pro-life feminism- an oxymoron?

[darleneconnor]

I dont know if it's possible to have this discussion without it turning into a pro/anti abortion or a pro/anti feminism catfight debate, but we'll see.

Having been an almost/potentially aborted fetus myself I was quite stongly anti-abortion in my teens. In those days I saw feminism/feminists as synonymous with pro-choice, and thus rejected the entire feminist cause (naive teen that I was).

In my 20s I got into feminism big time but found it difficult to reconcile with my (now much more liberal but still anti) views on abortion.

Now, in my 30's I see the pro-life movement (esp in USA) as deeply mysognyistic and would not wish to allign myself with them at all.

However, I do still think that abortion (esp surgical) is quite an unpleasent thing and that society would be better off if there were fewer of them. I would NEVER vote for any kind of criminalisation but I do think some effort should be made to reduce the numbers. No-one ever talks about this, probably because they are scared of being associated with radical anti-abortionists, which I can understand. But surely it is a feminist issue to try to prevent some of the female suffering that comes from this? Even if you discount the embryo/fetus, abortions (esp later ones)can be traumatic and harmful both physically and psychologically to the woman. The debate is so caught up with issues of fetal viability that the woman is forgotten.

So, the question is: can I be a feminist and think that (some) abortions are bad for (some) women?

Yes, I think so.

I am pro-choice and a feminist and don't like abortion - who does? It's a horrible thing but it is better than the alternative.

Look at it this way.

The more access you give women to sex education, family planning and abortion services, the fewer abortions take place. Societies that have liberal abortion laws, have fewer abortions than those that restrict because liberal laws usually accompany education and promotion of effective contraception. The true extent of abortion in countries that heavily legislate against it is disguised by women going overseas to have the procedure done - meaning that terminations take place at a much later stage - not ideal at all.

Promoting choice means reducing terminations and especially late terminations. So I do not think it is anti-feminist to want to have fewer abortions.

Absolutely Tondelayo. The key is to provide opportunity and education for women to help them prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Also to have an infrastructure that helps women keep babies that might otherwise be wanted but aborted pregnancies, such as removing the stigma of single parenthood, ammeliorating the financial penalties of having a child in less than ideal circumstances.

I wouldn't agree though that this could replace the need for safe, legal abortion though.

I don't like the terms pro-life and pro-choice, because they are used as tools to polarise debate.

It is a women's issue because only women become pregnant. But pregnancy involves both the woman's body and that of the future child. People hold differing views on when such a life becomes viable.

I am generally against abortion, but part of that is because I live in a society where contraception is readily available and coerced intercourse is a crime.

My gut feeling is that ultimately feminism tells me that "my body, my choice". I may choose to make bad decisions about what I do with my body, but ultimately I need to have autonomy over my physical self, even if that means I choose to destroy a potential life.

Society needs to help me make better choices if it wants to lower the abortion rate. Banning the option of abortion isn't acceptable from a feminist pov, in my opinion.

I think you can.

I'm pro-choice, but had an abortion that affected me quite badly in my late teens, and I think in the UK, in some cases, this is another area where women are treated very badly. Just to give the perspective from that side:

In my case, no counseling was offered and the (male) doctor was adamant that 'nice girls like you' did not have babies in their teens as 'your boyfriend won't stay with you'. Both of these are probably quite true statements, but the implications weren't great - especially the idea that I was dragging down my boyfriend and shouldn't do that. Again, later on when I was trying to come to terms, there was very little understanding from (again, male - whether this is relevant or not I don't know). I was told that women who are upset about abortions are using it as an excuse to hide other problems in their lives (how could you ever know if this were true?). No-one warned me that there might be physical implications (eg. milk at the right time, though it was an early termination); hormones all over the place.

All the usual things that I hear feminists on MN say were cited - lack of available childcare, the need to find into an education system biased towards men, etc. etc. - and I certainly felt that this was a 'woman's problem', something that was mine to deal with, ideally in such a way as it would affect my boyfriend's life as little as possible.

I find it disturbing, but not surprising, that apparently about 1 in 4 women has had an abortion, but there's still a huge stigma around it. Often, there's still a feeling that a woman who does that in some way deserves to feel bad, and/or deserves punishment. The argument that a woman's body is her own to control can be twisted by the misogynists to imply that women alone should bear the blame and men need not.

