[Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay]
One of the points we try to get across here at the Minimise Project is that the abortion debate is actually two debates: one on personhood/equal rights, and one on bodily rights. However, another point that we talk about less frequently is that the abortion is debate is really only these two debates. I have referenced this fact before when dialoguing with pro-life people, but I wanted to flesh it out a bit for our pro-choice readers.
First, a brief reminder: the pro-life position follows, as far as I’m concerned, like this:
- It is generally wrong to kill innocent people (there may be exceptions, eg, if an innocent person is threatening the lives of others because they are mentally unwell or because they are the victim of coercion, or in a warzone, etc. We will be coming back to the potential for exceptions quite a bit!)
- The unborn are people
- A woman’s right to exercise bodily autonomy does not qualify as one of the exceptions to 1
I do recognise, however, that most if not all pro-choice people think this is far too simplistic. I’ve simply laid out three tiny, black and white statements, which take no account of the complexity or nuance of people’s lives and circumstances, of pregnancy, of gender equality, or of the dreadful challenges and choices that people face daily. It’s too naive, it’s too heavy-handed, it’s heartless and cruel, it’s not realistic, it’s wrong, and you have so many examples to illustrate this point. I would like to take this opportunity to very briefly, with very little detail, show why these other valid, necessary arguments, ultimately fit into and are answered by 1-3 above. I’m being deliberately brusque here, and I’m not going to attempt to fully address any of these arguments, I’m just hoping to show how these arguments each ultimately fit into 1-3. I will however revisit and properly respond to these arguments in more detail in the future (if there are any you’d like to hear more about specifically, please let us know!). This post covers three such arguments, and my next post will cover four more – but let us know if you have any other arguments!
You can’t equate a living, breathing woman or girl with an unconscious embryo or foetus
This is a very important and compelling objection, and it is absolutely true. We can’t equate a living, breathing woman or girl with an unconscious embryo or foetus. There are massive differences between them, real, substantive, important differences. The pro-life movement should not deny these differences (perhaps some do, but they shouldn’t). The question, however, is not whether these differences exist – it’s whether they are relevant.
We do not believe they are relevant when it comes to determining whether the unborn should count as people, and we explain why in our Equal Rights Argument. If you agree with the Equal Rights Argument, then perhaps you disagree with point 1 above – that’s it’s generally wrong to kill innocent people – or perhaps you think being unconscious and/or being an embryo or foetus count as exceptions to point 1. That’s totally fair! For the record, we have considered both exceptions, and we disagree – but please let us know if you think we’re wrong!
Some babies die before or shortly after birth and you’re ignoring that fact
The case of babies who will die before or shortly after birth (also known as life limiting conditions or fatal foetal abnormalities) played a huge role in persuading many people to oppose constitutional recognition for unborn life in Ireland. It is clearly important for many people that parents not be forced to carry on with a pregnancy when there is little or no chance there will be a living child at the end of it.
Unless you think someone who will die soon does not count as a person, then I think these cases do not refute points 2 or 3 above. Therefore, I think again this objection is probably best considered as a case for an extra “exception” to point 1 – you can’t kill innocent people, unless this person will (a) soon die anyway and (b) will cause great suffering to someone else in the meantime. I am OK with having that conversation, and would love it if we could phrase it in those terms! Thus, if you support abortion because of LLC/FFA, I would try asking yourself: do I think parents should have the right to euthanise their babies and toddlers, who are terminally ill but who are experiencing no distress or suffering, in order to reduce the suffering of the parents in the meantime? If your answer is yes (and I genuinely, totally understand why that might be and very much share that instinct on many levels), then fair enough – your justification of abortion in this case takes the form of an exception to point 1 above. If your answer is no, however, then I think you have not actually found a justification for abortion outside of the framework I provided.
