"No uterus? No opinion!"
The premise of this statement is that individuals who lack certain physical characteristics are not entitled to hold opinions on topics which relate primarily to their counterparts who exhibit these characteristics. Specifically, people who lack a uterus (and thus who also lack the biological capacity to conceive, carry, and give birth to children) are not licensed to speak or act in regard to issues which pertain to the uterus; or, at the very least, such speech and actions are inconsequential and invalid.
Arguments about male involvement and investment in pregnancy notwithstanding, imagine if we applied this faulty principle—namely, the identity fallacy— to all interactive discourse.
Further scrutiny of this concept betrays yet more troubling ambiguity. Is the word “uterus” purely a metaphorical reference to femininity? If so, how is the suitable level of femininity calculated? And if not, what stipulations must any actual given uterus satisfy? Are only those equipped for childbearing extended the latitude to form an opinion? Do those afflicted with conditions which detrimentally affect fertility meet the criteria? Do those who have had hysterectomies? Are trans women excluded from weighing in?
At the same time, the declaration “no uterus, no opinion” undermines and discredits the entire pro-choice movement; a movement which comprises millions of individuals who routinely vote for male candidates in recognition of their pro-choice stance. Bernie Sanders does not have a uterus; very few people dispute his pro-choice platform on these grounds. At the very best, this is an oversight. At worst, it is expedient, inconsistent, and hypocritical.
This is not how we conduct rational dialogue. The assertion that individuals without uteruses are not qualified to discuss them is predicated upon a false assumption, and it is an assumption which we do not employ in other arenas.
“My body, my choice!” or “you can’t legislate morality!”
A familiar pro-choice refrain is that the restriction of abortion constitutes an infringement of rights and a contravention of personal sovereignty; legal proscriptions of abortion represent an unwarranted regulation of personal choice.
While it cannot be denied that policies which prohibit or impede access to abortion curtail the personal choices of those those who desire it, this alone does not render such policies unjustifiable.
This is because laws and the systems which they construct and inhabit serve two fundamental purposes: they exist to impose moral standards and they accomplish this by installing limits upon the personal choices of individuals. Any law which exists must, by nature and by necessity, enforce and uphold a moral code by encouraging or discouraging certain human behaviors. This is what laws are. This is what they do.
It is worth noting that, per the Pew Research Center, while evangelical Christians, Muslims, and Mormons in the United States lead the pro-life charge, as many as 30% of areligious adults who identify as “nothing in particular” also support limitations on abortion. This debunks the oft repeated talking point that pro-life proponents are nothing more than devout theists who are seeking to codify their religions. The issue clearly transcends any singular religious practice; it transcends religion entirely.
There is plenty of cause to explore the merits of abortion restriction and regulation, but the axiom “my body, my choice” (and the consequential aphorism that “if you don’t like an abortion, don’t have one”) quickly break down in light of the basic function of law. There is no “my body, my choice” when the topic at hand is drunk driving; you’d be hard pressed to encounter widespread agreement with the conjecture that “if you don’t like arson, then don’t commit it”. The ongoing drug war bears witness to the fact that we control the bodies of other people with astonishing regularity.
This reveals something about law: in most civilizations, its salient and most foundational objective is to protect people from harm at the hands of other people. The debate surrounding abortion, then, is not truly about boundaries placed upon choice, but about whether abortion can be legitimately labeled harm. This is a debate worth having.
A survey conducted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute signifies that more than three-quarters of polled Americans favor bans on sex selective abortions, which are a hideous manifestation of internalized patriarchy. Americans reacted similarly when confronted with abortions performed as a result of race or genetic disorder, which underscores that crucial quality of law: its inherent obligation to control bodies, even in the hotly contested realm of abortion.
Is abortion harmful? The answer is more convoluted than many will admit. The root of this integral question centers on the beginning of life and the status of personhood. And while both sides might give the impression that these queries can be satisfied with ease, the reality is that a scientific consensus does not exist. An article published by Wired cogently explains that this subject is not the purview of science. Although this does not substantiate the pro-life position, it does negate the unfounded accusation that pro-life philosophy is antithetical to science. In truth, science has very little to say about personhood because science is not able to say much about personhood at all.
The conversation should not focus on whether or not abortion laws limit personal choice, because this is incontrovertibly true. Instead, we ought to investigate whether such limitations of personal choice are consistent with the precedents we have collectively established through millennia of lawmaking. The mere presence of law inevitably prevents individuals from autonomously exercising agency without any restraint. We must accept that such limits endure and engage in the arduous endeavor of determining what they ought to be.
