"Unborn Children" and the Erasure of Pregnancy (1)
Should abortion be criminalized?
For decades I’ve been pro-choice, but never saw the issue as easy. Within a week of Roe being overturned, my nagging doubts disappeared. (Apparently many others had a similar awakening.)
There are three issues here: constitutional, legislative, and moral. The three are linked, but distinct, because different sorts of reasons are relevant. The first is whether the Constitution should be interpreted as protecting abortion rights. I wrote about that last fall, in the three “Scotus” posts.
The second issue, the legislative question, is about what laws should be passed: should abortion be protected, or prohibited, or neither? Since the Dobbs decision it’s become obvious that criminalizing abortion is a mistake, a terrible misuse of the powers of the state. In the states that do so, the results are tragic. A central fact is that surgical abortions are D&Cs (dilation & curettage): a scraping out of the uterus. D&Cs are done for many different reasons – to biopsy the uterine lining, to remove fibroids, to stop excessive uterine bleeding, to clear out the remains of a miscarriage—or to abort a pregnancy. (Something similar is true of misoprostol, the drug used in non-surgical abortions.) Criminalizing abortion has made doctors hesitate to do a D&C, or prescribe misoprostol, for any reason. That hesitation (often refusal) has put women’s lives at risk. Criminalizing abortion has imposed not only physical but emotional suffering, when someone is forced to carry a fetus to term even though it will die shortly after birth (e.g, a malformed heart, or the absence of a skull). “I had to carry the baby in order to bury it.”
So the practical implications for women of child-bearing age are serious. But there’s a deeper issue, but one that goes almost unmentioned. In no other case do we use the power of the state to compel the use of one’s body for the life of another. We do not, for instance, force a father to donate bone marrow even to save the life of his child. He may have a moral duty to donate. But the government has no right to force him.
Why, then, does the cry “My body, my choice” have so little weight with so many people? I’ve heard the response “It’s not your body. The fetus isn’t like an appendix.” True enough; the fetus is, or will become, a separate life. But pregnancy is most assuredly a state of the woman’s body, and the fetus survives only through the fullest and most intimate use of a woman’s body.
It’s not an easy or comfortable use. Even the most unproblematic pregnancy involves months of discomfort; often pain, sleep deprivation, and emotional shifts. The discomfort can be serious; injuries to the back and pelvic structure can persist after delivery. Delivery itself involves agonizing pain and torn flesh (vaginal tears, an episiotomy, or a C section). Some – too many – women die.
Yet the public conversation completely erases this story; it’s as if the issue were carrying a handbag for nine months.
Someone might respond “We can alleviate a lot of that discomfort, pain and scarring now.” True, although much of it remains. But no one ever makes that response, because the topic never enters the discussion.
Why not? Possibly because child-bearing is such a common experience. The uncomfortable months and final agony fade as attention shifts to the child. In the public debate, attention is there, and only there, from the beginning.
There’s darker, explanation for the silence about pregnancy: Women’s bodies are useful, for sexual satisfaction and for providing offspring. Throughout history those bodies have been exchanged: given, stolen, loaned, bought and sold. A background setting seems to highlight the useful body and grays out the experience of the woman.
Whatever the reasons for its neglect, if pregnancy were foregrounded, the cost of compelling its completion – of criminalizing abortion – would be clearer.
So I now find the legislative issue – about what laws should be passed - unambiguously clear. Practically speaking, criminalizing abortion interferes with standard medical care for all sorts of conditions, and the results can be tragic. Morally speaking, the state does not have the right to compel the use of one’s body, even for the life of someone else.
Is the fetus “someone else”? That introduces the third issue, the moral question, distinct from the legal one. Actions can be immoral, even deeply so, but outside the proper domain of government. (Shunning can be far more harmful than shoplifting, but only the latter is the business of the state.) A legally protected right can be misused: Unions, for instance, have the right to strike, but sometimes they’re wrong to do so. The moral issue is different from the legal issue.
The moral question, about the rightness or wrongness of aborting a pregnancy, is deep, and beyond the scope of a blog. (Later I’ll list some reading suggestions.) I do want to address the other phrase that is used so often, “unborn children.” Just as the Dobbs decision shook me into looking more closely at the cry “my body, my choice,” so it made me think more carefully about the moral status of the fetus. In the next post I’ll write about that.
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Afterwords
Privacy is also at stake. Where abortion has been criminalized, period-tracking apps, online searches about abortion, and text conversations can all be seized as evidence for prosecution.