I am continuing my rebuttal of the Physicians for Life (PFL) article, “In Defense of Life: Rebuttals to Abortion Arguments.” In Part 1, I addressed the arguments directed at the bodily autonomy of pregnant people. In Part 2, I addressed arguments directed at prenatal personhood and considered the ethics of forcing one’s religious morality on others. While writing this post, it became obvious that I was not going to be able to mop up the rest of PFL’s arguments. It also became obvious I needed to write something that was more reflective after I was finished with the argumentation. Therefore, as it stands now, I will be writing two more posts in response to this article. This post will cover arguments related to the rights of self-determination, equality and privacy. Part 4 will hopefully wrap up the rest of the arguments. Part 5 will deal with the personal reflections I had while writing these posts.
Section 6 meant to address the popularity of the pro-choice stance. It’s a bit of a word salad. It is also out of date. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a clear majority of the public supports legal abortion in cases where pregnant people do not wish to be pregnant. This appears to be a significant improvement, but it also still means the public still views the permissibility of abortion through the lens of their judgments about pregnant people.i Among other things, this means we still have a long way to go before people with uteruses are recognized as fully human.
Let’s move on to the meat the PFL’s contention: “We all oppose ‘choice’ in the case of someone wishing to commit rape or wishing to beat up family members. ‘Choice’ is not an applicable concept when there are victims.” I absolutely agree here. The problem with PFL’s argument is that it identifies the victim incorrectly. If the pregnancy is unwanted, it is the pregnant person who is the victim. It is the pregnant person’s body that is being used without consent. And if abortion is prohibited, it is the pregnant person whose rights are violated.
Section 7 presents arguments meant to respond to the pro-choice advocate arguing, “I believe women should have a ‘choice.’” Their first response is that they are choosing to kill. But oddly, as part of this argument, PFL asserts that 90% of people having an abortion felt they were forced into the abortion and regretted it. Tellingly, they give no source for this assertion.
The reason they give no source for the assertion is because it is a lie. In The Turnaway Study, Diana Green Foster reports only about 1% of people seeking abortions in her study reported feeling coercion from others to have the abortion. None cited this as the main reason for having the abortion. This is consistent with other studies and the fact that abortion clinics assess pregnant people to ensure they are making the decision of their own free will. Furthermore, five years after the abortion, 95% of the study’s participants felt having the abortion was the right decision.ii
PFL then alleges “choice” is just a way of society telling pregnant people to deal with the unwanted pregnancy by getting rid of it so society does not have to give them the support they are entitled to. Then they cite Feminists for Life of America, an oxymoron if there ever was one, to much the same effect. These are odd assertions to make considering the slave monger party is also the party that wants to cut whatever support pregnant people can get from society.
Again citing Feminists for Life, PFL tries to address so-called informed choice material required by some states. It cherry picks a quote from the Supreme Court decision in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that state-mandated material given to the pregnant person seeking an abortion is not “always relevant to the women’s decision, and may serve only to confuse her and heighten her anxiety.” It then accuses the court of patronizing the pregnant person’s ability to decide and forces pregnant people to make their decision in ignorance.
But read in context, the Thornburgh decision does no such thing. The decision explicitly states, “A requirement that the woman give what is truly a voluntary and informed consent, as a general proposition, is, of course, proper and is surely not unconstitutional.” Where the statute under contention went too far was in mandating the pregnant person be given information “not to inform the woman's consent but rather to persuade her to withhold it altogether” and that the mandated information be given “irrespective of the particular needs of the patient.” Rather than patronizing the pregnant person, the Court ruled the state was doing the patronizing and ordered it to stop.
PFL then encourages the slave monger to ask whether the pro-choice advocate supports abortions for sex selection. In the context of the United States, this is a red herring. Several studies of the reasons for having an abortion have been done over the years, and sex selection is not a factor. There is no evidence sex selection abortions is a problem in the United States. So basically the slave mongers are trying to rely on people’s discomfort with a non-existent problem to sneak through a general ban on abortion.
Next, PFL quotes Miriam J. Barth (without citing a source) to the effect that it is “sad” that “radical feminists” see abortion as necessary to women having the right to self-determination. I am not exactly sure what point the PFL is trying to make with this quote, or how it responds to the pro-choice advocate saying, “I believe women should have a ‘choice.’” It does not help their case. Just because something is sad does not necessarily mean it should be illegal.
