Pregnant Women Are Human Beings

The usual conservatives are using two recent pieces of legislation in New York and Virginia to scream that the Democrats are supporting infanticide.  Meanwhile, Georgia, Alabama, and other southern states are passing ever more restrictive laws against abortion.  Of course, the actual text of the legislation in New York and Virginia doesn’t support the charge of infanticide.  And much of the anti-choice legislation will certainly be overturned in the courts.  But that is the point; the entire purpose of much of the uproar on the right is to get a case to the Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade.  And, of course, there’s (always) a presidential election going on.  With so many women seeking the Democratic nomination, the GOP and the right-wing press will certainly use abortion as a weapon against them.

          The issue of abortion is fraught with numerous moral and emotional complexities.  The Supreme Court confronted many of these complexities in Roe v Wade, but the battle rages on.  And the rhetoric of the anti-choice crowd becomes increasingly aggressive:  abortion is a holocaust; women are murdering their babies; our society fails to protect the weakest among us.  And so on.  The potential human being that the pregnant woman carries dominates anti-choice moral discourse to the exclusion of everything else.

          But, of course, there is always another human being involved in abortion—the pregnant woman herself.  And she is not a potential person, but a real one, with a real life already underway.  She has relationships, responsibilities, and aspirations.  Others may well depend on her in a variety of ways—emotional, economical, legal.  And pregnancy is not simply an “inconvenience,” as the right so often characterizes the reasons of women seeking abortions.  Pregnancy is the utter and permanent disruption of this real, ongoing life—not only for the pregnant woman, but also for all those others whose lives are intertwined with hers.  (Indeed, it is an insult to all mothers to claim that forcing a woman to have a child is just an “inconvenience.”)

          To put the point a bit differently, the rhetoric of the right devalues women in a most profound manner.  The real life of a woman counts for nothing against the potential life of the fetus she carries.  And in service to that fetus, she is denied the control of her own body.  Absent control of her own body, she cannot enjoy or exercise any of the rights we normally associate with respect for human dignity.  Really, she is no longer fully human, but merely a vessel for that which may become human.  

          Of course, women will be told that the time to exercise control over their bodies is before they have sex; then they won’t have to worry about getting an abortion (or birth control, for that matter).  Or, in language that perhaps more precisely expresses the sentiment behind this advice, “Don’t be a slut, and you won’t get pregnant.”  This is excellent advice for women who are raped, particularly young women who are raped by older male relatives.  And, of course, refusing sex is an excellent way to strengthen the bonds of marriage.  As usual, women are expected to control the behavior of men and to suffer the consequences of failure.

          It is tragic anytime any woman confronts the possibility that having an abortion is the best choice she can make.  And it certainly behooves society to do what it can to reduce the number of abortions.  But demonizing women who face real threats to their well-being and depriving them of the very foundation of human dignity is not a reasonable policy.