You're either pregnant or you're not (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Shortly after Hillary Clinton failed to become President, I attended a meeting of American abortion providers to discuss the problems they and their staff would face under Donald Trump. Already they struggled with protests and blockades outside clinics; death threats are not rhetoric but reality in some states where doctors wear bullet-proof vests to work and check their cars for explosives. The community of doctors that provide later abortions is small. I’m an infrequent visitor to the US, but even I was on hugging terms with Dr George Tiller before he was murdered for his work in 2009 — shot in the porch of his family church in Witchita.
As the mainly female group shared their despair at the new administration, the older grey-haired man sitting on my left — conservative suit, flamboyant tie — smiled quizzically, before calmly remarking in his Southern drawl: “Well then, I suppose I am the only one here who supports our new President?” He was.
I can’t reproduce my conversation with this doctor from Arizona as accurately as I wish. I wasn’t taking notes and his story did not seem as significant to me then as it does now. But this is the gist of it.
In his small hometown, he ran not only the abortion clinic but two gun stores; he was a member of both the National Abortion Federation and the National Rifle Association. He was, he explained, a man whose values were shaped by the writings of Ayn Rand, whom he had met as a student in the Sixties. He said, and this is the one bit I do remember verbatim: “My support for a woman’s choice about abortion comes from the same place as my support for her right to bear arms. An individual’s freedom matters.”
This is not a conventional view for today’s supporters of legal abortion, many of whom seem to believe personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination are the preserve of the neo-con Right. I am not sure my gun-trading friend would now be welcome in a similar meeting. Perhaps, given what I am about to say, I would not be either.
How we talk about, indeed how we think about, abortion has changed fundamentally since it was dragged from the dowdiness of shame and secrecy to the centre of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Access to abortion was clearly about self-determination and moral autonomy. Yes, abortion was — at least in early pregnancy — a simple medical procedure that was a benefit to personal and to public health. But to those campaigning for its legalisation, abortion was so much more than healthcare. It symbolised a choice for a woman when her life was in crisis; it symbolised a new sense of personal agency, the personal power to shape nature’s plan.
Birth control gave us control of our reproductive destiny, freeing us from the socially constructed, imposed gender-role of mother and carer. It mattered not whether a woman actually used birth control — what mattered was that she could choose to do so if she wished. With contraception to prevent pregnancy and abortion to end it, the spectres of birth and motherhood were pushed away — unless we invited them to us. It’s hard to see what else could make a bigger contribution to a woman’s liberty.
Of course, not all who claim they’re committed to freedom and liberty believe that women should be free to choose to have an abortion. No doubt an abortion doctor would be as alone in a meeting of defenders of the Second Amendment as our gun-shop owner would now be among clinic staff. But when we go beyond the feelings and self-identification of different tribal members, there remains a consistency of a principle: that the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.
Crucially, this foundation is not contingent on a woman’s situation or experience — her race, or class or privilege. We live intersectional lives but some beliefs and principles remain universal concerns because we are more than our own experience. Indeed, the pro-choice principles that won abortion access only did so because they united women beyond personal experience or need.
They mobilised those who would never become pregnant because they were older, or infertile, or expressed sexual feelings in a way that didn’t risk pregnancy. Men joined us in solidarity because they understood how an involuntary pregnancy is a living nightmare. The social movement was built on an idea of what was worth fighting for.
Today, the focus is different. The sails of the movement now seem to be buffeted by winds from a different continent. Freedom of choice, once our principle, has been thrown overboard — not to anchor us as it once did, but to cut the movement loose from a legacy of white supremacy. “Freedom”, as in the personal moral freedom that gives each of us command of life, is dismissed as a privilege of the advantaged, not to be extended to all but instead to be “checked”. “Choice”, in particular the choice between abortion and motherhood, is now dismissed as elitist or consumerist or too binary.
Today’s destination is no longer a world where we have freedom to decide what is right and wrong in the private personal domain. Instead, it is a world where self-determination, autonomy and personal freedom are dismissed as privileged and arcane and insufficiently inclusive. It is as though these ideas, by being anchored in a Western philosophical canon, are forever tainted with a stench of old, white patriarchs.
Of course, how we experience reproductive rights and wrongs are woven with the rest of our lives. But, when every aspect of life is thrown into the pot of oppression and denial — racism, poverty, homelessness, educational disadvantage, disability, sexual marginalisation — it is unclear with whom solidarity can be won.
Does my older, white, male, privileged Republican abortion doctor have no place in this movement? Does the rich, white, conservative Texan woman with a $300 haircut and Gucci shoes not suffer the same degradation as her cleaner when she is told that the law no longer permits her to end an unwanted pregnancy? Where does privilege begin and end in this intersectional quagmire? Who is inside our tent, and who is outside it? Crucially, who decides?
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) grew out of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, changing its name in 1942. While its origins are tainted in eugenics (like every other mainstream medical organisation formed in the early 20th Century), it has provided birth control and sexual health care for generations of women since, particularly poor women without insurance.
So what is a poor, white, woman — with no job, no education, no home to call her own — to believe when she reads the following statement given by the President of PPFA to the New York Times last April: “By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of colour. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’ we have excluded trans and nonbinary people…”
Might not she herself feel excluded by the very organisation on which she relies no less than a poor, black woman? And when she reads that once-champion of women’s choice go on to say that “we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights to the exclusion of other causes that women of colour or trans people cannot afford to ignore”, might she not howl with despair that her own colour and absence of “queerness” casts her aside?
From the perspective of today’s reproductive justice warriors, pregnancy by its very nature is problematic. After all, it defies the progressive framing of every issue around social constructions, to the exclusion of hard-wired reality. Pregnancy is starkly binary: you either are, or you aren’t. It’s old-fashionedly objective and challenges self-definition: feeling and defining yourself pregnant or unpregnant won’t make it so. It relies on, and resides in, mature, female physiology — even if you don’t define yourself as “woman”.
Is this why so many young activists insist that I cannot or should not talk about pregnant women when I talk about abortion? Because pregnancy makes it obvious that a woman is more than just “a body with a vagina” or “someone with a cervix”? Her woman-ness is so obviously, physically real that a world committed to social constructionism simply collapses.
And does the fact that pregnancy happens to an individual, not to a community — and so calls for a personal decision that speaks to an individual’s sense of right and wrong — disrupt a narrative that seeks to frame itself as communitarian? It is not a community’s womb that becomes pregnant. It is not a society’s belly that grows, or a people’s breasts that are made heavy as they fill. All of this happens to an individual.
There is something grimly ironic about the tendency among today’s activists to deny this: namely, that their retreat from an old-fashioned commitment to individual choice leads right back to the eugenicist basis from which those of us committed to individual freedom have tried to wrest the birth control movement. A personal choice must be personal — otherwise it isn’t a choice, but social engineering.
Already we see social movements insisting that personal choices are being made for the “wrong reasons”. Advances in antenatal screening, for instance, are blamed for allowing women to make the choice to terminate pregnancies affected by conditions that a pregnant woman understands as disability, but which justice warriors see as “difference”. They protest that women are making discriminatory choices, that the world will be less diverse. But why, a woman might ask, should they get to decide for her? When it comes to her body, choice isn’t something that a woman can simply abrogate: it’s what makes her her.
The freedom to make moral choices is the most important freedom we have; the freedom to act on those choices is the most important freedom we can claim. And while Trump may be gone, that freedom is still far from guaranteed. In the battles ahead over who decides about abortion, I know I can count on the pro-choice, gun shop-owning white Republican to have my flank. I wish I could feel so confident about the twenty-something activists shouting him down.
Ann Furedi’s latest book The Moral Case for Abortion: A Defence of Reproductive Choice is available for pre-order on Amazon or directly from the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan
Ann Furedi is the former chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and the author of The Moral Case for Abortion.
AnnFuredi 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHilariously barmy nonsense.
Yes, it’s interesting that she sees that this is nonsense when applied to pregnancy while denying any trace of innateness to motherhood…
It’s nonsense on stilts however you look at it. If motherhood and childcare are socially constructed, then men could give birth and breastfeed if everyone agreed that was preferable. They can’t do either, so the motherhood and childcare roles are not “socially constructed”, but arise from immutable biological sex.
If the author misunderstands this as oldthink, and cannot bellyfeel it, then none of her opinions is of any value whatever. She can no more opine on anything than someone who can’t add to three can do rocket science.
I think you’ve misunderstood her point. I understood her to be saying that birth control allowed women (like me) to choose never to have children, unlike our mothers who, if they wanted to have an enjoyable sex life with a man, ran the risk of pregnancy and could not choose to end such pregnancies (my mother had five children, lost a sixth and was subsequently ‘sterilised’, as they called it then, at her own request). In that sense motherhood was the destiny of sexually active women of my mother’s generation, but not of mine. Motherhood could be chosen, or not chosen, because of birth control, for the first time in history. Once the choice became available, the pressure to choose motherhood was indeed coming from the stereotype of women as nurturing and caring for babies. Many people can’t see the point of women who don’t want children (whilst having great sympathy with women who can’t have children). I urge you to read the passage again in that light and not to dismiss it (or her) so readily:
“Birth control gave us control of our reproductive destiny, freeing us from the socially constructed, imposed gender-role of mother and carer.”
Feminism has forever run on feelings and subjectivity, making the personal political. Modern justice warriors are your mirror, a monster of your own creating.
When will Feminism start taking responsibility for this, and then reconsider its other narratives that are themselves driven on feelings and subjectivity?
On the topic of mothers killing their unborn children, the following debate between the author and an ex-Planned Parenthood* manager really highlights the evil and narcissism behind the unborn child-killing industry and its ideological cheerleaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMcM1pCHUAg
[* ‘Planned Parenthood’ and ‘Pregnancy Advisory Service’. Why the need to hide behind Newspeak, and more broadly language smudging like ‘fetus’, ‘abortion’ when ‘child’ and ‘killing’ is more accurate and available?]
Well said.
Mind your own uterus, Fred.
Hmmm. As usual on this topic it is the men who are out and about. Little said by female readers. I wonder why. Wink.
“language smudging like ‘fetus’, ‘abortion’ when ‘child’ and ‘killing’ is more accurate and available”. If a tree falls on you it could kill you, if a sapling falls on you, it won’t. The sapling could grow into a tree, but it hasn’t yet, and we have two different words for them to account for the difference – like fetus and child. I don’t mind people calling Voluntary Assisted Dying ‘self-killing’ though there is a difference, but one of the reasons for not doing so is to avoid using emotionally-loaded words when discussing these complex issues.
“If a tree falls on you it could kill you, if a sapling falls on you, it won’t. The sapling could grow into a tree, but it hasn’t yet, and we have two different words for them to account for the difference – like fetus and child.”
Are you saying killing a tree is unethical, but killing a sapling is merely doing some gardening?
Just saying it’s a good idea to use words precisely, and where possible, unemotionally.
As a keen gardener I do have a ruthless streak, but naturally, as a person on the left, I would consider the the prospect of birds being made homeless if the tree were cut down, how much stored carbon might be released from destroying a large tree etc.Does the sapling merit the same care?
The point is missed, according to what I see. You can talk about choice of words for ever but does the guy who shoots the doctor also have an internal debate about words? I would suggest that he shot because God told him to do so.
If you have law, you have a judicial system. If the judge agrees that the shooting was OK because God told him that, then you don’t have laws. This is why the USA can never be trusted. Even presidents will overrule laws because God is providing the advice.
And that is why some of us in the US are wistfully remembering that there was a time in which separation of church and state was reality.
Today, not so much
What is God! And what does “God” have to do with a woman’s choice about HER pregnancy?
Right, we should avoid emotional language, otherwise people might actually think about what’s being discussed.
The reason there are no “foetus death clinics” is the same reason there was a “final solution”. Some things you have to talk around, to keep yourself feeling comfortable and virtuous.
“Right, we should avoid emotional language, otherwise people might actually think about what’s being discussed.”
No, we can discuss most complex issues better without emotion. You can see this very clearly on the comments threads of most blogs – once emotional words are used the discussion quickly degenerates into anger and personal abuse – any thoughtful analysis of the issue becomes impossible. Emotion can easily derail a discussion, to no one’s benefit.
