07.22.09
Morality and abortion
Inspired by an article in Salon entitled “What’s wrong with the new pro-lifers” by Frances Kissling, a woman who appears to be opposed to abortion but has lots of issues trying to reason her way through the sticky issue.
Twenty-eight pages of letters later, I came to a comment by keenplanner, who stated
The New Anti-choicers
Same as the old anti-choicers.
The bottom line is that abortion will never dissappear, even if it is made illegal. What will dissappear are clinically safe abortions performed by medical profesionals.
Over 40,000 women all over the world die from botched abortions. Do these anti-choice religious fanatics and bigots want the US to join the ranks of countries with filthy, illegal, back-alley abortion providers?
This movement should not be called anti-choice, and it’s far from pro-life.
They should be called pro-coathanger.
I responded (and have expanded):
If you hang out where anti-abortionists feel free to speak their minds, you will find that actually many of them do feel that the punishment for abortion should be death, even if that means that 1/3 to 1/2 of women would die.
Of course, you can’t tell by looking at a woman whether she is one of the guilty ones. But that simply means that in their minds, any woman they meet could already be a murderer, and every woman of childbearing age, given the “choice”, could become one with her next act of moral agency. This dovetails nicely with their notion of the nobility of women dying as a result of a doomed pregnancy.
They honestly believe that late term termination of healthy pregnancies is so frequent that it is a huge problem, that it is the natural tendency of women to change their minds in the last week of pregnancy for no reason whatever, and that women who do this have no problem finding doctors to accommodate them.
Step back and you see that men who lead the movement are arguing that women are morally inferior. Women made the “choice” not to “keep their legs shut”, and therefore, should be forced (but not “punished”) to bear and raise the baby at their own expense (unless of course it is marketable for adoption). It annoys them to no end that there is no stigma to this.
They see abortion as enabling women to “get away with” sex. They think that not only should women be forced to bear any such child conceived out of wedlock (or within a marriage that she should have known in advance was going to end), but that women who do end up raising such children should be punished by society with poverty, as should their bastard children.
Let’s look at the religious issue here that is never spoken, as the argument implies that sex is a moral choice for women but not for men. It’s just the old garden-of-eden story claiming that wicked women tempt men, who are too weak morally to resist. Therefore, women deserve to be punished for tempting men to have sex, but men can’t help themselves.
If men are truly morally inferior, then they have no business lecturing women about moral choices. How about this imperative for moral choices by men: Men who are opposed to abortion can end abortion now just by keeping their pants zipped up.
Here ya go:
