Pro-What?

Let me start by saying that I know in my gut that abortion should be safe, available, and legal. I know that I will write letters and make phone calls and donate money and march on streets and sidewalks and whatever else it takes to protect a woman's access to trained medical professionals who perform abortions.

However, if you really pin me down, I don't have a good, moral, reason for why I believe this. Truthfully, I don't know when life begins. I don't. I don't know if or at what point abortion becomes killing a person. Yet it makes sense to me, if abortion is killing a person, that it should be illegal. And that people will feel compelled to try to stop abortions from happening.

And yet this train of thought is unsatisfying, because it feels incomplete. It feels incomplete because it fails to take the pregnant woman into account. This provides a good rhetorical road, for a while, until you get past medical complications. What's the moral defense of abortion in cases where the health of the woman is not at risk? I can provide lots of arguments, but they all leave me a little uncomfortable, they all feel slightly inadequate.

Fortunately, as part of my prep work for the upcoming summit, I have been introduced to the writings of Margaret Olivia Little. Regardless of your stance on abortion, if you're truly interested in some thought-provoking reading on the subject, I'm not sure you can do much better. She fills, in my opinion, an often overlooked gap in the rhetoric surrounding abortion. She includes the pregnant woman in her moral reasoning, but in a very specific way - by acknowledging and addressing that the relationship between a pregnant woman and an embryo/fetus is unlike any other relationship. Therefore, every analogy is inadequate, every argument faulty, specifically because we don't have the ethical and rhetorical tools to tackle this problem. As she states in "Procreative Liberty, Biological Connections, and Motherhood":

Let me put it more bluntly. The central figures in the abortion drama - fetus, gestating woman, and their relationship - are left out of the conceptual paradigm. When we reason about them, we appeal to analogies that are at best awkward, at worst dangerous, but always distorting, because we are trying to analogize to classifications that have at their root the denial of the situation we confront.

In "Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate" she gets into some really interesting thinking about this specific relationship:

...a fetus's right to life circumscribes a woman's rights to bodily autonomy; but it could go just the other direction: we could conclude that a person's right to life is circumscribed at the point at which that life involves occupying and using another's body. We could conclude that a woman's right to bodily autonomy ends when her decisions reach the body of the fetus; alternatively, we could say that the fetus's right to life ends when it relies inextricably on hers. In wondering whether abortion is murder, then, the issue is not just a matter of deciding whether or when the fetus is a person: it is a matter of determining the contours of the right to life in the rather distinctive circumstances of being gestated.
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The really interesting questions about abortion, I think, are questions about whether or when one has a duty to continue gestating when one finds oneself pregnant.

In the same piece, I think she really hits the nail on the head with regard to the state's interference in this relationship and decision (albeit through the use of language that is a bit insensitive to the fetus):

The fetus, of course, is innocent of malintent, indeed, of any intent; but the complaint here is not with the fetus, it is with the state. The complaint is with the idea of forcing a woman to be in a state of physical intimacy with and occupation by this unwitting entity. For, unwitting or not, it still intertwines and intrudes on her body; and whatever the state's beneficent motives for protecting the interests of the fetus, it matterse that the method used for that protection involves forcing others to have another entity live inside them.
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With pregnancy, of course, matters are especially loaded, because it taps into expectations of motherhood: women are supposed to want this sort of enmeshment. But this is just to point out the ideal (if it is one); whatever she is supposed to want, the point remains: it's what she actually wants and agrees to that determines the status of the enmeshment.

She also has a chapter in "Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics" (the whole book is fascinating and challenging) in which she defends the moral basis for abortion. In the previously mentioned piece Little says, "What we need in thinking about abortion is a moral approach that does justice to the ethics of intimacy; what we have is a moral approach that rarely uses the word." In this chapter she runs with this idea, part of which involves distinguishing between one's moral obligations in deciding whether or not to enter into a relationship and one's moral obligations once one is involved in a relationship.

Then there is the aftermath of the nine months: for gestation doesn't just turn cells into a person; it turns the woman into a mother. One of the most common reasons women give for wanting to abort is that they do not want to become a mother - now, ever, again, with this partner, or no reliable partner, with these few resources, or these many that are now, after so many years of mothering slated finally to another cause. Not because motherhood would bring with it such burdens - though it can - but because motherhood would so thoroughly change what we might call one's fundamental practical identity.
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To argue that women may permissibly decline this need not trade on a view that grants no value to early life; it is, in essence, to argue about the right way to value pregnancy and parenthood. It is to recognize a level of moral perogative based not just on the concretely understood burdens of the activity in question, but also on its deep connection to authoring a life.

Little goes on to point out that for many women, abortion is viewed as 'preferable' to adoption because they realize that they will not be able to care for a child at this point, and yet also know that after living with that gestating child for nine months, will be incapable of giving it up.


Lastly, returning to the first piece mentioned above, Little does an excellent job of pointing out the double standards that currently exist regarding mothers and fathers:

Legan 'duties to assist' for instance, are far more extensive for pregnant women than for fathers of children already born. Courts have ordered women to undergo cesarean sections without their consent in order to increase incrementally fetuses' chances of survival, while courts routinely deny attempts to force fathers to undergo procedures such as kidney transplants or even blood tranfusion in order to save their existing children.
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For instance, concerns about the dangers that alcohol poses to a fetus focus almost exclusively on women's dangerous proclivities...even though fetuses also face significant harm from drunk men battering their pregnant partners. Or again, public health campaigns concerned with fetal damage from tobacco smoke almost never target expectant fathers' responsibilities not to smoke around their pregnant partners.

And yes, I realize this double standard works both ways, and men are still getting the shaft when it comes to 'positive' rights too. I think work toward equality has to focus on both awarding the positive things and punishing/restricting the negatives.

The conference starts tomorrow, I'm sure I'll be back with another mouthful.