Okay, take emotion out of abortion. A woman is pregnant because the man she had sex with didn’t use a condom. He is already in the wind as all he wanted was to get his rocks off. She has no money to eat a healthy diet. She lives in her car. She doesn’t want to be pregnant because she knows that should her foetus be born, there is a huge possibility that it will be damaged due to her living circumstances. Once a child, she also knows the state will have to raise it as she can’t afford to and the man has no intention of raising any child. Best practice, abort then there will be no child for the state to bring up and the man is totally off the hook.
Or
Woman and man have sex. Pill fails as it can do. Woman goes to man and says I am pregnant. Man says here is $500, get rid of it. Woman says no. Man then kicks her down the stairs hoping she lands on her belly. She doesn’t. Man then kicks her several times in the belly. Her body rejects the foetus. But she still has to go to a clinic or hospital to get rid of the placenta. Man made abortion. Not safe.
Both these scenarios are real.
Both are abortion. One is safe, the other… Someone needs to be jailed and it is not the woman.
“One is safe”
For who? Certainly not the baby.
There is no distinction in the final act. Both have intentionally killed an unborn baby, if the latter scenario deservers jail then so does the former.
If you want to think about what is being discussed, you have to use words that do not take one of the positions for granted. If you call something ‘pro-choice’ or ‘racism’, or ‘child-killing’ there is nothing left to discuss. Only one opinion is possible, and the others are obviously wrong and evil. If you agree with the words you need not argue. If you disagree with the words it is impossible to present your position properly, because the words assume that you are wrong. That is why the woke so often insist on changing the language. It is hard to convince people that born males have a right to enter female dressing rooms, but if you can convince everybody to make it about ‘transphobia’ then it seems obvious that you are right and everybody else is wrong. It is a way of manipulating people so you can win discussions on pure social power. I saw a lovely example in a linguistics treatise.
The scene is southern US:
Policeman: “What’s you name, boy?”
Black man: “Dr Poussaint, I am a physician.”
Policeman: “What’s your first name, boy?”
Black man: “Alvin“.
The policeman never argues, or even says, that black people are inferior, but by talking as if they were, and forcing the other side to participate, he won the point anyway. Dr Poussaint, who told the story, told that he felt demeaned and full of self-hate afterwards. The only way out is for the other side to refuse to participate unless the words are changed – or to stop talking about what matters and spend your time arguing semantics instead.
So, please do not play the woke game of using language tricks instead of arguing for what you mean. It is perfectly possible to say, e.g. “I think that morally abortion is no better than child murder”, without having to do violence to the English language.
Does anyone truly believe that abortion is the same as child murder? If so, they believe that one in three women in the USA are better than Myra Hindley.
It’s not much of an argument though.
Not just prolifers, but vegetarians, vegans, anti racists, and anti slavers in their time: they all believe that otherwise perfectly nice people are doing something monstrous. But something monstrous that is socially condoned.
Prolifers (I’m not one, btw) believe that abortion is socially condoned murder. Their position is that the rest of us are refusing to acknowledge that.
Excellent summary!
I suppose it comes down to how many abortions a single woman has in her lifetime. One abortion – unfortunate, two abortions- not very clever, three or more then yes she is a psychopath who would benefit from sterilisation! Stop talking about abortions like they are the only way to not have to deal with unwanted pregnancy! If you don’t want to have children then there are two very good and effective choices A) don’t have sex. B) use birth control (in extreme circumstances the morning after pill)
You are right; no-one tells friends and family that they are expecting a fetus.
That’s probably because you already have a fetus, you are expecting a child in a number of months time.
That’s because they are already carrying a foetus, it grows into a baby. Is an acorn the same thing as an oak tree, or an egg the same thing as a chicken?
I did… Why? I never expected to carry to term and the medics could find nowt wrong at the time. Only later did they find out what was wrong and that I would never birth a child and be a natal mother.
No one tells friends and family that they are expecting a miscarriage either. The ‘expectation’ of a baby is a hopeful guess at a desired outcome. It’s not a fully formed baby in early pregnancy, it’s a foetus that has developed from an embryo that has in turn developed from two gametes.
I sort of agree with you but think that your reasoning has led you 180 degrees astray. It’s not a neo-Marxist (or “woke” if you will) trick to point out when one side is abusing language to obfuscate. It is accurately pointing out that one side is abusing language to obfuscate, because if one side is doing this, it’s an important datum point.
The basis for example for opposition to abortion, where it’s not religious in origin, is that it’s infanticide for the mother’s convenience (it can’t be for the father’s, because he has no say in the matter). The reason why proponents of abortion don’t like this terminology is nothing that it’s “emotional”, but that it’s not. It’s exactly factual and it also embeds the obvious challenge that if infanticide is OK, then why can’t we allow abortion up to the age of, say, five years of age? Let’s not get emotional, right? If we were going to do that we’d call abortion proponents “paedophobes”, or something.
The fact is that you could rebrand euthanasia as something else, but if it’s imposed by the offspring or some third party on a parent, then it is not euthanasia. Perhaps it’s just very late term abortion.
The problem is that one side’s obfuscation is the other side’s obvious fact. As it happens I agree with you that abortion is best seen as a kind of infanticide but probably a majority of the population strongly disagree with us. Similarly I am sure that most progressives are completely sincere when they say that anyone who is against full gender self-identification must ‘transphobic’, i.e. irrational, hate-driven, and anyway totally wrong. But the whole point of discussing these things is to decide *whether* we want to say abortion is akin to murder or *whether* we think the talk of e.g. J.K. Rowling is irrational, hate-driven, and wrong. If we insist on adopting our pet vocabulary at the start of the discussion we will never get to discuss anything, just stand and shout insults at each other across no man’s land.
The best procedure would be to stay with standard unemotional words whenever possible. And whatever you think of terminating pregnancies the standard word remains ‘abortion’. And (as you may have noticed 😉 ) I believe you can be as hard-hitting and tough in your statements as you want to be without having to resort to loaded words.
So what is spontaneous abortion? Nature’s infanticide? If so, the majority of women who have had sex with a fertile man will be guilty of infanticide. And so is every man who wears a condom – the waste of the sperm that should make a foetus.