Pregnancy can wreak absolute havoc on a woman, or particularly on a girl
Once again, this point does not refute points 2 or 3 above, so let’s go with the “exception” idea again. In this case, we’re saying “It is wrong to kill innocent people unless their life may wreak havoc on someone else”. Again, I totally understand the instinct behind this. However, I think if you really thought about it, you’d see that you’re highly unlikely to apply this principle to any other people. Can you think of any circumstance where you would conclude that an innocent person’s existence wreaking complete and total havoc on someone else would justify their being killed? Or would you conclude that, while the fact that their existence is wreaking complete and total havoc on someone else is an absolute devastating tragedy, and that everything possible should be done to alleviate the situation, killing an innocent person is not an acceptable solution?
I think once you put this in “exception” language, most people would realise that it’s not just the massive impacts that pregnancy can cause on women and girls that explains the instinct for support for abortion. It’s actually because deep down, the person believes that the unborn don’t actually fully count as people (point 2) and/or they believe that the havoc caused by having one’s bodily autonomy violated is a particular kind of havoc that justifies a particular kind of response (point 3).
My next post will attempt to show how another four arguments also ultimately fit into the 1-2-3 framework above – but if you think of any others you’d like me to address, please let us know!
Muireann
The Minimise Project 
I’d like to as a pro-lifer, offer an additional possible objection that I don’t think falls into the framework above, namely anti-carceralism, and to illustrate it with a stack of examples. Specifically, we acknowledge that unborn human beings do have the right to life, and that killing them is wrong, but that that it is not proportionate to punish this with criminal sentancing. It is obviously the case that infanticide is generally seen as totally unethical, and homocide (outside of perhaps, euthanasia type exceptions*, which I worryingly suspect many people will in fact make), and legal discretion is a possible response. For example, British colonialism of India caused massive spikes in infanticide. But it would be I think, if something like the UN existed at the time, be a flawed response for our hypothetical UN to have responded with the suggestion of criminalising Indians who made in response to the violence of British colonialism, unethical decisions, rather than to have put the suggested legal penalties at the foot of the Brits.
Relatedly, in military conflicts, it is not automatically unethical to agree to let some parties avoid facing a trip to the ICC or equivalent in exchange for stopping the conflict and agreeing to a ceasefire (much as I hate it, I would agree to not drag warmonger Pootin or genocidiaries like Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir to the Hague in exchange for both of them actually ending the conflicts in question, even if the latter conflict started well before the current administration’s genocide, due to decades of apertheid and colonial Israeli foreign policy towards Palestine).
And of course, if pro-choicers are right to think that Thomson’s violinist is a better analogy to pregnancy than outright infanticide is, then anti-carceral objections do carry some real weight, without denying the premises above. For what it’s worth, I think that you shouldn’t be punished for disconnecting from the violinist (which is in any case a far bigger bodily autonomy imposition than a typical pregnancy). Unless perhaps, the reason for doing so was that the person connected to the violinist was something like an extreme gender essentialist attached to an intersex violinist, and that wanted to kill, or at least disconnect from the violinist specifically due to them being intersex (i.e. the analogy of sex-selective abortion with queercidal** intent), though this category would admittedly be a legal exception upon an existing exception! Third parties who don’t take some level of steps to try and stop you disconnecting from the violinist potentially ought to be tried here per duty of care (and you certainly should be if you disconnect the violinist as a third party, or create numerous Thomson’s violinists and cause disconnections to happen a bunch), however, or in the analogy of abortion, performing abortions on others should be criminalised and so should some forms of causing them to happen (e.g. petrochemical companies whose products cause miscarriages, let alone action abortionists or companies who make products designed to perform abortions), but outside of perhaps extremal edge cases like sex-selective abortions with hateful intent, self-abortion shouldn’t be.
If the analogy to pregnancy is closer to co-joined twins though, this if anything may actually make the case for non-criminalisation stronger, I feel. Granted, the analogy to most abortion (disconnecting from your weaker co-joined twin outside of triage to reduce total death) is probably a lot more unthinkable there for the people in question.