“Men need to get their hands off of the bodies of women!”
This argument is a classic example of both argumentum ad hominem (circumstantial) and digression (avoiding the issue), both of which are fallacious and intellectually lazy tactics of deflection and distraction. It is a logically deprived platitude which is as exhausted as it is old.
But even if we concede this line of reasoning, it becomes instantly problematic because it blatantly discounts both data which has been accrued and history which has transpired in relation to abortion in the United States.
And was it not a panel composed of a majority of old, white men who ruled in favor of Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) in the pivotal and decisive U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade? All but one justice who occupied the bench and presided over these proceedings in the early 1970s were, indeed, old white men; the 7-2 decision was reached by a collection of individuals who did not have a single uterus between them.
Sure, that was then and this is now. But even more contemporary abortion controversies have been ignited by women, as when Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (a woman) signed AL HB 314, an abortion ban bill which had been sponsored by Representative Terri Collins (a woman) and subsequently passed with yea votes from all but one of the present female representatives (in spite of explicit objection on the part of several male legislators), once again proving that men are far from the only adversaries of abortion in the United States. It is false to claim otherwise.
“What about the overtaxed foster care system?”
Pro-life critics often cite the overburdened foster care system in the United States as well as the ostensibly miserable lives of unwanted children.
This is deceptive and misleading.
Firstly, if the foster care system in the United States is under immense strain, it is because of bureaucratic red tape and lack of sufficient assistance and incentives in the adoption process. American Adoptions documents an estimated two million American families ready to adopt today; this is approximately 36 families for every one child who is placed for adoption. So why the waiting? Per the Washington Post, it is because adoption can cost up to $30,000 in legal fees, a natural deterrent for Americans across most economic strata. While drastic reforms and restructuring are in order to improve foster care and adoption in the United States, to aver that the current unsustainability is the product of an overabundance of children is to assign a false cause: cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (“with this, therefore because of this”). It also indulges a false dichotomy, in which the only feasible outcomes are either excessive stress upon the foster care system or else the relief which abortion might supply.
We must be wary of insisting that “those who are against abortion should adopt children”, because many have already tried. The remark also bears striking resemblance to the ridiculous submission of the American radical right: “you dislike the indefinite caged detention of immigrants? I don’t see you sheltering any!”. Do not be deceived: this is profoundly preposterous and disingenuous rhetoric. One does not have to adopt or strive to do so in order to be pro-life.
But there is an even deeper problem which arises when this point is raised.
The most universal contention among pro-life communities is that abortion is a manifestation of violence. The appeal to a floundering foster care system does not actually address this, much less refute or repudiate it. Instead, this rejoinder merely justifies violence as a viable alternative; it dodges the charge that abortion is a violent act and suggests that it remains a fair recourse for mitigating and ameliorating human suffering. The obvious flaw with this notion is that we do not generally regard violence as an acceptable option for alleviating human distress; our attitudes toward refugees and the homeless would undoubtedly change if we did.
In this same vein, the popular book Freakonomics touts a correlation between rising abortion rates and falling crime rates to illustrate the potential benefits of abortion. But even if causation could be plausibly inferred beyond the shadow of a doubt so as to circumvent post hoc reasoning, this apologia still does not rebut the claim that abortion is violence. Since preemptive violence is not a culturally or legally approved method of crime reduction, such justification is equally futile.
To effectively confront the opinion that abortion is violence, those who disagree must produce an argument to the contrary. Otherwise, the implication is that it is better for some individuals not to live at all than it is for them to struggle or for others to accommodate their struggles. Not only does this furnish individuals with inordinate power to make quality-of-life assessments for other people, but it also conveys a crushing message to foster children, delinquents, and individuals with disabilities: “you are not worth the trouble”.
“Criminalizing safe abortion will result in an increase in dangerous, back alley abortions.”
Several of the most routinely utilized pro-choice defenses are almost identical to the customary arguments against gun control. The irony is that, by and large, proponents of the former and the latter find themselves aligned with philosophically antithetical camps.
Criminals disregard laws : Laws don’t work : Thus, laws must be worthless : Stop making more laws and abrogate old ones
However, laws are not simply expressions of proposed ethical responsibility intended to psychologically persuade or dissuade individuals from committing criminal acts. Laws outline unethical actions and avert them by impelling bad people to be good and by decreasing the immediate availability of criminal enterprises.
To conclude that “criminals ignore laws, so why make more?” is to misunderstand the role of law in society. Of course criminals ignore laws. To do so is definitionally criminal. The goal, then, is to craft laws which make crime hard to commit and even harder to get away with.
