Women’s bodies as community property
Paul blogs Katha Pollitt’s conversation with Annie Laurie Gaylor:
“We have to start talking about abortion as a normal part of women’s lives,” Pollitt told us. “It always has been.” And in fact, even religions have not been, and are not always, tied to the notion that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a full person. She talked about the “wiggle room” that Southern Baptists allow for abortion, and how in Judaism, the woman is the “first person” of priority when there is a question of primacy.
A major stumbling block when it comes to abortion is the ingrained perception of women’s bodies as somehow being community property. Part of this is exacerbated by what Pollitt called the “baby-fication” of the fetus, treating a glob of cells like it’s a cute little infant in a onesie. But more to the point, the problem is that much of society views the woman’s body as violable.
Violable, judgeable, open to criticism and grading – just plain public in every way. The whole woman, at the same time, is profoundly unimportant and negligible. She’s the “and his wife” in newspaper headlines about awards she won along with her husband. She plays the bit part, often with no dialogue. She does not count – therefore her wishes about what happens to her body are entirely beside the point.
She brought up the fact that Christopher Hitchens had expressed his opposition to abortion, saying that to end a pregnancy must be a societal decision. Exasperated, Pollitt said, “Is society going to die in childbirth?”
Is society going to be flattened by exhaustion for the first trimester? Is it going to nurse the baby? Is it going to raise the child?
Also at the conference was Kristine Kruszelnicki, an anti-abortion activist who had a table there.
I'm a #prolife #atheist at #WIS4 but enjoying hearing @KathaPollitt author of Pro: Reclaiming #Abortion Rights. #OpenMinds always important!
— Kristine Kruszelnicki (@kruszer) September 25, 2016
She’s an anti-abortion atheist. “Prolife” is an obnoxious and dishonest label for opposition to abortion. People who support abortion rights are not “antilife” so “prolife” is a dishonest way of framing the opposition.
Anti-abortion advocates are not “pro-life”. Full stop. In addition to cases where the mother dies during childbirth, their view of life is closer to metabollsm than humen life. See Terry Schiavo.
Kristine lives in Ottawa, and I have tangled with her on this topic numerous times. In summary: Kristine’s view as I understand it is that there is a continuum of life from the moment of conception. Therefore, a woman who chooses to terminate a pregnancy is ending the life of another human being. The woman’s right to bodily autonomy does not justify the termination of another life, and to devalue the life of a blastocyst or embryo or fetus in favour of the pregnant woman is age discrimination and/or ableism.
Oh I’d forgotten she lives in Ottawa and that you’d tangled with her. I remembered her from an encounter with Rebecca Watson at a different conference, but forgotten most of the details.
She’s not wrong that there’s a “continuum of life” – but the issue isn’t life. Viruses are alive; nobody thinks that’s a reason not to kill them.
But also I just detest that label.
I should have clarified by saying “continuum of human life“. It’s about the chromosomes. Viruses are not genetically human. Even human gametes are disposable. But once it’s a zygote, it’s a proto-BABY and therefore entitled to human rights.
Agreed about the label – “forced birth” would be a more accurate description.
Rights aren’t absolute. A fine traditional formulation has them ending at the tip of another person’s nose. Inside their uterus is rather closer than that. Stressing the fetus’ place on a continuum of human life or identifying it as a baby already is a dodge: putting the argument there is a distraction from the woman who’s being relegated to an incubator. Maybe it’s a shell game people inflict on themselves first; maybe it’s one they just don’t notice; maybe it’s easy for them because they’re already dismissing women as nothing more than incubators, or they figure any woman who ever has sex is issuing an invitation to any baby who may happen to show up in her to stick around for nine months at least and maybe from then til college.
I’ve never known a woman to fling around those invitations that widely, myself.
This is exactly what they figure. They even say this sometimes. If you have sex, you face the consequences. This is considered appropriate punishment for daring to have sex without (or with) that ring on your finger that makes it legal.
Right to bodily autonomy trumps right to life– or can I sedate Kristine against her will to extract a kidney to save someone else’s life?
I have in fact made the argument about non-voluntary organ donation. I think it is a robust argument, and helps to reveal the true nature of the position of the forced birth proponents. It has not occurred to most people to consider the fact that (in most countries, including Canada and the US) bodily autonomy continues even after a person is dead – regardless of how many lives could be saved, organs would not be harvested from a person who had previously objected to the procedure. We don’t even mandate blood donations, where the time commitment and risk to the donor is minuscule.
So the only argument left to the forced birthers is the claim that the woman has a unique responsibility for the blastocyst/embryo/fetus because an action of the woman (having sex) caused it to come into being. And based on this, she should be forced to risk her health and life to maintain the pregnancy. (It occurs to me to wonder if anyone done an actuarial calculation to determine the cost of continuing an unwanted pregnancy. This might put into perspective what would happen if the other person who participated in the sex act and contributed the other half of the genetic material would be forced to accept an equivalent level of responsibility, at least in financial terms.)
Before birth control pills became available in the mid-1960s, women’s bodies could be used to control them without creating a baby-in-a-cute-onesie out of a developing mass of cells.
In 1968, this was the general thinking among the fundies. An evangelical professor at a theological seminary wrote:
As that article says, writing that in the last 20 years would get you fired from any fundie-controlled job.
The embryo-as-baby — who is more important than the human woman carrying it — was an invention following the loss of control over women caused by the invention of birth control.
Kristine Kruszelnicki got trounced by Matt Dillahunty in their abortion debate. She was struggling to hold on to the audience, but when she showed pictures of aborted foetuses, she lost all goodwill.
https://youtu.be/P78_V1Z9CO4