By the same logic, everyone eventually dies, so killing someone isn’t murder.
I suppose you are aware that some abortions, far from being ‘for the mother’s convenience’, are undertaken to spare a full-term child the trauma of dying a few hours after birth from a catastrophic and unsurvivable medical condition?
“As a person on the left I would consider the prospect of birds being made homeless if the tree were cut down” Really. So you being on the left are privileged to consider this. What utter virtue signalling rubbish. I am centre right, so presumably I do not possess such sensitivity towards the domicile of our feathered friends and neighbours?
As a centre-right person I not only think about the birds but also apologise to the tree and explain why its death is necessary. Perhaps the left-leaning person is not seeing the whole picture
Perhaps this left-leaning person was making a joke.
Ridiculous augument NO SAPLING NO TREE.
If all saplings were cut down we would soon have no trees. I prefer Goethe’s famous aphorism.
You are right; no-one ever tells their friends or family that they are expecting a foetus.
True, but that’s because that is not what they are expecting. It’s what they might currently be carrying though.
In the same way, if I fire a gun at you, I am not shooting at you. By contriving the combustion in a confined space of a small amount of propellant, I am endeavouring to make a projectile traverse the barrel and exit the muzzle of a Smith and Wesson. If it hits you, the result may be a late-term abortion. It’s a lazy conflation to claim that I shot you.
Indeed. In the debate I linked, the author even slips up and uses the term ‘premature baby’.
‘Baby’ when expecting.
‘Baby’ when premature.
‘Fetus’ when killing.
Dehumanise before killing, oldest trick in the book.
Exactly. Which is why “pro-lifers” dehumanize women by erasing their humanity from the debate. I would rather see a million fetuses (or unborn babies, if you prefer) killed through abortion than see one scared teenage girl die from sepsis or hemorrhage after being driven to self abort at home.
I own this statement: I value the lives and humanity of women and girls more than I value the lives and humanity of unborn babies.
You value the lives and humanity of unborn babies more than you value the lives and humanity of women and girls. But unlike me, you do not have the integrity to own your beliefs.
Gosh, a million to one. Really?
Not me, guv! There are tragedies on both sides; I acknowledge that. I still think (something like) industrial-scale baby killing is the worse choice. As for you: If you would rather sacrifice a million fetuses than a single grown woman, are you valuing ‘the life and humanity of unborn babies’ at anything more than zero?
If a woman has a miscarriage in the first trimester of pregnancy, do you treat that he same as if she had lost her 2 year old child?
Personally I don’t, whilst I’d feel sad that she’d lost her chance of having a baby in the first scenario I’d feel much more devastated for her in the second example, and think of that as much more of a tragedy
They’re both tragedies, Bob. That’s the point.
But they’re not the same, that’s my point
Of course they’re not the same, they are different things. They are still both tragedies.
There is another question to answer… Can the aborted foetus live outside the woman? The answer to that is for the majority, No. Therefore the foetus would never be a child. If the foetus is born and breathes for itself, then it may be considered a child. But then if it dies? Has the woman committed murder? And if it dies in hospital, do we prosecute the health professionals for not doing more to make the foetus live?
The foetus lives with extreme disabilities… Who is responsible for its life?
None of my foetuses drew breath. Each looked like a wizened child. I know the sex of all 7. All were natural abortions. Am I guilty of infanticide?
That’s because they would be saying they expect a stillbirth or miscarriage. A fetus cannot survive outside the mother’s body; a baby can.
I feel the same about WW2 issues
The standard and most neutral words are ‘fetus’, ‘abortion’ (and ‘assisted suicide’). ‘Newspeak and language smudging’ is when you try to force a wording with an emotional load that takes your opinions for granted, rather than arguing for your position. It leads to losing touch with what matters and banging on about semantics. ‘Child-killing’ ‘pro-life’, (and ‘self-killing’) are newspeak quite as must as ‘pro-choice’ (or ‘voluntary assisted dying’) – or for that matter ‘enslaved person’, ‘womb-carrier’, or ‘structural racism’
Absolute nonsense, this is a script-flip of reality. It is a child, and it is killing the child. The terms ‘fetus’ and ‘abortion’ are a few words among many used to hide your eyes from this.
Watch the debate I linked above and count how many times the author uses Newspeak or smudges the language, tip-toes around the reality of what happens with verbose rationalisations. I have more respect for pro-unborn child killing advocates who outright state that what they are supporting is the right of a mother, written in law, to kill their own children.
The crux is that those employing Newspeak, language-smudging know in their hearts that what they are supporting is wrong, is evil. It’s a form of absolving themselves, smearing their mirror with wax so they do not have to look themselves in the eyes.
You can rant and rave all you want, but criminalizing abortion never leads to less abortion: it only leads to more illegal abortions. Women here in Texas have been getting ulcer medication from Mexico for years, and they abort at home with no medical help (legal abortions in Texas have been harder and more expensive than illegal abortions for a long time).
If you truly care about the unborn, you will fight for increased social and financial support for poor families.
If you are not will to do that, you need to shut up about how much you “care” about unborn babies. You are actually helping to kill them.
We have about 194,000 abortions a year in the UK – about 10 million since it was legalised. Is it your contention that if it were illegal, there’d have been even more?
And, we (I am in Texas, as well.) have had at least one resident needing to drive herself to New Mexico for an ectopic pregnancy because the medical establishment is scared witless because of the vigilante law. So much for “in case the woman’s life is at stake” exception.
Perhaps it will take deaths as happened in Ireland (Dr. Savita Halapannavar and Poland (“Agnieszka”) for there to be a wakeup call. Or perhaps not.
As far as public assistance aid in Texas Is concerned, I am afraid that if you haven’t lived here, you cannot comprehend how much Texas is a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” state. Even if you have no boots.
Couple that with religious fervor, and yes, this is a recipe for disaster.
I am pretty sure the law says, that if the life of the mother is at risk (ectopic pregnancy falls under that category) abortions will be allowed.
The law may say one thing; doctors will or won’t do another.
This vigilante/bounty hunting law in Texas (which the Supreme Court will not declare unconstitutional) has created an atmosphere of abject fear.
Just read that in another state it is *imminent* danger i.e. the woman is about to die as to how they roll.