I've rambled long enough, but I think this is really an area where women are damned whether they're pro-choice or pro-life. Abortions can be bad for women. The attitudes and medical care for abortion can be highly misogynistic. Increasingly it seems to be one of those areas where society takes out its anger on women for having the nerve to progress away from their status as subordinate child-bearers.

Can I add that my mother is vehemently anti, but would never wish for abortion provision to be removed, because she is old enough to have seen how far women used to harm themselves with DIY attempts or backstreet practitioners in the days before legalisation.

That has probably also coloured my views (see previous post), which look more towards contraception and consent.

I think there's another point here, which is that if women have the confidence to say no to men who won't use contraception (which is an issue, especially for teenagers and young women), then that would also go some way to reducing the abortion rate.

I was listening to an absolutely horrifying programme on Radio 4 yesterday am where boys were talking about girls who they slept with who they thought were a good fuck and how nice it is to be able to share that pleasure with your mates :(

Those young women are not in control of their sexuality or their bodies

I don't think there's anything anti-feminist in wishing no woman was ever in a situation where she felt that a termination was necessary, or in trying to improve the things mentioned above which reduce the likelihood of women wanting/needing to have them.

It only becomes anti-feminist when the arguments take away a woman's right to make that decision for herself based on notions of what women "ought" to do/think/feel.

I'm "pro-choice" if it has to be one or the other, but I'd rather there were fewer abortions.

I object to the very term "pro-life", because it is a propaganda term dreamed up by anti abortionists. They deliberately chose "pro-life" because a) pro sounds better - it's always better to be for something than against - and b) everyone is pro life, most of us aren't in favour of death... except ironically, many American anti-abortionists, who are wildly enthusiastic about the death penalty.

I also don't like the rhetoric of choice, as if choosing to have an abortion is the same as choosing whether to have vanilla ice cream or chocolate. No-one makes choices in circumstances of their choosing and I once read an excellent article which said something along the lines of " a woman chooses to have an abortion in the same way a fox chooses to gnaw its own leg off to escape from a trap". The language of choice trivialises the issue IMO because on the whole, women have abortions because they feel they don't have a choice - our society traps them.

And this I would take issue with:

"I live in a society where contraception is readily available and coerced intercourse is a crime."

1. Not all contraception works and it isn't readily available for all women for various reasons.

1. Coerced intercourse isn't generally a crime. Unless it's accompanied by extreme violence, even its victims don't usually recognise it as a crime.

My take on it is that of course you can be a feminist and not like the idea of abortion and not choose it for yourself. And the best way to reduce abortion rates, is to a) give women more autonomy over their bodies and sexuality and b) raise the status of motherhood so that no woman is ever penalised, either financially or socially, for being a mother. That means supporting motherhood with or without the involvement of men and that's something a patriarchal society is extremely unwilling to do.

Bottom line though, is that a woman cannot be considered a mature, full citizen, unless she has absolute automony over decisions which affect her own body. So any argument that says women's control over their bodies should be limited, is anti-femininst IMO.

Sorry for the essay btw.

I am a feminist.

One thing which I dislike about feminist orthodoxy, however, is that it is not permitted to ask whether, really, abortion is just about a woman's body and her right to do with it as she pleases (eg her right to have sex or not, her right to use contraception or not) or whether this is about a woman and another person, i.e., the foetus. The "control over my own body" argument seems to me to be wilfully blind.

There are a number of answers which can be reached about the rights (or not)of a foetus and when those rights arise; but I do not think it right that it should be assumed that a woman's rights always trump those of the foetus. I do not like the way in which feminism seems so incapable of asking some of the subtler questions here.

Likewise, to the extent that women do have control over their own fertility, this is always discussed as a right and never as a responsibility. If I were in a position where a pregnancy would be a disaster, is there not at least a question as to whether I have a responsibility to try to ensure that it doesn't happen rather than just relying on the option of abortion.

I am generally anti-abortion; but I do not think that that makes me any less of a feminist. If anything, I think that addressing these difficult questions with something other than a knee jerk mantra is part of taking moral responsibility for ourselves- surely something for which feminists have thought.

I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of difficulties from both perspectives here, I just wish that a better discussion within feminism were possible

I would describe myself as pro-choice but anti-abortion.