In any case, however “sad” it may be, “radical feminists” are absolutely right that abortion rights are necessary for female-bodied people to have the right to self-determination. The Turnaway Study provides several lines of evidence showing how having an abortion vs. being refused one impacts the lives of women. On the physical level, those denied an abortion were more likely to have serious complications as a result of their pregnancy, an effect that carried over to subsequent pregnancies. Overall, those denied an abortion were less healthy than those who were able to obtain it. Those who are denied abortions may also have a higher risk of death from the pregnancy than the general population (146-150). Call me a radical feminist, but I think it is self-evident that living is a necessary precondition for the right to self-determination.
Women who are denied abortions significantly downgrade their aspirations. “[D]enying women wanted abortions causes them to scale back their plans for the coming year, while allowing women to have a wanted abortion enables them to set more aspirational plans for the coming year…. Women are changing their plans and dramatically scaling back their non-child-related plan in response to being denied a wanted abortion” (168). Even with these lowered aspirations, those denied an abortion were less likely to achieve those goals (169-170). “Women denied abortions tend to scale back their career and financial expectations, realizing that having a child—or another child—will affect their life trajectory. Women know that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term will limit their other accomplishments” (170).
In the longer term, those who were denied an abortion became more likely to raise their children alone. Their employment situation is more erratic than those who had an abortion, and it takes four years to catch up, with the expected negative impact on their families’ economic well-being. Those denied an abortion were far more likely to depend on welfare benefits, including food stamps and WIC. They are more likely to live in poverty, and even after five years were more likely to report they do not have enough money for basic expenses (174-177). On top of a 78% increase in past due accounts, those who were denied an abortion also had increased incidences of evictions, bankruptcies, court judgments, and loan defaults (179-180).
Being denied an abortion also has ramifications for future relationships. For example, only 28% of those denied an abortion described themselves as being in a good relationship after two years compared to 47% who were able to get an abortion (235). Even more worrisome, those denied an abortion were more likely to be tethered to abusive partners, often because the partner’s income is their main source of survival. Not surprisingly, those who were denied an abortion were more likely to be physically assaulted by their partner than those who were able to have an abortion (232).
Note I am not saying that those who are denied abortions cannot or will not succeed. The Turnaway Study gives a number of examples of women who succeed despite being denied an abortion. However, a common theme of those successes was that these women had excellent support systems, usually a family that had the means to help. And arguably they would have succeeded much faster had they gotten the abortion they sought because they would not have had to face the socio-economic obstacles associated with being forced to bear and rear a child before they were ready. But for most female-bodied people, most of the time, abortion rights are necessary to fully exercising the right to self-determination.
Shifting away from the Turnaway Study, it has been shown that homicide is a (if not the) leading cause of pregnancy-related death. Often, they are murdered by their intimate partners. Obviously, we cannot how many murdered pregnant people wanted or planned to have an abortion. Still less, we cannot know how many of them would have gotten an abortion had they known they would be murdered. Once again, being alive is a necessary precondition for the right to self-determination.
PFL then returns to slut-shaming, arguing the real choice happens in the bedroom. Female-bodied people are urged to work out an understanding with their partner such that pregnancy is prevented in the first place. In any case, they should not “take out their frustration on a helpless little child.” I can only quote the absurd remark that follows: “Often, abortion advocates portray women as weak, vulnerable wimps who must give men all they want (blame men for their problems); then they turn around and demand that women are totally in charge of their destinies with total ‘control over their bodies’ (blame their babies for their problems) because they allow the abortionist (usually a male) to violate their bodies and destroy their preborn babies. The abortion advocates cannot have it both ways!” I can only at best guess what they are trying to say here.
So, where to begin? As I noted in Part 1, Physicians for Life are against abortion even in cases of rape, a fact we will deal with more fully later. As we will also see, these slave mongers are against abortion in cases where birth control failed. Logically, this means it does not matter what the female-bodied person does. What we have here is a case where the slave monger places the entire onus on female-bodied people to not get pregnant, and then say it does not matter what they do because if they get pregnant through no fault of their own, they are still going to be forced to gestate. And then they accuse the pro-choice side of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Forgive me if I’m not impressed.