Individuals don't abide by the law because the law instructs them and informs their actions. They abide by the law because its design is to make crime difficult to perpetrate and because law ensures punishment and retribution for those who breach it. It is not possible to fully eradicate all forms of crime, of course, but this does not preclude the pursuit of justice and it is not a valid excuse to refrain from achieving this aim.
“What about incidents of rape, incest, and life of the pregnant?”
This is the nuclear option; it is frequently employed in order to corner pro-life individuals into a hypothetical situation wherein they would be forced to refuse access to abortion for victims of traumatic sexual violence or else to individuals whose pregnancies place them in immediate danger. It is also an example of the converse accident fallacy, which operates under the assumption that “an exception to a generalization [ought to] appl[y]… where the generalization should apply”.
Gun lobbyists make statements which are virtually indistinguishable when they attempt to aggrandize gun ownership by pointing to anomalous and incredibly rare instances of home invasion. The instant vault to rape, incest, life of the pregnant, and breaking and entering is hasty generalization: an appeal to extreme conditions which fall outside of the statistical norm.
Of the several hundred thousand abortions which occur in the United States annually, USA Today reports that fewer than 2% are due to rape and incest. Guttmacher shares that an additional 8% of average yearly abortions are the consequence of complications which threaten the life of the pregnant individual, although the medical field is divided on the authenticity of medically exigent abortions in a variety of cases. Incidentally, the most common reason given was that “having a baby would dramatically change my life”.
Most abortions are wholly unrelated to rape, incest, and health concerns. It is not fallacious to consider these outlying incidents and how to respond appropriately to them. It is illogical, however, to resort to these comparatively isolated instances when developing broader policy.
“There are no protections or personhood for the unborn in the U.S. Constitution.”
On January 22nd, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down statewide abortion bans, referencing the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The National Constitution Center notes that the due process clause, specifically, was among the deciding factors; this clause reads, in part, “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. Seven of the nine jurists on the most prestigious judicial body in the United States deduced that statewide abortion bans do indeed “abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” and “deny… equal protection of the laws”.
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| The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court |
Justice Antonin Scalia theorized that “when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons”. Similar sentiment has been echoed by prominent pro-choice thinkers and writers such as Nadia Bolz-Weber, who in her book Shameless emphatically opined that the Scriptural significance of passages which recount the “breath of life” and the moment in which God “breathed life into Adam” (Genesis 2:7) communicate that life (and thus personhood) are defined by the literal ability to breathe independently (a hermeneutically irresponsible departure from the metaphorical and connotative symbolism of the Hebrew word).
Aside from the obvious confusion as to whether non “walking-around” and non breathing individuals such as the quadriplegic, intubated, asthmatic, drowning, or otherwise physically disabled and impaired are afforded personhood, this is a poor interpretation of the text and intent of the due process clause as delineated in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Of the 28 states which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the state legislatures of all but three had already outlawed abortion in no uncertain terms by 1868. This means that the very lawmakers who enshrined personhood in the Fourteenth Amendment either counted unborn children among “citizens of the United States” or else evaluated the risks posed by abortion as excessive, a categorization which went uncontested by the U.S. Supreme Court. To quote Justice William Rehnquist, “in [Roe v. Wade], the Court… had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment”.
Roe v. Wade is an object lesson in the hazards of unfettered judicial activism which operates under the guise of plain text interpretation. It directly subverts the contextual meaning of the documents to which the U.S. Supreme Court purports to adhere. If modern judges intend to uphold Roe v. Wade, they must acknowledge that the original and actual meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is irrelevant to their decision.
Where do we go from here?
Many of the aforementioned arguments rightfully highlight our societal dereliction of duty to others. The foremost concerns are the manner in which we attend to and provide for individuals who are jeopardized by pregnancy, individuals who feel incapable and inadequately prepared for parenthood, children who are entrapped in a deeply dysfunctional foster care system, and the victims of sexual abuse which will alter their lives forever.
On this, the pro-life cause misses the mark.
Billboards depicting dismembered fetal tissue, demonstrators shouting at terrified young women as they enter clinics, the diversionary denigration of Margaret Sanger, and cheap platitudinous slogans which reduce a complex issue to the barbed synoptic quip that “abortion is murder” betray the pro-life movement as one which features public shame and personal guilt as the primary devices and instruments of its effort.
The stigma of pregnancy must be rejected in favor of the affirmation of its beauty, dignity, and value; rejection must be substituted for warm acceptance, gentle care, steadfast support, and intercession on behalf of the vulnerable. A movement which genuinely holds that abortion is not an acceptable means must advance alternatives.
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