I just want to post a trigger warning – since 1 in 3 women have had an abortion, and it’s incredibly common, I just want to flag up that this post may be especially upsetting to these women, since I’m going to be talking about arguments used to shame women who have abortions.
Recently, this woman decided to have an abortion at 18 weeks and it has become a huge deal and elicited a lot of judgement:
I think this just ends up being the same old “If you’re classy and have an abortion, I’m sympathetic, but if I think you’re ‘trashy’ and don’t conform to my ideas of how a woman should behave, then shame on you and you’re bringing feminism down – not wanting a kid is not reason enough” stuff. “She’s aborting because she wants to get famous, not because it’s a difficult time in her life for a child. So she’s sacrificing a life for personal gain.”
What this argument means is that if women are possibly able to have a child, then they shouldn’t have an abortion. This does not make any sense – surely women have a right to choose to terminate a pregnancy simply because they do not want a child, even if they could physically or financially have one. Women are not required to bear children just because they are financially or physically able. Choice means that they can also choose abortion just because they don’t want to be a parent. It also means that women shouldn’t have to have their lifestyle deemed ‘acceptable’ before their decision to get an abortion becomes valid. A low-income woman, a sex worker, a black woman, or a young person shouldn’t receive any more judgement if they make a choice to have an abortion than a wealthy white woman or a woman who is married with children.
I don’t think I’m ‘pro-abortion’, but I’m just not ready to shame women for their reasons to choose abortion. I think abortion on demand up until the cutoff date just isn’t controversial. I don’t think I would ever have an abortion at this point of my life, but knowing how incredibly destructive and painful pregnancy is, and how miserable and gruelling childcare can be, I just don’t see how it’s at all controversial to decide not to have a kid, for any reason.
Personally, I don’t understand why “I got a job I wasn’t expecting and so I’m getting an abortion now” is surprising, so I guess I am still misunderstanding the problem. I just don’t think there is a “selfish” reason for abortion before the cutoff, if we believe that a woman has an absolute right to her body and a fetus is not a person. If the woman does not have an absolute right to her body and is balancing her right to good quality of life with the fetus’ right to life, only then can a reason for abortion be morally questionable or “selfish”. So I guess it depends on how you approach the issue of abortion – whether a woman has an absolute right to her body, or whether she is depriving the fetus of life and should only do that with good reason.
I would say that the reason her feelings about her abortion are valid and other people’s are not is because it’s her body and not public property. Everyone has feelings on things like whether someone wears makeup or shaves their legs or the fact it’s raining outside, but if they are trying to say there is a moral issue going on rather than an emotional one, that’s a different story. It sounds like some kind of internal struggle between whether all reasons are valid, or whether some are immoral. I understand that struggle – it’s a struggle I went through when trying to figure out what I believed about abortion, and whether I thought the cutoff date for abortion on demand should be lowered.
People seem shocked that her choice is too “flippant”. I don’t understand. Having a child is a life-changing event. Choosing not to have a child is not necessarily a life changing or even a major decision. It depends on the woman’s experience, but I don’t see why it’s at all necessary that it be at all emotional to decide to *not* do something, or why that should be a decision made with gravity. If I believed that abortion was the sacrifice of a baby which should only be done when it’s absolutely necessary, that’s when I would believe that it should be done only for unselfish reasons and with gravity and emotion.
Abortion on demand is just that – whatever your reason is, it’s your reason and your body, and it’s a neutral decision, and you should have access to an abortion on demand without judgement up to the cutoff date. The issue then becomes the cutoff date – is it too late? Would it be better to, say, have abortion on demand up until 12 or 14 weeks like most of Europe, and then only for medical reasons after? My own stance is basically that whichever cutoff date I happen to support, up until that cutoff date, a woman’s right over her body is absolute. If I’m not willing and able to say that about any and all abortions done up to 24 weeks, then I believe the cutoff date should be lower. That’s how I try and avoid internal contradiction. So let’s look at cutoff dates.
I’m not sure that health and safety of the pregnant woman makes much sense as an argument for lowering the cutoff. Abortion isn’t more risky than childbirth. Normally, childbirth is much more dangerous than a legal abortion. After 20 weeks, in the USA, abortion is statistically *as risky* as childbirth, not more. I couldn’t find statistics about British risks because all my searching only led me to pro-life religious articles! So lowering the cutoff can’t be about protecting a woman’s health – it all comes down to the fetus, and when a woman’s absolute right to sovereignty over her body and to abortion on demand ends.
I really struggled with the cutoff date when I first started thinking about abortion. Premature babies run in my family. I was born at 33 weeks, and my cousin was born much earlier, with a hole in her heart, though she survived and is now a healthy 15 year old. Some premature infants have survived at just shy of 22 weeks. So if your cutoff is related to fetal viability, then it probably actually should be earlier, though the cutoff date is just going to keep decreasing every few years until they’re able to just pop out the zygote and raise it in a robotic womb. I don’t think I would be ok with that – if there was technology to make sure it could survive at any stage, I’m not comfortable with that meaning that abortion was 100% illegal. I’m not sure if that’s too much of a “slippery slope” argument, I just am not that convinced by ‘viability’ as the deciding factor.
Personally, my own ideas about the cutoff date are related to whether a fetus can know anything is happening – are they conscious, can they suffer. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argues that “Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.” (source linked at bottom)
Honestly, an 18-week fetus doesn’t suffer and isn’t conscious. It’s at week 31 that a fetus can start to sense things – to hear voices speaking through the amniotic fluid and recognise its mother’s voice, taste the food she eats, etc. I would never want the cutoff date in the USA lowered because the very small (less than 2%) percentage of abortions which happen after 20 weeks are usually late-term because the woman couldn’t access an abortion earlier due to all kinds of structural reasons, and is usually young and poor. In a country where women could immediately access abortion on demand and in which abortion was free, I might be more willing to accept a lower cutoff date than 24 weeks – maybe 22, before the thalamocortical fibers begin appearing, for example, in order to be entirely sure – but it seems that there is no need. Almost all the medical evidence agrees that there’s no ability to feel pain before 24 weeks.
Honestly, I desperately want children in the future, and have an emotional response towards abortion – it really disturbs me to think of my beloved child not being born. What convinced me was that I had a dream where I was discussing abortion with a friend and somewhat smugly telling her that I would never have an abortion. Then, in the dream, I became pregnant, and suddenly realized I had absolutely no possibility of choosing to terminate and was going to be forced to keep it. It was really horrifying. I immediately woke up and realized that all the niceties aside, sovereignty over my body was incredibly important to me. My emotional response about abortion had been me imagining having a desired child and that conscious child experiencing death and rejection. But the reality of a termination is the death of an unconscious fetus that would never know the difference, experience pain, or develop enough consciousness to be awake. Honestly, for me, I think it’s very similar whether it’s 4 weeks or 18, since in both cases, the embryo/fetus is just not conscious or able to suffer.
There’s really an argument about whether it’s more cruel to slaughter conscious, intelligent animals for meat than to have an abortion and kill an unconscious human fetus that can’t experience pain. I just don’t think the line between a human animal and another animal is that rigid, and it all comes down to consciousness and suffering. I would argue that the implications in the fact that we have a later cutoff date for foetuses with disabilities is obvious, but opens an entirely different debate about the intersections of ableism & disability and feminism which I am not qualified or prepared to explore.
Sources:
http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/25/why-abortion-is-less-risky-than-childbirth/
hannamaria 