What I would really like to say here is that the slave mongers at PFL need to take off the rose-colored glasses. Rape happens. So does reproductive coercion. People don’t always keep their agreements. And even when both parties honor their agreements, accidents happen. There is no reversible birth control that is 100% effective, 100% foolproof, and 100% tamper proof. People cannot always afford the most effective birth control, and the cheapest methods are also the least effective ones. Do pro-choice advocates say that female-bodied people are weak to the point they have to give male-bodied people whatever they want? No, they just happen to live in the real world.
If these arguments do not work, PFL suggests asking pro-choice advocates why they fight against laws requiring informed consent. This was partly answered above in the discussion of Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The short answer is we do not oppose medically sound information being given to patients seeking an abortion. What we oppose is state-mandated interventions intended to intimidate pregnant people from having an abortion. We oppose states requiring abortion providers to tell lies about abortions causing breast cancer or mental health issues. We oppose mandating medically unnecessary procedures and TRAP laws.
If none of these arguments against choice work, the slave mongers ask what pro-choice advocates do besides providing abortions. Well, let’s take a look at the service categories Planned Parenthood provides beyond abortion, to take an example: birth control; emergency contraception; general health care; HIV services; LGBT services; men’s health services; patient education; pregnancy testing and services; STD testing, treatment, and vaccines; and women’s services. (So much for the remark that their income comes from the number of abortions they do.) Pro-choice advocates also tend to advocate for living wages and strong social safety nets so people who decide to have children are able to care for them. They also tend to advocate expanded medical coverage of pregnancy, up to and including Medicare for All so that people who decide to carry a pregnancy remain healthy and give birth to healthy babies. They also tend to support comprehensive sex education and no out-of-pocket cost for contraceptive coverage to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. They also tend to fight against pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. They also tend to advocate for paid family leave so parents can bond better with their newborns. I could go on and on, but this should be enough to get started.
Moving onto section 10, the pro-choice advocate is said to ask how women can have equality if they cannot control their reproductive lives. PFL counters with questions like how female-bodied people are seen as needing surgery to avoid their second-class status and why they should have to become like men to be successful. These are strawmen. No one is saying any of this. As detailed above, in terms of just physical health, lowered aspirations, economic well-being, and future relationships, having a child one is not ready for has long-term ramifications on the ability of female-bodied people to live their lives on their own terms. Pro-choice advocates are not saying access to abortion is the only thing they need to overcome second-class status; but it surely is part of the puzzle.
PFL cites the oxymoronic Feminists for Life saying if there are barriers to equal participation of pregnant people and new mothers, that is the fault of society. I agree. But who are the people working to maintain the second-class status of female-bodied people? That would be the so-called pro-life party, as perfectly encapsulated in this cartoon:
The next section tries to address the right to privacy. Physicians for Life contend that the abortion debate is about whether violence is done, and if so privacy has nothing to do with it.
First, let me note that I may not be the best person to address the right to privacy as it relates to abortion. Though the right to privacy surely applies to abortion, I consider it too thin a thread to hang the legal right to have an abortion on. Nor am I the only pro-choice advocate to think there are stronger grounds to affirm the right to an abortion. Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued abortion rights are more properly situated in equal protection. Other arguments have been offered to ground the right to an abortion in bodily autonomy,iii limits on the duty to aid others, and so on.
I myself think abortion rights should be grounded in the Thirteenth Amendement. The argument is simple and elegant. Prohibiting abortion makes the pregnant person the state-mandated slave (or, if you feel this word is too harsh, the involuntary servant) of the prenate. This is clearly prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. Full stop.
Having said that, Physicians for Life is just plain wrong that the debate is about whether violence is done. An induced abortion forcibly removes or expels the prenate from the pregnant person’s body. No knowledgeable pro-choice advocate would deny this.
The abortion debate is about whether the pregnant person can be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. It’s not about whether violence is done; it’s about whether it is justified. Pro-choice advocates argue, generally speaking, that the violence is justified and that the pregnant person cannot be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. This being the case, the abortion decision is in fact a matter of privacy.
