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| For good reason: The poorest 30% of women account for 75% of abortions in the US. |
"Our liberation cannot be bought with the blood of our children" has become a common slogan on placards or T-shirts carried or worn by women at events involving abortion laws. It's powerful because it captures the weakness of so much of the pro-abortion argument. Abortion kills, but also to argue in favour of abortion is to undermine the status of women, to present the unique dignity of each woman as nothing else than that a woman should be like a man in every way including unlovely sexual behaviour.
As Mary Harrington points out in reviewing Erika Bachiochi's The Rights Of Woman: Reclaiming A Lost Vision (2021) the central issue over women's rights, especially in the fraught area of reproduction that society has allowed to bear most heavily on women, is that campaigning should be directed to allowing women to be women, rather than trying to shoehorn one sex into the shape of the other. She writes:
Babies and children take a lot of looking after. How, then, [are] ideals of individual liberty to be balanced with the evidently asymmetrical burdens of human reproduction?
As in many areas of activism, "progressives" show a certain laziness intellectually and organisationally in ignoring the difficult duty of rectifying society's disregard of the toxic economic inequality we see generally, shirking the task of taking on corporate power to enable the flourishing of unions, the sharing of profits with a greater focus on equity, the reduction of real working hours, more holidays, and parental leave. Instead, they use their elite status to impose a set of cultural dogmas that are as false as they are acceptable to their peers in academia, the mainstream media, and corporate and political leaders.
From a Guttmacher Institute statement on a study of reasons women give for abortion, the top is that:
Having a baby would dramatically interfere with their education, work or ability to care for their dependents, or they could not afford a baby at the time. In addition, qualitative data from in-depth interviews portrayed women who had had an abortion as typically feeling that they had no other choice, given their limited resources and existing responsibilities to others.
The point is that: Under these circumstances there is no way abortion can be called a “choice”. Furthermore, as a response to an article in The BMJ (British Medical Journal) the authors state:
75% of women requesting abortion in the US are in poverty or in the low income bracket. The poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions and the poorest 30% for 75% of abortions.
They continue:
Abortion cannot be a solution for poverty; thereby surreptitiously allowing those in authority to abdicate responsibility of tackling socio-economic inequality. The BMJ has shown commendable leadership and been at the forefront of the campaign to eradicate period poverty but has been much less vocal at the scourge of poverty which suffuses the issue of abortion. Abortion may be a right in the UK but it is clearly not a choice.
To pick up again Harrington's concern that today's feminism is hurting rather than empowering women, she highlights the fact is that going back at least to the late 1700s it has been argued that "motherhood and family life are both ennobling in themselves and compatible with other activities in the wider world". Further:
As the pro-life feminist Clair de Jong put it in 1978, “Accepting the ‘necessity’ of abortion is accepting that pregnant women and mothers are unable to function as persons in this society”.
US President Joe Biden’s recent description of mothers as “locked out of the workforce” by caregiving responsibilities is typical. Mothers are, in effect, illegible to the prevailing conception of personhood — which is based on market participation — except when we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is seen largely as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realisation.
An unborn child is absolutely dependent on its mother, and she cannot be replaced. Within an atomised understanding of what humans are, we have no way of weighing competing interests in such a context. And if personhood relies on us having absolute autonomy over our bodies, we must begrudge any claim, however slight, of a dependent baby still contained in that body — lest its rights-bearing nature conflict with ours.
But women are more likely to show a willingness to accept that a woman's "absolute autonomy" does not reflect reality:
Polls consistently show us to be ambivalent on this question, across both sexes. More women than men believe life begins at conception, while in this 2017 poll, 41% of UK women supported reducing the gestation limit to 12 weeks or lower, compared to 24% of men.
Harrington speaks on this in a very personal way:
We can only resolve this via positions most people find intuitively repellent, such as the claim that signs of trying to avoid pain aren’t evidence of life. Or even, as the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Peter Singer argues in Practical Ethics, that because “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time,” therefore “they are not persons”. If you’d told me, when I was grieving a pregnancy loss, that I was mourning “little more than cells and electrical activity“ I’d have punched you. And yet we nod along to this idea in other contexts, where doing so supports women’s bodily autonomy.
She adds that because a baby just a few days after conception looks little like an adult can explain why so many lack of willingness to face the reality of a claim from within the womb that demands recognition as an equal. However, the same is true with a newborn and an adult. In addition, peer pressure can override the scientific reality of what is being killed in abortion.
For Bernard Nathanson, the co-founder of Naral, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and who was once the director of the US's largest freestanding abortion clinic, the development of ultra-sound technology was a game-changer. Ultra-sound "for the first time threw open a window into the womb" and his rejection of the abortion industry.
In Nathanson's own words:
Although we had a mound (literally) of empirical data attesting to the fact that a living human being had been destroyed in the act of abortion, it was not until after the advent of ultrasound technology that a true paradigm change took place. With ultrasound technology, we could not only know that the fetus was a functioning organism, but we could also estimate its age, watch it swallow and urinate, view it in its sleeping and waking states, and watch it move itself as purposefully as a newborn.
No matter, science takes a backseat when self-interest is in play. As Harrington puts it:
The atomised vision of personhood is nigh-on unchallenged today. So, many decades into the victory of autonomy over dependence, in the name of feminism, it’s easier to see why even Right-wing young women [at New York University] were unwilling to hear Bachiochi’s arguments. The Right may speak more warmly than the Left about family life, but while we grant personhood and citizenship on the basis of bodily autonomy, what sane woman would seek to deny those goods to her own sex?
The necessity in a woman's life to provide care and cope with dependents has long been a feature of Bachiochi's career in law, including lecturing at Harvard, and in the exploration of sexual economics. Harrington taps into her expertise:
Nothing, [Bachiochi] suggests, could more viscerally epitomise the conflict between the individualistic logic of the market, and a more communitarian one that values and centres dependency and care, than the question of abortion. A women’s movement that “regards abortion rights as equal citizenship rights”, Bachiochi suggests, has already conceded nearly the entire battle on valuing dependency: it has “surrendered, once and for all, to the logic of that market”.
And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.
And from this vantage-point, even those feminists who resist the claim that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” find their proposition fatally undermined if they support abortion. For if Bachiochi is right, then they are defending the distinction between the sexes while fiercely committed to the medical intervention most critical to collapsing the distinction between the sexes.
Therefore, speaking to her sisters, Harrington asks:
On Twitter, Bachiochi posted this note:Can we really protest the degradation of feminism into a campaign to free us from our biology, while digging our heels in to defend a vision of personhood that rests on exactly that? For 21st-century feminism, the question of choice poses some difficult choices.
NB: I was a pro-choice feminist (& women's studies student at Middlebury College) before coming to see what abortion *is* and what it has wrought for women's equality, so no "on-going strategy" here. "Feminists" always assume pro-life women are but a puppet of some man somewhere.
Her point that society must get away from the whimsical view of feminism and into the nitty-gritty of establishing a social order that defends women's needs and so the family, was made clear by a critical tweet in response to her op-ed in the New York Times in December (2021). It said:
How does forced gestation bode for women's equality? Asking for myself, who was terminated from a job while pregnant and couldn't find employment as a noticeably pregnant woman.
This challenge exemplifies the nature of Bachiochi's argument that women will make no further progress in society unless society makes provision for the needs of women. And abortion is principally a factor of poverty, which is a route "progressives" decline to take because it means breaking from the rich and powerful elite that they travel with.
💢 Read more of Bachiochi's views here
💢 The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision - details here
💢 Read Life in the womb matters to these women
💢 Read Trauma from abortion - why the surprise?
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