Welcome to SheKos! SheKos is a diary series for all Kossacks to explore issues related to feminism, women's history, and equality. We seek to find solutions within and beyond the Democratic Party to improve the lives of women -- and men -- regardless of race, sexual orientation, or economic status. We believe that women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights.
Let's face it - debating abortion rights is tiring. I cry "pro-choice," someone else cries "right to life." I say "reproductive freedom," someone else says "personal responsibility." And if anyone mentions "financial access," you can bet four or five others will chime in with "pay for your own abortion."
I'm weary of this debate. And frankly, it's not really about abortion "rights," anyway. No one has a "right" to an abortion; a right is something that equally applies to every member of society, whereas abortions are only available to women who can become pregnant. That's why the term "abortion rights" has an unsatisfying sound. It's inaccurate. It's not what the conflict is really about.
Abortion is merely the symbol of what women are really struggling for, a symbol of what anti-choice people want to deny us. No, this is not about abortion "right." At its crux, this conflict is not about abortion, but about equality. Therefore, from here on, I intend to amend my terminology to reflect this.
I am here to talk about reproductive equality.
Equality means EVERYONE has the same rights
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." I think this is a concept that often gets shuffled to the back of any discussion of rights involving any oppressed group. Instead of seeing the issue from the perspective of the oppressed group, too many people erroneously see their own moral beliefs as a factor in determining those rights. Homosexuality offends them and their religious denomination declares that marriage is supposed to be "between one man and one woman;" therefore, they have a "right" to keep gays from marrying. Abortion is morally repugnant to them and they see it as denying life to unborn children; therefore, they have a "right" to keep women from having abortions. No one who engages in these acts of "protecting rights" seems to see the denial of rights to gays or women as an issue. Why is that? You really don't have to work too hard to conclude that there is an implicit judgment, even if no one is willing to admit it.
The justification is that gays and women have somehow stepped outside the bounds of acceptable behavior - gays by having sex with people of the same gender, women by having sex without being willing to accept pregnancy as the consequence of that behavior. This stepping outside the bounds therefore entitles those who have stayed within the bounds to impose judgment upon them. The problem with letting moral judgments determine people's rights is pretty obvious: different people have different moral beliefs. Moreover, a lot of people get their moral beliefs from a religious affiliation, and religious freedom is one of those core values that are supposed to govern this country.
This is where Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement comes in. The "my rights end where your nose begins" doctine is clearly the guiding principle of our system, the means of balancing our robust individual rights amongst a large and diverse population of equals. Under this doctrine, everyone has the same rights (theoretically), and those rights apply to the individual. Once an individual's rights negatively impact the rights of another individual, the boundaries of individual rights have been determined.
Thus, it doesn't make sense for us to say that heterosexual marriage is okay but same-sex marriage is not. Marriage is between the parties directly involved, not between society and those parties. Your finding it disgusting that two people of the same sex marry means that you are free not to marry someone else of the same sex, not that you are free to tell gays they can't marry people of the same sex. Your belief that abortion is morally wrong means that you are free to never have an abortion, not that you are free to make sure that no one ever has an abortion.
The crux of this matter is the right to SELF-DETERMINATION. Self-determination depends on an individual having complete control and ownership of his or her own life and body. If some members of society have this and others don't, then that society is in a state of inequality. While anyone's self-determination is curtailed, no one in the society is equal. Some are privileged and some are not. That is not what our society is supposed to be. It's certainly not what we advertise when we brag about America's freedoms.
Rights belong to the born
One thing that no one seems to think about when they talk about the Constitution and specifically, the Bill of Rights, is that they were written to guide and empower people who were already born. There is no assumption that fetuses in the womb deserve any more protections or consideration than they are given by nature. Nor should there be.
Because the only way to "give" rights to the unborn is by taking them away from women. A right isn't conjured out of the ether with no cost to anyone else, and the way that we approach individual freedoms in this country is that society as a whole takes on the burden of supporting individual rights. If fetuses are entitled to rights like those we accord to people who are already born, then the cost of bestowing those rights should be spread amongst us all. Instead, the cost is applied to one sub-group only: women who can become pregnant.
By declaring a fetus a person with a right to live, we are by necessity declaring that a pregnant woman's rights are subordinate to the rights of a fetus. No one else is being asked to subjugate themselves to this fetus - only the woman within whom the fetus is growing and drawing nutrients and oxygen is required to give up her own personhood in its favor. It doesn't matter how the woman became pregnant; the fact of the matter is, she is being FORCED to give up her body, her nutrition, her own SELF-DETERMINATION so that something that MAY someday be born and survive can exercise rights that she has surrendered.
This, to me, should be a no-brainer. If a woman is subordinate to a fetus, then she has no self-determination, and therefore, no real freedom. If a fetus is a person, a woman cannot be one. Therefore, no woman who can become pregnant is an equal citizen under such a policy. This is why the fetal personhood argument is inherently misogynistic, even if that is not the conscious intent - which I concede that it is not, for many people. But those who would argue for fetal personhood need to face the inevitable consequences of that argument. A woman is not a person if a fetus is.
Equality is for ALL economic strata of society
I never know whether to laugh or scream when some "progressive" tells me that things like the Hyde amendment (and now Stupak) don't interfere with "abortion rights." How many times has someone self-righteously snarled, "All it does is keep federal funds from paying for abortions... You can have all the abortions you want, but you shouldn't expect me to pay for it."
A lot of people in this country, they tell me, find abortion abhorrent and don't want their tax dollars to go toward ending the "lives" of the unborn. When you ask them where they got the idea that we can stipulate what our individual tax monies can be used for, they inevitably have no meaningful answer. The point is, to them, that abortion may be a legal "right," but that doesn't mean society has to pay for one.
But how can a right be a right if only some people can afford it? How can we honestly say that all people are equal if only those with enough money can avail themselves of a legal right? I don't see how.And don't give me that argument that the average abortion only costs $400 or whatever the arbitrary number may be, because it's not the point. The point is, some women are poor. Very poor. For some women, $400 is a fortune. For some women, coming up with $400 means that they will have to surrender the right to self-determination, because they don't have the money to exercise that right.
And let's not kid ourselves - a disproportionate number of poor women are also minorities. So not only are we saying it's okay to deny poor women a legal right because of financial obstacles, we're saying it's okay that the majority of women being denied that right are women of color.
Is this really what you want to be saying?
The core of the progressive agenda is protecting the rights and freedoms of all people, regardless of their place in society. We therefore cannot be for women's rights and against public funding of abortions, because if a woman cannot afford an abortion, she is being denied a fundamental right to her self-determination. In this case, access equals the right itself. If we believe in public assistance for providing people with money for food, clothing, housing, and medical care, then how on earth do we justify exluding abortion from that assistance? If forced pregnancy prohibits a woman from exercising control of her life - her self-determination - then she is being forced into a kind of slavery. And the fact that many other women can avoid this slavery because they have enough money makes this situation more shameful, not less.
It's not really about abortion.
The "abortion debate" is only a debate about abortion because of religious conservatives who have forced it into that framing. Many non-religious people have nonetheless been hoodwinked into supporting a movement that is being driven by religious judgment. It is vital that progressives who come down on the anti-choice side of this debate be willing to honestly scrutinize the framing and try to understand that it really is about women's rights and equality rather than "killing unborn babies."
What this all comes down to is one basic, horrifying question:
When is a woman a person?