PFL would then ask the pro-choice advocate whether the right to privacy was absolute and whether that right exceeds another person’s right to live. PFL is begging the question of whether the prenate is a person, an issue I already dealt with in Part 2. Having already conceded that I think the right to privacy was a thin thread to hang abortion rights on, I am not going to contradict myself here. However, I think it can still be argued that, given current medical technology, abortion is covered by the right to privacy. I will concede that, generally speaking, the right to privacy does not outweigh a person’s right to life. I will even go so far as to stipulate prenatal personhood for this purpose.
What, after all, is the right to privacy? I think a good definition of the right to privacy is to be let alone by other people and/or the government so long as you are doing nothing wrong. This may not align precisely with the legal definition, but it does seem to be something like the definition most people use in their everyday lives. Already, we can see why, generally speaking, the right to privacy does not outweigh another person’s right to life: unjustly depriving someone of their right to life is wrong. But it is also why we can see that there are some cases where the right to privacy does outweigh another person’s right to life.
Recall my argument for the permissibility of abortion roughly runs as follows. In an unwanted pregnancy, the prenate is using the pregnant person’s body without consent. Because of this, the pregnant person is permitted to use any necessary means to end the nonconsensual use of their body, just as we are permitted to use any necessary means to evade/escape rape, slavery, kidnapping, involuntary scientific experimentation, and forced organ donations.
For a moment, let’s focus on forced organ or tissue donations. I have cited the case of McFall v. Shimp several times in my arguments on abortion. In this case, McFall had a blood condition and required a bone marrow transplant to live. Shimp, McFall’s cousin, consented to an initial test that indicated his marrow was compatible. It was only when Shimp refused to undergo the confirmatory test that McFall sued, asking the court to compel Shimp to undergo the confirmatory test and donate his bone marrow if compatibility was confirmed. Ultimately, the court ruled that, however morally detestable Shimp’s refusal to donate his bone marrow to McFall may be, he was doing nothing legally wrong and was to be let alone. Shimp’s right to privacy in this case did outweigh McFall’s right to life.
One could argue that in the case examples I used in my argument, these are not matters of privacy. If I killed such a perpetrator, I could still be charged with murder and I would have the burden of proof that I acted in self-defense. Further, much of the case would probably center around whether it was necessary to kill the offender. This much is true, but the reason is that there would be questions about whether the perpetrator was in fact trying to do these things and whether it was necessary to kill the offender.
This is not the case with abortion, particularly when procured before viability. In the case of the prenate, that they are using the pregnant person’s body is beyond the shadow of a doubt. By seeking an abortion, a pregnant person has proven they do not consent to that use.iv There are simply no means of ending a pregnancy before viability without it resulting in the death of the prenate. Lacking any means of transferring the prenate to another person or an artificial womb, the question of necessity is settled. If stopping a rapist always and everywhere meant killing them, then necessity would not even come into play in my case for self-defense. The only thing I would have to prove is that the offender was really trying to rape me, i.e., trying to use my body without consent. Always and everywhere, the prenate is using the pregnant person’s body. Always and everywhere, a person seeking an abortion does not consent to the use of their body by the prenate. Before viability, the necessity of killing the prenate is unambiguous. There is clearly no question about whether the pregnant person is doing something wrong, so the decision to have an abortion is covered by the pregnant person’s right to privacy.
As stipulated in my essay, once the fetus becomes viable, things become more complicated as the necessity of killing the fetus becomes questionable. Let us be clear here. If the pregnant person no longer consents to the pregnancy even past viability, they still have the right to use any means necessary to end the nonconsensual use of their body by the prenate. This part is beyond question.
However, once the fetus becomes viable, options that will not necessarily kill it, like inducing labor and C-sections, become available. In the discussion of necessity, I argued that is not required to take heroic measures to avoid killing the offender. As applied to ending an unwanted pregnancy, this means if inducing labor or having a C-section is riskier than having an abortion, an abortion may still be considered necessary.
At the time I wrote the essay, I admitted I was not a medical expert and could not answer the question of risk definitively. However, the question of just how risky in terms of death from various forms of late-term abortions, inducing labor, and having a C-section came up in the comments. Finding these statistics does help me to start answering the question of necessity. So, let’s list the mortality rates:
There are 8.8 deaths per 100,00 live births. This is the baseline.
There are 4.9 deaths per 100,000 dilation and evacuation abortions.
There are 9.6 deaths per 100,000 for instillation methods of abortion.
There are 60 deaths per 100,000 for hysterotomies and hysterectomies.
