the Texas statute- more about preventing abortion than about the well-being of the pregnant teenager. But there are many legal conundrums related to parental rights, and a teenager can still get judicial excuse from those laws in various ways).
Then we have the patriarchy defense. The argument that women’s lives and, therefore, women’s bodies have been subjected to the will and whim of men for pretty much all of recorded human history. I believe it to be true. Somehow men originally gained control and, for far too long men (with obviously many individual exceptions) did everything in their power to maintain that control. Women were treated as second class citizens and in some instances no better than livestock. In some parts of the world, women’s experience remains tragically quite the same. I am aware of the legacy of the patriarchy and I am aware that vestiges of the patriarchy remain in all societies. But I am infinitely grateful that I live in a time where men in my society, by and large, no longer actively view women as their property. I am well aware that women continue to be raped by men, and I am infinitely grateful that I live in a time where, by and large, when a woman is raped, the state will bring charges against the rapist and he can be convicted (and I know that justice is in no way guaranteed, but I refuse to ignore the progress that has been made because there are too many examples of other parts of this world where victims of rape can only hope they will someday have a chance for such justice).
What I don’t accept is that in order for women to achieve full status as human beings and citizens, the status of unborn human beings needs to be diminished or ignored or dismissed. How can it be claimed that a woman has full possession of her rights only when she can choose to end an unborn human being’s life? Yes, being entrapped in the life of child-bearing and child-rearing and utter dependence on men for survival was (and still is across the world) an injustice, a wrong that cannot be denied or defended. But the amelioration for that wrong is to say, “well pregnancy is what kept women dependent is what kept women subjugated is what held women back and therefore it is a sacrosanct right for a woman to terminate at any time during gestation an organism that at some stage attains a form that is more similar to every 'living' human than it is different”? And somehow it has been decided that if we treat that fetus as having some “right” to life (which, as evidenced by previously stated examples we already DO), the amount of equality women have gained will be stripped away and/or no further progress in how men and women treat each other can be made?
Really? We have so little faith in the how far we have come that we believe affording the right to life to fetuses will diminish the right to life of women?
I know that women carry the burden with gestating and birthing and nursing children. It does seem completely unfair in the scheme of things. You get pregnant and you’re not ready and it was unplanned and your entire life is changed. Forever. And through no fault of their own, men don’t experience it the same. They can’t. What a cruel trick of evolution. Or God’s design. Either way, it seems unjustified. And abortion is certainly a corrective action for that imbalance. But is it really the best corrective action?
I’m not allowed to force my beliefs on others. I understand that. I’m not even suggesting that abortion should be illegal. We have codified killing human beings for committing capital crimes and for being enemy combatants. We can continue to codify killing human beings whose existence creates burdens for and robs freedom from the human being gestating them.
But let’s not pretend it’s something other than that. Let’s admit the uncomfortable reality of the choice. Let’s acknowledge that among the fetuses that have been aborted were living organisms with the latent brilliance of Picasso or Salk or Einstein or Gandhi. And if not those geniuses, were still going to be somebody. Somebody who, had they been miscarried instead of aborted, might have been given a name and a gravestone. Let us admit and face the contradictions of those choices and not pretend they do not exist.
