An Entirely Pointless Post About Abortion

You may want to ignore it

OK so after the really quite shitty news from the US, I decided to write some of my thoughts about the political issue of abortion. But before I do, I want to make a few things unambiguous:

I am a man. I have never had an abortion. I will never have an abortion. I will never have to make the decision of whether or not to have an abortion, and I have never before been even tangentially involved in such a decision. Abortion has not been an issue that has directly affected my life and it probably never will. I am very much just some guy saying some stuff what he reckons. As such, if you believe that my views on the subject are utterly worthless, I fully support you. There is no particular reason to even bother reading on: I am fully aware of this. So I won’t mind at all if you simply roll your eyes and move on to something more interesting.

If you ARE still reading, I will also say this before I get down to business: I am absolutely and without qualification pro-choice. I believe abortion should be safe and legal, even if it’s not rare. I have no problem whatsoever with women deciding to terminate pregnancies for any reason at all, at any stage whatsoever.

But this post isn’t about my beliefs about abortion. It’s about the beliefs of those who disagree vehemently with me, and why I think that there is value in acknowledging and understanding the views even of people you think are wildly, incredibly, dangerously wrong. It’s about abortion as a political issue and the best way to approach that issue to get best results.

And it is also, as previously mentioned, just some guy who reckons something.

So, anyway…

The thing about abortion is that in some places in the world, it is easy to think it’s a settled issue. We feel that the world is getting more progressive, and as our part of the world has reached an enlightened position on abortion, it can’t be rewound.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we think it could be rewound, but only by the application of forces of pure evil, hypocrisy and cruelty. So those are the forces we need to keep at bay, and by extension, those are the forces that have this far prevailed in those parts of the world that have not reached our enlightened state.

And so, the reversal of Roe vs Wade in the US is purely a result of those evil forces getting a foothold and ramming home their advantage.

This is not, I think, an entirely unreasonable view. Because make no mistake, when regressive abortion laws are passed, they are passed by politicians, and those politicians are in the vast majority of cases cynical bastards whose professed principles about the sanctity of life are a big barrel of boiling bullshit. The average pro-life politician (take the scare quotes every time I say “pro-life” as read: I know it’s a misnomer) cares about as much about the welfare of the unborn child as they do about selfless devotion to the service of the people. If you catch my drift.

The point is, to most pro-life politicians, the fate of unborn babies is not a personal concern, it’s a tool. Like most politicians of every stripe, they are in the business of getting as much for themselves as they can - if the electorate is lucky their representative will only lust for power; the really bad ones are after money as well. The pro-life movement is just another means by which they accrue what is valuable to them.

But here is the thing: the only reason they can use that tool is that there are a lot of people out there who, unlike pro-life politicians, are genuinely pro-life. By which I mean, they genuinely believe that conception is the starting point not just for life, but for personhood; that a foetus has - or should have - the same rights as any other human being; and that abortion is, in a moral sense, literally murder.

I cannot stress this enough: they really, truly, honestly, believe that. Yes, there are people who only oppose abortion because they want to keep women subjugated. Yes, there are people who only oppose abortion because they think sex is shameful and allowing women to have sex without what they see as the appropriate consequences is disgraceful. Yes, there are people who only oppose abortion because they got raised in a religion that drilled into their heads the idea that it’s a sin and they will follow that teaching forever without even thinking about it. And as we’ve established, there are people who only oppose abortion because they reckon it’ll help their careers.

But there are also people - and around the world, they number millions upon millions upon millions - who oppose abortion because they find the idea of killing an unborn human organism utterly hideous. They are disgusted by the idea. It makes them shake and weep when they think of the horrific atrocities being perpetrated with government imprimatur every day. To them, an abortion clinic is no more morally justifiable than a slaughterhouse for five-year-olds.

And I’ll say it again, for those up the back: THEY BELIEVE THIS. They don’t just say it. They believe it, down to their very core.

And those politicians? The ones who don’t believe that at all, but just pretend to for political gain? Well, the only reason they can gain politically by their pretence is that there are so many people who genuinely believe it.

If sincere pro-life beliefs didn’t exist anywhere in the population, it’d be pretty easy to shoot down the pro-life movement where it reared its ugly head. Because an ugly head would be all the movement had: there’d be no body, ugly or otherwise, to carry it round. But the REAL pro-lifers - the ones who, however mad or misguided they might be, carry that belief with total sincerity deep in their hearts - are the base for pro-life politicians, and they’re the reason anti-abortion policies and laws get traction.

And the reason I’m pointing this out is because when you see pro-choice activists speaking out and fighting back against the pro-lifers, 99 times out of 100 they pretend those true believers don’t exist. They don’t even take them into account when making their arguments. Not always, but almost always, the pro-choice message is based on the premise not that people who think foetuses are people are wrong, but that there are no people who think that.