There are 13 deaths per 100,000 C-sections.
I could not find any readily available death rate for inducing labor. I found that inducing labor increases the risk of fatal embolisms and postpartum hemorrhage, but not a solid deaths per 100,000 cases of induced labor. I would presume that heightened risks of potentially fatal complications translates into at least a slightly higher risk of death than the baseline, but I cannot verify it. Nor do I know how the potential benefits weigh against the risks. So I will stipulate for the sake of this discussion that inducing labor is no more risky than the baseline.
Looking at these statistics, two things stand out. First, a C-section is far riskier than the baseline. A pregnant person cannot be required to have a C-section in an effort to avoid the death of the fetus. However, a D&E is still far less risky than the baseline, and presumably inducing labor. In terms of my argument, an abortion can still be considered necessary because the other options would be considered heroic. A pregnant person does nothing wrong in requesting a D&E, and properly trained personnel do nothing wrong in providing it. And this falls within the right to privacy.
I have already dealt with section 12 in part 2, so before closing this post, I will comment on section 13. In response to the pro-choice argument, “The government should not interfere in this highly personal issue,” PFL responds by saying the real issue is about the government preserving and protecting life. This response still begs the question of whether the prenate has the right to life in the first place, which, as I explained in part 2, they have failed to show. Beyond that, it also begs the question of whether an abortion unjustly deprives the prenate of their right to life, assuming they have it. PFL does not even try to make a case here. In light of these two basic, fundamental failures, PFL’s assertions about what the “real issue” is falls flat.
Perhaps realizing this, PFL urges slave mongers to divert to the issue of the government paying for abortions. They think they have caught pro-choice advocates in a contradiction. Pro-choice advocates are said to both want the government stay out of abortion but also pay for it. However, a pro-choice advocate would be more likely to actually say something like, “The government should not interfere with decisions pregnant people make about their pregnancies.” Once the strawman has been dealt with, the apparent contradiction disappears.
I should note here that not all pro-choice advocates think the government should pay for abortions beyond the normal rape and maternal health exceptions already contained in the Hyde Amendment. One can hold without contradiction that abortion should be legal but that it should not be paid for using taxpayer money. They are in fact separate issues.
While I can only speak for myself, what follows is the general sense I get from those who do advocate the government should pay for abortions. Abortion care is health care. I have already already discussed some of the findings from The Turnaway Study regarding the health effects of being denied a wanted abortion. I have also shown that even late-term abortions are far safer than childbirth. In this post, I have not discussed the effect being denied an abortion has on children (those who already exist, the one the pregnant person is forced to bear, and/or future children). Spoiler alert: It’s not good.
Furthermore, the earlier one has an abortion, the easier and safer the procedure. But as The Turnaway Study notes, “Needing time to raise money to cover travel and procedure costs was the most common reason for delay among our study participants, with nearly two-thirds of women who showed up close to the clinic’s gestational limit reporting such costs as a reason for delay” (65).
So it is in everyone’s best interest that the government pay for abortions should the pregnant person decide to have one. But more than that, as I already mentioned, pro-choice advocates tend to advocate expanded medical coverage of pregnancy. I myself advocate Medicare for All, so that everyone can receive the medical care they need regardless of their individual situations and choices.
Edited on 2 Nov 2021 to fix bad hyperlinks.
iPollitt, Katha. Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (p. 46). Picador. Kindle Edition. Pollitt appears to be dealing with attitudes toward the reasons pregnant people abort in general, and not just legal permissibility. It is possible, and even likely respondents who think abortion should be legal for people simply not wanting to be pregnant would still disagree that it is morally permissible. Therefore, I am not going to attempt a reconciliation between the Kaiser survey I cited and Pollitt’s figures.
iiFoster, Diana Greene. The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion (p. 42-43, 124-126). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
iiiManninen, B.. “Rethinking Roe v. Wade: Defending the Abortion Right in the Face of Contemporary Opposition.” The American Journal of Bioethics 10 (2010): 33-46.
ivA slave monger may try to appeal to implicit consent, but Holly M. Smith refuted that notion nearly forty years ago. It is sufficient to say that in a case of a theoretical argument the pregnant person consented by having voluntary sex and an actual person saying here and now they do not consent, the actual person wins.