Any doctor will tell you that they are not omniscient (any doctor with reason and humility):. The point of death is not so easy to ascertain.
And if you have someone jonesing for that $10,000 reward money standing over you, you are in hot water.
Read what happened to Dr. Savita Halapannavar and Agnieszka.
Both had dead fetuses (or babies if you prefer the term).
Both begged for abortions.
Both died of sepsis.
Both had medical providers scared of the state (Ireland and Poland in these cases.
Blood poisoning is a horrific way to go, and I’m sure Dr. Halappanavar having been a dentist saw many patients with abscesses and knew what was ahead.
I do not for one second think that Texas doctors are not in the same position.
The state *and* the bounty hunter are both formidable adversaries.
I truly believe that Ireland changed its laws because the country was on the verge of an international incident with India (Dr. H’s country of origin)
There is more to these stories than a law .
Thanks for that link….
The author amazingly believes that life starts at conception. No wonder that she struggles with the moral question of allowing a viable baby to be killed in the womb, but not after birth. She complains about the new woke generation, but people like her, especially H.Clinton and Pelosi, use words like “woman’s reproductive health” to make exterminating the unborn more palatable.
Glad you ‘enjoyed’ it.
Long-form debates where the pro-child killing advocates are pushed by the moderator and opponents, are allowed to hang themselves by expanding on why they believe what they do, is always an excellent if very grim look into the rationalisation of evil.
This debate is another gradually evolving gobsmacker – the pro-child killing advocate who wouldn’t kill a fly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHwHX601no
“Mothers killing their unborn children”… What planet do you live on? It is women killing foetuses. The foetus is not a child until it is born. The woman is not a mother until the child is born. That is basic biology. I have never been a mother as I have never carried to term. I am a woman who has been pregnant, 7 times, but had spontaneous abortions each time.
The majority of women get it. So many men don’t. I support the right of women to terminate their pregnancy safely and legally for the whole term of their pregnancy without any reference to society or even the man who provided the sperm. Our bodies, our right.
Even before abortion was legal, women sought to terminate their pregnancies, by drinking gin, through the coat hanger method, by taking purging herbs, whatever that would rid themselves of the foetus inside them.
The least a so called civil society or democratic country should do, is make the procedure as easy snd as safe as is possible. If a country cannot do that, it must consider itself barbaric.
There was a time when the Left and the Looney Left could be distinguished but that seems increasingly difficult.
“Where does privilege begin and end in this intersectional quagmire” – ideally with you all having eaten each other in a purity spiralling orgy of ideological cannibalism. I don’t mourn the slow eradication of 60s progressivism by intolerant zoomers. They are a creature of your own making. If you live your life by corroding the structure of morality and structure itself, don’t be surprised when the whole rotten edifice comes crashing down on you.
I do not believe there is a moral argument for abortions, however that doesn’t mean I’m anti-abortion. There are many people I have met or read/heard their words and thought I’m glad you’re not a parent/I hope you never become a parent. With birth control today so freely available in the west, there should be little reason for anyone who doesn’t want to be a parent to need an abortion. Unfortunately we have swathes of people who are so selfish, so immature and frankly low on the intelligence scale that abortions are still necessary. I work with young people and many don’t care for birth control, they see abortion as a form of birth control and see there own lack of self control as a perfectly reasonably excuse for getting knocked up/knocking someone up. I’m tired of listening to the feelings before facts arguments, they’re not arguments! They’re tantrums from people who lack maturity and make me wish we could raise the age of consent into the 20’s but I also appreciate that would be impractical, impossible to enforce and punishing those who aren’t entitled selfish morons.
What a bunch of drivel; any sane adult knows that being pregnant is a matter of feelings first and foremost. Pregnancy tests are inherently sexist and discriminatory, as all such tests broadly label biological males as “negative”. Humanity as a whole should abolish any predefined, patriarchal definitions of the word “pregnancy”, and simply accept that sometimes, in some places, babies will drop out of humans, and nobody knows why.
~~~~
On a more serious note, this part of the text aptly describes the core of the whole issue:
The first sentence of this quote expresses in great clarity why almost every aspect of feminism is ill-conceived and destined to fail, as it is vastly based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The gender-role of mother and carer is by no means socially imposed; it is a direct and very logical result of human biology. Even stripping away any social aspects, those who bear children are mothers, and if they are not also carers, the infant will die of starvation shortly. Once children can be grown in tubes and fed artificial nutrients, we can claim that the biologically assigned role of women as mothers is not a necessity of survival any longer, and that role can be filled by technology instead. In this way, we will be re-defining something that before was assigned by the laws of physics, nature, survival: indeed, by reality itself. Society, or societally imposed roles, play no part in this picture to any degree at all, and they never have. It’s a matter of biology versus technology, and literally nothing else. Social impositions, which clearly exist, only arise secondary to these basic principles. And yet, feminism clings to the ridiculous idea that somehow, somewhere, female organs are assigned by society at birth to limit the liberty of a newborn individual.
This neatly ties into the second sentence, which illustrates how the inherent contradiction of feminism relates to the psychology of the individual, and is indeed amplified by it. The author of this text betrays it by her words, via the suggestion that bearing children takes away a woman’s liberty. This issue is easy enough to understand; being pregnant and raising a child certainly costs time and resources, and is thus limiting in certain ways. But so is literally everything else we do. And I daresay that on average, a 60-hour job in a leadership position is a comparable or even greater sacrifice of freedom and liberty than is bearing and raising a child. Certainly, the payoff is different, but that will be an issue of viewpoints rather than objective value. But see, here we have already missed the key point: by stressing that bearing children takes away the liberty of a woman – a fact which is clearly evident and not worth mentioning to most everybody else – the author betrays her personal motivations, which she shares with so many other feminists. Understanding this point will help us to better grasp the core of the issue, and relate to the individuals behind the curtain. Be warned: I am now going to lean out of the window big time.
