I just heard someone whose opinions I generally admire say they thought both terms used in the abortion debate to describe the two distinct ideologies that make up the "debate," such as it is, "pro-life" and "pro-choice," tend to divide us. I agree wholeheartedly in regard to the term "pro-life," which is why I use the term "anti-choice." But I don't agree with "pro-choice." The essence of liberty is the ability to choose the course of your life. "Pro-choice" can apply to many things, not just reproduction.
On the other hand, the term "pro-life" is offensive. The recent mess over the Susan G Komen Foundation pulling funding from Planned Parenthood because of pressure by the "pro-life" movement makes that perfectly clear. How can you claim to be "pro-life" and also be in favor of denying funds for up to 170,000 breast exams? The answer is, you can't.
I wrote this a while ago, and I'm presenting it once again, because I think it's evn more appropos.
When I was very young, a few years before Roe v Wade, my parents were good friends with a family (a father and two daughters-- the father had become widowed several years earlier), all of whom were officers with the police department of a major US city. Mr. Andy loved to regale us with stories of the seamier side of life, even when I was no more than 11 or 12. Basically, I think he just liked grossing out my mother, which was remarkably easy. The stories were horrific. Now, I know the current-day image of the 50's and 60's is more like of Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days and that sort of thing but, frankly, his stories would make people in 2011 feel a bit queasy.
One story – actually a series of stories - in particular hit me pretty hard, and I remember it very well. It was actually something of a regular occurrence for the police department to receive a call from someone who found a fetus in a trash receptacle somewhere in the city. After an investigation, they would often find several fetuses, wrapped up in paper or plastic, after which they would write a report. They would investigate, but there was no way to tell where they came from, so they rarely "caught" anyone responsible. According to Mr. Andy, they could have come from any of a number of "abortion mills" that had been set up around the city to take care of women who wanted an abortion, but who were forbidden from getting a legal one. Police were also often called out to investigate cases in which desperate women had mutilated themselves attempting to abort their own fetus, or having a friend do it for them; someone who had no business attempting a medical procedure. Among the tools used for these procedures were not forceps, but coat hangers, soda bottles and vacuum cleaners. One story involved a pair of pliers.
Some folks apparently think such a world was the ideal.
Thankfully, since the Supreme Court issued one of the most rational decisions ever in Roe v Wade, we've transcended the barbarism that characterized the illegal abortion era. Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there who would love to take us back to those dark days and again hand a woman's reproductive choice over to the government.
Dominion over a person's own body is the essence of liberty and absolutely essential in a free society, and that is exactly why the anti-choice movement is so dangerous at its core, and must be stopped.
No one likes the idea of abortion, and there is no such thing as a "pro-abortion" movement; that is not now, nor has it ever been, a factor in this. I doubt that more than a handful of psychos thinks abortion is something desirable. On the contrary, a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy is almost always gut-wrenching. Most young girls don't grow up thinking, "I can't wait until I'm old enough to have an abortion." The vast majority of women never have them, and most would never have one, except under the direst of circumstances. Most people who think of themselves as "pro-choice" would agree that it would be a good thing if no one felt the need to have an abortion. If we could eliminate most or all of the reasons why women decide to have an abortion, we could practically eliminate the practice without passing any sort of law. Just off the top of my head, we could increase welfare payments, increase access to birth control, make sure comprehensive sex education was mandatory, and stop demonizing girls and women who get pregnant under less than “ideal” circumstances. Those measures alone would probably eliminate most abortions, yet the anti-choice side of the debate actively advocates against all of those measures.
Really, when you think about it, those of us who are pro-choice actually do far more to prevent abortions than anyone on the anti-choice side, which facetiously calls itself "pro-life." I refuse to call them that, because they’re actually anything but. I’m more pro-life than most of them are. Being in favor of life entails a lot more than simply claiming that life is "sacred," but limiting that definition to those beings incapable of life on their own. These people say life is sacred, but the only time they seem to value it is before birth and when the body is about to die. The rest of the time, they treat life as a major inconvenience; little more than a major expense.
The anti-choice side is all about doing the easy thing, which is to make another pointless law. They do this because they believe that making a law solves a problem, despite the fact that laws against abortion have never solved that problem. Perhaps it's because a law would make abortion someone else's problem. Look at how well their attitude worked with regard to the drug war. All of those magical drug laws made illegal drugs obsolete, right? The drug war has worked so well, the anti-choice contingent wants to do the same with abortion. Isn't that a great idea?
The anti-choice movement is an empty vessel, full of pointless rhetoric and self-righteous posturing, but with an absolute inability (not to mention unwillingness) to even understand the problem, let alone offer a solution. Punishment is the only motivating factor here, as if the specter of punishment would act as a deterrent and make women who feel the need to terminate a pregnancy change their minds. That might work in a few cases but, as the stories i outlined at the beginning of this article make clear, they do NOT solve the problem. We would end up in a world in which fetuses were left in dumpsters, and thousands of women every year would suffer great physical harm because of the unavailability of legal abortion. I know anti-abortion folks love to cite adoption as an alternative, but face facts; there are more than 900,000 unadopted children in this country on any given day, and while there is a demand, the demand is largely for perfectly healthy white babies. There is no reasonable reason to believe that doubling or tripling that number would solve any problems whatsoever.
The strange thing is, the number of abortions have been dropping each year for more than 20 years. And they are moving in that direction because, as I said, the pro-choice side has done more to prevent abortion than the anti-choice side. For one thing, welfare, in the form of Food Stamps, WIC, AFDC and Medicaid, give women in a seemingly hopeless situation at least some hope that she will be able to raise her child after it’s born. If the supposedly "pro-life" faction would start fighting to encourage larger welfare payments and better child care for single working mothers, the number of women who feel forced to terminate their pregnancy would drop further still. But they don’t.
Another reason more women are choosing not to abort has to do with the changes in attitude brought about by the unfairly-maligned feminist movement. Pregnant girls no longer have to quit school to have a baby, and single mothers they are less likely to be labeled with a derogatory name, except, ironically, by those who claim to be against abortion. Parents and friends, as well as the community at large, have become more tolerant of situations that were once cited as the main reason for the sense of desperation that often led a woman to terminate her pregnancy. A woman is far more likely to decide keep her baby if she knows it will be brought into a nurturing environment; something that the screaming anti-choice faction just doesn't seem to understand.
What does the anti-choice faction want, anyway?
They want to overturn Roe, a decision based on sound Constitutional principles; a declaration that only a woman and her doctor have a right to have whatever medical procedures she sees fit. Instead, they want the government to make that decision for a grown woman. How does that fit in with our concept of liberty, really?
Think about that a second. People who are always on about the government wanting to take away their rights are advocating for the government to take away a woman’s reproductive rights.
They would say that the fetus has a right to live, too, and they might have a point in an alternate universe. The problem is, at the time that almost all women who choose to abort actually submit to the procedure, the fetus does not have the ability to live outside of the womb, under any circumstances. Is it possible to confer a "right to life" on something that is technically incapable of life? There is no way to keep the fetus alive outside of the womb in almost all cases in which the overwhelming number of abortions occur, which is the first two trimesters. That essentially means that the anti-choice faction is handing a right to the fetus that it is unable to exercise, and taking a right from the mother that pretty much anyone would agree she had.
And please spare me the lame arguments.
- Abortion is not murder. Even most anti-choicers agree that women who are raped, are victims of incest or will die if the pregnancy continues should be given a pass. Are those excused because they’re “self-defense”? A fetus is incapable of life on its own; it can't be "murder" to remove it from the womb.
- Abortion is not "against God's (or anyone else's) natural law." It isn’t even mentioned in the Bible, and laws against abortion were only in place for about 80 of the 390 years we’ve been on this continent.
- "But what if a woman uses it as birth control?" If a few women use abortion as “birth control,” that is simply none of your business. It’s a medical procedure that’s a result of a decision between her and her doctor and/or her and her gods/God/supreme being/mother nature. You don’t know the real reason ANY woman gets an abortion. If you get access to her medical records, then the rest of us get access to yours.
- It also doesn’t matter how someone pays for abortion. It’s 100% illegal to use federal funds, so no tax money is used, although that, too, should be no one's business. Pregnant women pay taxes, too. If private insurance is paying for them, so what? The rest of us have to pay for treatment when smokers and drunks get sick, and when gun loons shoot each other, insurance pays for most of that, as well. I don;'t see anyone complaining about paying for your decision to eat fast food at every meal.
Just for fun, let's look at this issue another way.
Imagine you were in the hospital for gall bladder surgery. You wake up the morning after the surgery, only to find that another adult human being has attached to you, and is using your lungs to help him breathe. When you ask about it, the doctor tells you this other person will die if he is removed from your lung, and that your lung is the only thing keeping him breathing, so removing him would be murder. Would that be right?
Of course it wouldn’t. He’s not capable of life in his own; why should his inability to live without the use of your lung create an obligation on your part to keep him attached to you? The answer is, it doesn’t. And no one would argue that the adult human has rights. If an adult human with rights can’t create such an obligation, why can a fetus, which has no rights?
Yet, that is exactly what the anti-choice crowd is trying to make you believe is right. The fetus is using the woman's body as its life support. Now, we would all rather she felt great about being pregnant and want to carry it to term and raise it to be a great citizen. But if she doesn't feel that way, what right do the rest of us have to force her to keep it against her will? Then why does the fetus have more rights than a living citizen?
Being pro-choice is not about being pro-abortion. It's about allowing women freedom and autonomy over themselves, with no government interference. Maybe I'm naive, but I always thought that was the point of the entire Bill of Rights. Yet, the anti-choice movement is about control. They wish to force women into a morality they themselves feel is the norm. That's never a good basis for law. And it's certainly not moral. When we see them all come out for more welfare, and not less; when we see them all come out for wider availability of contraception; when we see them come out in favor of very comprehensive sex education in schools; when we see them treating all of the born with the same reverence they seem to reserve for the unborn; then they might have some credibility on this issue.
But for now, the anti-choice faction is not credible when it claims to be "pro-life." Not credible at all.
