Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
I Am Pro-Life
An article in this morning’s paper confirmed it: I am pro-life.
I started suspecting I might be when I wrote this post last summer. Now, however, a global study by the Guttmacher Institute has left me with no doubt.
I am pro-life for the 67,000 women who die annually around the globe due to unsafe, illegal abortions.
I am pro-life for fetuses, which is why I believe in comprehensive sex education and making reliable contraceptives available and affordable.
I am pro-life, not pro-criminalization.
According to the New York Times this morning,
A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it. Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth.
I know there are good people on both sides of this debate. Plenty of intelligent, compassionate people have been working to make abortion illegal in the
I invite them to join me on the pro-life side. I would like to reduce the number of women who die due to unsafe, illegal abortions. I would like to see the abortion rate continue to drop worldwide--and the best way to do this is to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies.
I am pro-life, which is why I hope we can all work together to make abortion safe, legal, and rare.
posted by Tess | 6:49 AM
4 Comments:
I generally agree with your position. And, it is quite damning to the position of the conventional "pro-life" movement (i.e. those who support the crimininalization of abortion) that abortion rates are not lowered by making it illegal. This evidence strongly indicates, as you argue, that the most "pro-life" position, given the terrible injuries and even deaths that occur to women in countries where they cannot get a safe, legal abortion, is to support CHOICE. We should, indeed, work together to make abortion safe, legal, and rare.
Yet a part of me does resist basing the argument against criminalizing abortion so centrally on this non-correlation. For, though it seems unlikely, it is still conceivable that the data could turn out to be otherwise in some other time and place. I would say that abortion should be legal even if criminalization did reduce the rate of abortion. (Perhaps you would too.) For the whole problem is that "abortion takes a human life" is an imposition of a particular religious point of view in a pluralistic society. I can see why some people would think it morally wrong to have an abortion (so don't have one), but I don't ultimately think this position is very convincing outside of certain religious assumptions. It does not even represent the consensus view of Christians (such as me), for goodness sake. One could just as well imagine a religious movement that declares the egg to be sacred (apologies to Monty Python) and then seeks to force women to conceive children with every avaiable egg (I have toyed with the idea of starting a tongue-in-cheek "abstinence is murder" but decided it might be too divisive and confrontational, even as satire). The point is, these views are debatable, and good people with moral convictions can disagree. How could we possibly make such a call for society as a whole, when the entity under debate as a possible form of morally sanctified "life" is a part of and attached to a woman's body? Shouldn't that difficult moral call be hers to make? I just can't see any other way to protect women's equality and control over their bodies in a pluralistic society, even if criminalizing abortion did at some future time actually work (which, as you point out, it doesn't).
Sorry for muddying the waters of your attempt at common ground with my more traditional pro-choice comments. I really do think your argument is quite sound and should be taken to heart by all those who profess to care about "life."
What has struck me lately, as I tried to keep an open mind and see what the research has to say about abortion, is how the "pro-life" argument fails even on its own terms. The fact that criminalization does not seem to "save lives" is, to me, symptomatic of a certain kind of social conservatism that seeks to base policy on wishful thinking rather than evidence. As far as I'm concerned, that's pro-ideology, but not pro-life.
Since I am trying base my beliefs on evidence as well as philosophical convictions, if future research shows a different result, I will have to reconsider certain aspects of my position.
The satirical abstinence-is-murder argument illustrates the difficulty in defining the terms of this debate. If, due to successful use of birth control, no conception occurs, there is no "baby" to be "saved." Can a lack of conception be considered "pro-life" simply because no abortion occurs, when one might have taken place if a pregnancy had happened? Or does "pro-life" mean that every possible conception must take place?
I do agree, though, that the choice should be a woman's to make. In fact, I would argue that the current study shows that it always is, and the idea that government can control women's reproduction is an illusion. Criminalization of abortion can indeed prevent licensed medical personnel from performing abortions. Since pregnancy takes place within a woman's own body, however, she has ultimate, if crude, control over what happens. If a woman is so determined to end a pregnancy that she is willing to risk her own death, there is nothing a government can do to stop her.
I kept reading passages of your post (and comment) out loud to owen; his response was "Damn, you have smart friends!"
I agree. ;)
What I find interesting about the "pro-life" classification is that it's often used to refer solely to a stance on abortion.
I consider myself pro-life philosophically - I am a pacifist, I'm against the death penalty, I do view conception of a fetus as a "life" and abortion as taking that life - but politically, in the case of abortion, I am pro-choice. Abortion should certainly be legal.
Then I hop on the hypocrite wagon, I guess, because I think the death penalty should without question be revoked.
The other part of the abortion debate that people tend not to address is that when pro-choicers want to say that having an abortion should be a woman's decision, they're condemning her to make the choice on her own. My belief in Christian community says that she should have as much support in making this decision as she wants - that if she wants to be able to have the baby, but has no one to help raise him or her, the community babysits. If she wants to put the baby up for adoption, the community adopts the baby. And if she wants to end the pregnancy, the community makes sure she'd have the same kind of care she'd receive for any medical procedure.
I also have difficulty believing that any woman can make the decision lightly, which is an agenda it seems like conservative pro-lifers want to push. I don't think any woman can have an abortion and not - two, five, ten, thirty years later - wonder what that child would have been like. Not to undo it, but it's certainly the kind of choice that stays with you, that defines you, that causes you to make choices about yourself.
I'm sorry for rambling. I'm tired, it's Friday. I love how thought-provoking Tess can be.
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