Any feminist who advocates that birth-control pills and abortions have increased the liberty of women, is simply saying that it’s important to give women the choice to not have children, as the choice to have children is usually there by default. What they are thereby also saying is that they personally do not want to have children or regret having children, and they are happy that there is a possibility to live their lives without that responsibility. So far, so good – but why don’t they live their lives in silent enjoyment? After all, in the free market, it does not really matter which gender you are – so long as you are competent enough, you will get ahead in life, even moreso if you don’t have to “waste” time on childrearing. Shouldn’t these feminists, with their newfound freedom, invest time in their personal career instead of fighting for some general cause? And yet, they do exactly that, for one simple reason: nature, which feminists have fundamentally misunderstood, is coming back to bite them in their butts. These women, in reality, are deeply insecure about betraying their biologically assigned role to procreate, to be mothers and caregivers. Deep down, they know that chasing after material goods is not going to make them happy. They know that they should follow the emotional and psychological instincts that are, indeed, buried deep within our genetic code. And to say that any fertile woman or man does not have instincts that tell them to procreate, is akin to saying that they do not have a fear of death. Deep down, we are still animals, and our main objectives are to survive and multiply. Everything else is based off of that, without it, we would not exist. This does not mean that people can’t find fulfillment aside from procreation – but if these individuals had, would they really choose to be militant feminists? Where does all this spitefulness come from, where is the hatred born? How can so much cognitive dissonance be kept alive? A possible explanation is that these individual are trying to push away their biological imperatives, but their biology pushes back. This creates massive pressure, and pressure always needs a violent oulet.
In conclusion, I strongly believe that feminists who advocate that birth control increases the liberty of women, are simply women who are at odds with their natural instincts. By selling this defiance in a positive light (i.e. the fight for liberty) they are trying to lie to themselves and coerce their bad conscience into leaving them alone. However, this can clearly not work long-term, and a young woman seduced by such drivel may ruin her life by not finding a partner when she is in the perfect age to have children. Feminism is dangerous, it’s narrative creates hatred and leads to subpar life-choices which create more hatred, and thus create more feminism. It’s a vicious circle of hatred where people fail to take responsibility for their choices, and instead blame society and their reproductive organs, thereby tempting other people into giving away their responsibility as well. After all, what could be a stronger liberation from responsibility than the public admittance that one is a victim of something? At the same time, what could be more disempowering?
The bottom line is, I think, that one cannot fight nature and win. Supposedly, there lies wisdom in realizing what you can and can’t change, and in accepting the latter. And indeed, our fundamental biological attributes and operatives, as well as the day and possible cause of our death, fall into this category.
I agree with you entirely. I have long thought that feminism is a rationalisation of psychological disturbance, experienced by some women in response to the stress caused by our capitalist industrialised world, causing them to be both anxious and aggressive.
From a Jungian point of view, they are possessed by their animus.
Bingo. Feminism is a collective rage against reality.
What utter cobblers. I’m way past childbearing age and perfectly happy with my choice, made possible by modern medicine, not to have children. You’ve used a lot of words to mansplain something of which you clearly have no understanding.
Good for you! Like I wrote, there are some women who are happy with their choice not to have children, but they are usually not the ones who run around forcing their opinion on others.
Though your comment does make it seem like you are quite easily offended by an alternative viewpoint, and your use of the word “mansplain” suggests that you are part of the very group my post was about.
This seemed to be a significant throw-away aside in the article: “a world committed to social constructionism simply collapses.” Throw-away as it doesn’t seem to include the idea that terminating life in the womb is constructionism!
I’m old enough to have appreciated the experience of disagreeing strongly with someone without having to hate them; a perspective where arguments are won through reason and persuasion rather than by threats or state fiat. Ann Furedi seems to be bewailing the same loss.
But the huge post-War moral changes have produced social reconstructionism; and the irrational woke nonsense we are now supposed to accept without question is simply the grandchild of those initial reconstructions. In metaphorical terms, the revolution eats itself or “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”. I’d love to be more sanguine about our prospects; but perhaps only something revolutionary will do it. I would like it to be a moral revival which appreciates our common humanity and puts children’s rights (including the unborn) before the rights of adults.
The pandemic has caused me to profoundly reevaluate some of my positions on the issue of abortion.
Previously, I always maintained that the issue – the only issue – was whether or not the fetus can be considered human life. If so, then there was no case that could be made to justify abortion. If not, then no case could be made against it.
Now, after seeing how our fundamental freedoms can be so badly trampled in the name of ‘saving lives’, I am much less sure of myself.
Why after all, did I defend human life so fervently? The Judeo-Christian tradition holds that human life is sacred. But it also holds that the thing that defines us as human is the right to choose good over evil. Whether this unique feature of humanity begins at conception or at some later stage of spiritual awakening? On this, the Bible is silent. Yet the fact that Adam and Eve live first in innocence, then know sin, suggests the fact of biological life is not synonymous with humanity in the spiritual sense.
Does a fetus have this human capacity? Or is it not in a state of pre-humanity?
Does our obligation to protect our fellow humans (or pre-humans) really extend into such an overt intrusion on a woman’s bodily integrity, and on her own ability to choose good over evil?
It was always a hard question to answer, and at least for me, the last 22 months have made it even harder to answer.
The old adage is true: the older I get, the more I learn. The more I learn, the less I know.
Interesting points, thanks for your thoughts.
Good points.
For many of us, myself included, there is a point somewhere between conception and birth at which a foetus becomes human in a moral sense. It isn’t two minutes after conception, and it isn’t two minutes before birth, and where we set the line is to some degree arbitrary – but a threshold is crossed.
We also have to weigh moral goods and ills, and competing interests and achieve some sort of balance. The interests of the mother cannot be automatically sacrificed in the name of the sanctity of human life, but nor can the interests of the unborn be simply dismissed in the name of freedom.
Abortion being legal to a certain stage in the pregnancy, but only in exceptional circumstances after that still seems to me to be the best approach.
It’s about five years old IIRC. By the end of this century, I reckon, we will be seeing abortions at that age.
I think there is not an arbitrary time during a pregnancy when moral responsibility begins but from the time of conception there is the inevitability that wrong moral choices will be made. Of course, the extent that such choices are made varies and depends on many factors.
Why from conception? Serious question.
An interesting question too!
Because that is when two gametes become a foetus and the inevitability of wrongdoing after birth begins.
The reason I ask, is because at that stage the foetus cannot be considered a child, or a human being in the normal sense we would use that term. It isn’t sentient in any sense.