This does as a flipside I feel, show that much as some of what they say is very clearly silly (read, calling any form of restrictive bill that has exceptions immoral and siding with pro-choicers to lobby against it), pro-lifers probably ought to grapple a lot more with abolitionist cases for charging the people who have abortions with murder (even as a pro-lifer who thinks they do go too far). But abolitionism is also a good test case for anti-carceralism given that off the top of my head, something like 1/4 women in the US will have an abortion, and even if criminalisation did something as drastic as reducing the amount of abortions by 90%, you’d still be looking at sending at around 1/40th of your population to jail, potentially for life (or worse, death row given the messed up laws in the US), and in practice the impacts would be highly sexist and classist (you’d probably get a lot of cis men who pressured their partners sent to jail under such proposals as well). For context, if I recall correctly, about 6/1000 Americans is currently imprisoned, and the US is if I recall correctly the world leader in jailing people (outside of countries that are themselves open air jails, such as North Korea, or de facto occupied Palestine due to Israeli foreign policy). Such reasoning would at best quadruple the US prison population and if also advocated for by people who support the death penalty, create dramatically unpredecented spikes in executions – an insane idea to put it mildly.
Relatedly, I do think that some forms of prison abolitionists (or full on anarchists) would look at this debate through an interesting lens totally at odds with how most everyone else would (since they don’t really believe in jail or carceral solutions at all). Does that make them pro-choice by default? Eh, it depends on if they think abortions unjust due to perhaps, being lethal application of a heirarchy of born people over preborn ones, or parents over children (there is a version of a case for abortion which is “parent’s rights” type reasoning in the worst possible way, though I have to admit I’ve been convinced by a different PL leftist against parent’s rights as a concept, and in favour of actual nuclear family abolition). I do think any consistent anarchist would probably be committed to condoning non-violent direct action against abortion clinics or pill distributers, and probably against e.g landlords*** who evict pregnant people to try and stop abortions (read, most anarchists ought to emulate Lauren Handy here).
These were of course, a lot of admittedly nuanced thoughts in perhaps a less than organised fashion, but a pro-choicer could counter that even if abortion is at worst unjust homocide, not all unjust homicide ought to be criminalised, and that abortion would fall under this framework (thereby avoiding the framework of points 1-3 above). I sort of feel about this form of pro-choice reasoning in a similar way to how I do about people who support the full legalisation of sex “work” over some form of Nordic model- sex “work” is IMO fundamentally rape (sex without consent, rather than rape in the legal sense) pretending to be choice (it’s not realy a free choice to have sex if there’s financial pressure at play coercing against withdrawing consent), but where I don’t think the opposing view is remotely close to insane for suggesting the carceral response the wrong approach (although I do think the legalisation crowd are broadly speaking, factually wrong on the actual consequences of full legalisation over Nordic model).
*Something like the Dutch Groningen protocol comes to mind here, where it’s not technically legal to perform infant euthanasia, but in practice is, since doctors who perform euthanasia of infants under 2 with fatal conditions are by the agreed protocol not tried and the legal system just shrugs. Let me simply say I think the Netherlands ought to face serious legal sanctions from the EU here.
**I do feel there’s a reason why pro-life Malta is so much more progressive on intersex rights compared to most everywhere else (i.e. banning mutilating genital surgeries to conform them to a non-existant sex binary)- they don’t abort their intersex kids, which combined with the small population size, creates the perfect conditions for intersex rights groups to form and lobby for legal changes.
***The socialist in me sees landlords as effectively proxy abortionists through creating the conditions in which prenatal humans will inevitably be killed in direct response to what they themselves do (charging rent and threating evictions on people who don’t pay it, which some people invariably wouldn’t be able to if they give birth to a child). Though like, abortion aside, I’m fundamentally in favour of abolishing for-profit landlording and would be even if I agreed with Peter Singer on infanticide!
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