And I don’t think your average progressive realises what this means for the way their message is received by those not already in the progressive camp. Because for someone who truly believes in the rights of the unborn, the pro-choice message sounds very different to how it sounds to you or me.

When you say, “A woman must have the right to choose”, they hear, “A woman must have the right to kill babies”.

When you say, “Nobody has the right to tell a woman what to with her body”, they hear, “Nobody has the right to tell a woman not to commit murder”.

When you say, “If they’re so worried about children, why don’t they push for increased welfare for kids?”, they hear, “As long as I can call someone else mean, I’m entitled to murder children”.

When you say, “How dare you make a woman give birth to her rapist’s baby?” they hear, “If a child’s father is a rapist, that child should be killed”.

When you say, “Making abortion illegal won’t stop abortions, it’ll only stop safe abortions”, they hear, “Murders happen anyway, so murder should be legal.”

When you say, “Anti-abortion laws are an attack on women’s rights”, they hear, “It is every woman’s right to kill children, and only misogynists are opposed to child murder”.

You get the point.

You may think, with much justification, that this way of thinking is completely bonkers. But the point isn’t whether it’s reasonable: the point is that it is what lots of people - many more people than we’d like to think - believe.

We’ve got to get to grips with this. It’s much more comforting to think that everyone knows you’re right, and only pretends to disagree with you because it’s more convenient for them, than it is to accept that there are many folks out there who think you’re wrong. But society does not progress via the most comforting route.

But OK, why does it even matter whether we acknowledge these people or not? We’re talking about the crackpots, right? It’s not like we’re ever going to convince a religious fundamentalist to renounce their religion anyway, right?

Correct. We’re not. The point here is not to convince the person holding a sign outside an abortion clinic to put the sign down and get on board with the feminist revolution. That person will go to their grave believing they did the right thing, that the scared teenage girl walking into the clinic was about to commit murder and that screaming in her face was a righteous last-gasp attempt to prevent a terrible tragedy. Nothing we say to that person will change their mind about that.

The point, rather, is that like in all heated political debates, the most heated debaters are not the main game. This is not a battle between passionate pro-lifers and passionate pro-choicers to see who can slap down the other side. It’s a battle between passionate pro-lifers and passionate pro-choicers to see who can seem, to the not-very-passionate majority, the most reasonable.

Because for every furious argument between two angry people, there’s a hundred vaguely curious onlookers who haven’t ever thought much about the issue at hand, casting an eye in that argument’s direction to see which side seems most persuasive.

Right now, in my country and most other rich western ones, I would say that the bulk of the not-very-passionate majority is on the pro-choice side. They don’t think about it much, they not engaged with the details of the debate, but if they’re asked they’ll affirm that they believe in a woman’s right to choose.

But the pro-life movement isn’t going to go away. They’ll be there, forever looking to seize on any weakness in their opposition. And the inability to engage with the actual argument is a weakness, because on the pro-life side there are masses of people protesting that their enemies want to kill babies, and on the pro-choice side there are masses of people who refuse to even bother contradicting them.

So what you get is people whose first exposure to abortion as a political issue is conservatives stoking moral outrage versus progressives taking great pains to dodge the conservatives’ arguments.

Would you not concede that there is at least a chance that those people might get the idea that the people who say they’re trying to save babies’ lives are the good guys, and that the endlessly evasive people are a little dodgy?

So…that’s why I reckon it’s time we - and by “We” I mean everyone who is pro-choice, which I believe is the correct position to take and is more moral than the alternative - admitted that the pro-life position is not just a smokescreen for powerful men who want to control women (and just incidentally, every time this issue is framed as purely a “men vs women” issue it absolutely plays into the hands of the pro-lifers, because they have millions of women on their side, women are front and centre in all their campaigns, and any casual observer can easily see that pro-life women are everywhere and pro-choicers who claim that women monolithically support them are full of it).

This is not to say give up arguing for women’s right to choose, bodily autonomy and all that. Keep going hard. But I reckon we should broaden things about a bit. When the conservatives start talking about unborn babies, tackle that head-on. Make it clear that we are NOT talking about unborn babies, we’re talking about beings that are not babies yet. Make it clear that we know and understand our opponents’ arguments, and we are not afraid to argue against them.

Talk about personhood. Talk about the clear distinction between a born person and unborn non-person. And talk a LOT about how many of the pro-life “leaders” don’t really believe their own talking points. Note that anyone who truly believes murder is being committed on an industrial scale in legal medical facilities should actually be a hell of a lot angrier about it than the average right-wing politician seems to be. Point out how in pretty much every way, society does not acknowledge anyone as a person until they are born, and in pretty much every way, we ALL - pro-life and pro-choice alike - accept that. Ask pro-lifers why they don’t celebrate their birthdays on the anniversary of their conception.

My point is: don’t cede such a swathe of the moral ground to our opposition. Stop giving the impression we don’t have answers to their arguments, because we do. And we should bloody well use them.

That’s what I reckon, anyway.