Later in the pregnancy that is all different. Which is why I support early abortion, but not late.
And yet you cannot use discarded foetuses for medical experiments over 14 days ( or did the ethics committees decide on 21 days)? But you can kill a perfect,y healthy foetus by aborting it at up to several months old. Odd that.
There is a distinction between an embryo and a foetus. As there is between a foetus and a baby.
Two gametes become an embryo, then a foetus.
I would laugh out loud if there were any vegan abortion proponents. Are there any? There must be.
Actually I suspect that there is a big overlap. Which suggests that moral and political positions are tribal, rather than ethically consistent.
Graham, I think you’re conflating two issues. One is “when is a person worthy of protection as a person”, and the second is “when can a person choose good over evil”.
You say that the latter is what defines us as human, but it really isn’t. If it were, newborn babies wouldn’t be human either. There’s a long tradition in theology of the “age of reason” — that point when a person becomes cognizant of their own sin and therefore responsible for it. Judaism places this at 13 and celebrates it with a ba(r/t)-mitzvah. Catholicism places it at 12 and celebrates it with Confirmation. Protestantism has no specific celebration, but most denominations teach the same idea. This is your point of “able to choose good from evil”; obviously someone too young to understand sin can not be held responsible for choosing sinfully.
This is distinct from “when is a person deserving of protection as a person”. There is no age or utilitarian test for this. One of the things that distinguished ancient Christians was their unwillingness to “expose” their infants, a common Roman practice when a child was deformed or unwanted. From the 1st century, Christians recognized that even the youngest child’s life was worthy of protection.
While it’s true that being “made in the image of God” means we will grow into creatures “able to choose good over evil”, our humanity does not wait for that ability to manifest itself.
I agree with your sentiment though: anyone who thinks abortion and birth control are easy issues with simple solutions has never really thought them through. Like you, the older I get, the more convinced of my own ignorance I become.
I’m not sure when exactly a (pre-)human arrives at the point where they are able to make choices. My point was not to say that at the moment of birth, a baby magically becomes cognizant and able to choose between good and evil.
Rather, it is to question that theological justification for an absolutist position regarding the defence of human life. Once we accept that pre-sensory foetuses and children are incapable of choosing good from evil, and are therefore not complete humans in the biblical sense, we can more readily accept a relativist perspective, and therefore consider where an appropriate balance lies between a woman’s bodily autonomy and the pre-human’s right to become a full human.
This still doesn’t answer the question. It only makes the question more complex – and that is where I think we agree: there really are no easy answers.
I stopped donating to Planned Parenthood when they started insisting on “pregnant person” instead of “pregnant women”.
I lost all trust in them, and they have alienated the majority of those who seek abortion: low income white women.
‘An involuntary pregnancy is a living nightmare’. Leaves me lost for words. I have always been pro abortion but this article strikes me as positively evil, partly in its cliche ridden sententiousness and partly in its assumption as laid out above. Btw, unherd, if you are going to cancel my posts, please let me know when you do so.
Sometimes you wonder if they know that birth control is an actual option. It blows my mind, why can’t we focus on promoting birth control to reduce the need for abortions, they really should be the last option!
If a 15 year old, who was not yet sexually active hence not in need of birth control, had become pregnant as a result of rape would you deny her an abortion?
Sure, but only if that choice carries moral weight. That is, it comes with the responsibility to weigh the issue morally and a willingness to accept the moral consequences. Otherwise it is better described as freedom from morality. The freedom to make an amoral choice in an area where morality should come into play is not the same as the freedom to make moral choices.
Too often this debate is framed in a way which simply strips abortion of any moral significance at all.
haha, I could not quite decide if this article was irony and parody of the more clever type, of if it was really what she believes.
“Yes, abortion was — at least in early pregnancy — a simple medical procedure that was a benefit to personal and to public health. But to those campaigning for its legalisation, abortion was so much more than healthcare.”
In USA it has been the tradition for decades to give people who vote at the Voting Poling places a sticker saying “I VOTED” to wear out in the streets to show one had done their civic duty and precipitated in the exercise of freedom.
This woman would likely have the abortion clinics hand out “I ABORTED” stickers to wear to show person had also done their civic duty in her participation in the exercise of freedom.
And this wonderful line, “are forever tainted with a stench of old, white patriarchs.” was so great the writer included it twice, as it deserves to have been.
As an antiabortion, but pro- Death Penalty, person, I wondered how her position was on the second issue? An amazing article, one which in this time of Mass Formation and all the horrors it is bringing to the world, fit right in.
“As an antiabortion, but pro- Death Penalty, person”
You could say that you were pro- the Killing Penalty, but it sounds a little enthusiastic, doesn’t it?
Better than the Liberal mantra of kill the innocent unborn babies and protect the guilty psychopathic killers.
Russel, have you ever watched JP Sears? He does satire sketches, and his one on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07lTHCHRS04 ‘What Woke Men Are Like’ is worth watching – minute 3:3 he talks about how he, as a man, wants to get pregnant…..and why
Had never heard of J P Sears: amusing, but a little long, and doesn’t contribute much to this discussion.
ps. I’m sure the liberals don’t have the mantra: ‘kill the innocent unborn babies and protect the guilty psychopathic killers’. Those kind of loaded, violent words don’t a good mantra make.
His two on vaccine mandates and booster shots are genuinely very well done, quite amusing.
So the author disapproves of Planned Parenthood’s wholehearted embrace of identity politics and its consequent callousness towards those ‘poor white women’ who do not fit its prescribed victim categories. Yet her own argument rests on just such ugly favouritism. According to her, the pregnant woman has ‘moral autonomy’ (a very troubling concept), while the life she is carrying in her womb has no rights at all. Nor are the interests of fathers or society at large – which depends on offspring for its survival – deemed worthy of mention. If Ann Furedi finds it objectionable that ‘justice warriors’ get to decide for a woman whether or not she carries her child to term, why is it any less objectionable that that same woman can elect to end another human life without consulting any of the other stakeholders in that life? If the point of this essay is to argue that all women faced with an unwanted pregnancy – black or white, rich or poor – must be entitled to an abortion as an assertion of their right to individual freedom, does it not also follow that all women – black or white, rich or poor – are equally privileged above and beyond all others – the unborn, the fathers of the unborn, other members of society – in that they alone have the ultimate right: the right to end another human life?
