We all awoke on Wednesday to the dawn of a new era. For those of us with a particular interest in reproductive healthcare, the horror has been particularly profound. It has been tempting in the past few days to curl up into a little ball and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns. And I'll admit, I have spent some time in the fetal position. But now it is time to figure out how to move forward. The time is particularly ripe to reexamine the “pro-life” vs “prochoice” dichotomy that has defined the discussion or reproduction for the last 50 years. An argument based on women’s rights, autonomy, and welfare is much less likely to be successful in the new era, and may in fact be counter-productive. I would like to start a discussion of new ways to discuss this. The anti side has been extraordinarily successful at disguising their true agenda of social control of women behind a smoke-screen of talk about “protecting innocent babies” that has made their preferred policies palatable to a much broader swath of people. The whole “partial birth abortion” meme is the epitome of that. We need to do something similar. We need to create a dialogue about reproduction that can potentially sway people who do not care about women’s rights. I have some ideas of additional points that do not require looking thru the “choice” lens. This is the first of what will be at least two diaries. Please add arguements that can be made in the comments (or in a new diary).
I would start with a question: Is it more important to have a low abortion rate, or to express social disapproval of abortion? I think it's pretty obvious by their rejection of contraception that the anti-abortion side cares more about the disapproval than about deducting the numbers of actual abortions. This point needs to be emphasized any time anyone makes a “pro life” arguement. We need to push back against that phrase. The reality is that abortion rates are fairly unresponsive to social disapproval and laws against abortion. Some of the highest abortion rates in the world are in places have been in times and places where it has been strictly illegal, and where government, church, and prevailing attitudes are firmly against it. The lowest rates are in European countries where abortion, at least in the first trimester, is ready available and even covered by national health services. The difference is that those countries also have (1) fact based sex ed in the schools, (2) high levels of effective contraception use, and (3) practical support for mothers who do give birth. That third one is particularly important. Those who claim to be “pro-life” generally support policies that are miserly towards families which include children. For too long, they have been allowed to have it both ways — they have been allowed to be anti-abortion, while simultaneously be against anything that has been proven to reduce abortion rates. This needs pushback!
I want to make a corollary point, and that is that abortion doesn't care what anyone thinks of it. Having an opinion, or a policy, is a little like trying to control the tides. It's irrelevant. Abortion doesn't care what you, or I, or even god, thinks. Hell, it doesn't even care what a pregnant woman thinks. It was eye opening to me when I was involved in abortion care a number of years ago that many, many abortion patients are not pro-choice. They would agree with all of the arguements put forward by anti-abortion leaders. But they have abortions anyway. This is because reproduction is controlled by a much more primitive part of the brain than the part that internalizes anti-abortion messages. It's useful to think about animal mothers. Every animal that “normally” takes care of its offspring will also sometimes abandon, reject, or kill its young. Some will spontaneously abort in response to stress, or even a better mating opportunity. Many will sometimes eat their young. That is normal animal behavior too. An argument for there being some biological basis for this is that it applies almost exclusively to brand-new offspring. You don't normally see mammal mothers rejecting their young after a significant period of acceptance and nurturing. There are exceptions when the pair are separated and then reintroduced. But generally, this is a phenomenon of the newly-born, or newly-hatched period. Animals are primed to cut their losses early when exposed to less than ideal reproductive outcomes. There is lots of surplus and waste built into the reproductive process to allow for, and encourage, rejection.
And that leads to an additional point: Nature (or God, if you prefer) favors the mother over the offspring. If a pregnant mammal, including humans, is injured and loses significant blood, the mother’s body will shunt blood away from the fetus in order to save the mother. It would not make sense to do otherwise. If the mother dies, or is significantly impaired, the offspring’s chance of survival goes way down. Better to cut losses on the pregnancy, and live to have offspring another day.
That leads leads to the relative value, including moral value, of mother vs embryo or fetus. That is the subject of my next diary. It is an argument that “pro-choice” folks have often often ignored or ceded to the other side. Stay tuned!