Ah. So we’ve figured this one out: Folks tend to support “choice” when it conforms to their policy preferences; they tend to suppress “choice” when it doesn’t.
And, yes, the constitutional interpretations relating to access to abortion and access to firearms share some structure. Before Roe v. Wade (1973), access to abortion was regulated state by state. After Roe v. Wade (1973), access to abortion was still regulated state by state, but the Supreme Court said that the states had to provide at least some level of access. Meanwhile, Heller v. District of Columbia (2008) said much the same thing about access to certain types of firearms: the states have to provide some minimum level of access.
We understand that “social conservatives” are more likely to favor access to guns but disfavor access to abortion whereas self-avowed “progressives” are more likely to favor unlimited access to abortion but to disfavor access to firearms. Neither position is pro-individual rights. both positions are pro-arbitrary applications of the law.
No, I disfavour the individual rights of an unborn child being set aside so that they can be lawfully killed by their mother.
Both this and gun access are positions of pro-individual rights.
“…there remains a consistency of a principle: that the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.”
Abortion is murder – should the state take a step back and stay out of a personal decision to murder?
I disagree with you, but in a sense you have hit the nail on the head. It all comes down to whether we think the choice to have an abortion is a “private personal decision” or not. The author does, many do not, and the author doesn’t really provide a reason for preferring her take on things.
Most feminists claim that gender is a social construct – i.e. the psyche at birth is a blank slate on which society imprints its archetypal gender roles, based on biological sex. Transgender activists say that gender is hard wired into a person’s brain at birth irrespective of biological sex – an opposite point of view. The transgender activists have been so successful at bullying society into submission that women are now suffering. The unique pregnancy and childbirth experience of biological women is being denied and the author of this article does well to make this case.
On a separate point I have yet to see a clear case why a comatose adult who may recover consciousness in a few months should not be killed by their carer, but a human developing in the womb can be. Anyone care to explain the difference? .
The difference is that the comatose person’s life support is not within the body of another person but is external and mechanical. Anyone can feed the comatose person by tube, whereas only the woman’s body can sustain her foetus. If the woman doesn’t want the foetus to develop further because she doesn’t want to give birth to a child (for whatever reason) then denying abortion places her in the position of the host to a parasite. Someone who doesn’t want to care for a comatose adult is in the position of being free to walk away. That adult is not dependent on her body for survival.
Amazing how the ex-members of Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain have infiltrated into the highest administrative ranks of British society – Munira Mirza, Claire Fox, Brendan O’Neill, Ann and Frank Furedi.
This is the first time I have heard this applied to motherhood and abortion. Who, exactly, is criticising abortion as being elitist, and consumerist?
This article completely ignores the fact that abortion means killing a baby.
About pregnancy and motherhood : this is basically a biological destiny. But being human means we are biological and cultural animals. In so many instances we have challenged biology to fit our cultural evolution. Sometimes it was beneficial, sometimes not. That social justice warriors come to oppose abortion on such bizarre ground speaks a lot about the fragility of their paradigm.
It seems you will have 15weeks to decide.
I look forward to Ms. Furedi’s book. I get what she’s saying, and have to kinda giggle at the predicament. As to abortion, I have found it ironic that for decade after decade, women have demanded the same respect, opportunities, and responsibilities as men. Yet, when that ultimate test of personal responsibility comes … what to do with a miraculous and beautiful creation of another life via a willful act of that ever-important freedom of sexual expression … those same women demand full abdication of any responsibility, a clean slate, without judgment, shame, or even conscience. There may be a moral case for abortion, as Ms. Furedi no doubt purports, and some even say there is a Biblical case. Yet, I cannot help buy ask what the demand for the complete renouncement of this singular, preeminent act means for her cause.
“a miraculous and beautiful creation of another life via a willful act of that ever-important freedom of sexual expression” is a characterisation of their situation that is unlikely to apply to those women or children who are in the unfortunate position of being pregnant as a result of rape.
I personally identify as someone who is pregnant.
“the state should step back and stay out of private personal decision-making.”
But it’s not entirely personal is it. What about the baby? He or she is also a person.
Doesn’t the state have a responsibility to protect babies?
In my opinion, abortion should never be considered as a fail-safe or an alternative to contraception. To suggest otherwise is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. The argument for bodily autonomy has merit, but is often made either disingenuously or dishonestly. An embryo or foetus consists of two people’s DNA, not one, and therefore any choice should be made jointly. The choice to abort the pregnancy comes with consequences for both people, both legally and emotionally. If both people agree, there are no issues. If the woman wants to have a a child, but the man doesn’t, then the man should forego any parental rights along with the legal requirements to support the child financially. If the woman wants to abort the pregnancy, but the man wants a child, then that’s the complicated solution that society needs to find a solution for. I also find the dehumanisation of embryos and foetuses disturbing. If we respect people’s religious beliefs, how can we dismiss their argument that abortion is murder? Science can not determine at what point we first have a soul. We need to find a solution that satisfies all of society as much as possible, but that will never happen if we reduce abortion to an argument about bodily autonomy.
I am not sure how the right to kill an innocent human being can ever be used to support the humanity of the decision maker. At a minimum we should pray that the decision never have to be made and, if the decision is made, that the decision maker(s) ultimately find peace in eternity.
They call abortion ‘The woman’s right to choose’. What they never mention is that it’s the right to kill the foetus. The he woman’s right to abortion is actually, the woman’s right to kill the foetus. For example, if the police or army are conducting a rescue mission and they abort the rescue mission.They don’t kill the person they were rescuing.What they do is give up the attempt to rescue them. When a test flight is aborted they don’t blow up the plane. They either don’t make the flight or return the aircraft to base. Saying that killing a foetus and calling i aborting it, is like a murder saying that they didn’t murder the victim. That they had instead aborted them.
In the decision to abort, it is never JUST the woman’s body.
The new frontier in abortion – post-natal abortion – is already here….it’s eugenics via vaccine. All in the name of science like the original eugenicist movement of the Progressive Era.
Talk about disappearing up your own fundament.