Pro-choice because I don't believe that choice should be taken away from women who need it. Taking it away would create the potential for terrible situations which are damaging to women in terms of physical or mental health or damange them and their prospects, doubly so when the pregnancy is not a concious decision.

Anti-abortion because I don't personally agree with abortion and don't support it because of my personal beliefs about when 'life' begins. But just because I wouldn't do it and I would never tell anyone to do it doesn't mean I don't feel that it shouldn't be an option for others.

HerBeX - that's a really interesting post. Thank you.

I wonder if it's like when people who advocated natural childbirth are assumed to, therefore, be 'anti-caesarean', when, while that may be the case for some, mostly they're just anti-higher-than-neccessary-caesarean-rates. They're anti- the way that HCPs sometimes (often?) do things that make caesareans more likely, when they may not have needed to do those interventions in the first place, had they, and the women, had more understanding of natural, normal, processes of labour.

If we educated girls (or pregnant women) more thoroughly; and boys (pregnant women's partners). And society's (the hospitals') attitude in general were more accepting, equal, better all round, then it would just follow that abortion (caesarean) rates would drop.

I agree with FOAS.

I also think that education is only half of the story. No matter how much education we give people, it is going to remain the case that if lots of women become sexually active at 16, but don't want to have a baby until they are over 30, the chances of some of them becoming pregnant when they don't want to are very high, even with adequate contraception and education.

I think that the existence of abortion as an option has contributed to the demonisation of young mothers. Because (as a poster illustrated earlier) middle class girls are encouraged to have abortions through social pressures, it encourages further prejudice against the 'type' of girls who continue with the pregnancy. We then get women on MN saying well young mothers have children who are more likely to fail at X, when failing at X is more to do with social inequality and the class background of the girl than the fact that she is young.

So I feel that reducing the abortion rate is not just about education, it is also about reducing prejudice against younger women having babies and making it easier for young mothers to progress in their careers (although I believe it may be a myth that having children later makes career progression easier, but many people believe that myth).

The age at which a women is considered too young seems to be getting higher. A poster on MN recently said that all single pregnant women under 25 should be made to raise their children in an institution.

In a society that made it easier and more socially acceptable to have children, whatever your age and whatever your background, abortion would be less common.

Sorry, I meant that I agree with SFAP. I am getting confuses as to who is who!

at your MN quote, MillyR!

I think something similar to that quote is a BNP policy or potential policy, although the poster wasn't claiming any interest to the BNP.

HerBeX...great post and I totally agree with Lenin's rather concise point.

I am pro choice, having made that choice myself. A whole heap of issues, none of which are ignorance, lead to me getting pregnant. The second termination hurt the most, mentally and emotionally. In fact it wasn't until my third pregnancy that I even dealt with any of the feelings... I digress.

Abortion is certainly better than the alternative of trapping more women in the clutches of poverty with little regard or support for them. The only way, in my mind, to reduce abortion is to stop unwanted pregnancies.

I don't think it's possible to be pro life and a feminist.

Pointissima it's not blind to insist on the necessity that women control their own bodies whatever the scenario.

As soon as you start saying that foetus's have rights too and that those rights can be allowed to interfere with the rights of an adult woman, you are saying that adult women are not wholly sovereign over their own bodies in the way that adult men are.

And that is absolutely unacceptable to anyone who thinks that women can never be supposed to be incapable or simply not allowed, to be in control of their own bodies. Either you accept that they and they alone are in control of their bodies, as men are, or you don't - there isn't a compromise on this. If you don't, you don't believe that women are as adult and competent as men. Part of believing in women's adulthood, is the knowledge that some women may make choices that you don't agree with, disapprove of, or are disgusted by. But they have the right to make them, because they are full, adult human beings.

I actually don't think of limits on the availability of abortion as being about removing a woman's control over her body (any more than any pregnancy does that, anyway).

Forcing a woman to have an abortion. That would be about denying her the control that is rightly hers. Limiting the availability of abortion is more about there being consequences to one's actions. Which there are. It's a bit of a bummer that, when it comes to sex, the consequences affect the woman more than the man but there it is.

I think that abortion should be available in some circumstances, but I would not like to see it available to absolutely anyone in absolutely any circumstances.

"Limiting the availability of abortion is more about there being consequences to one's actions. "

Really! You think continuing with an unwanted pregnancy is an acceptable punishment consequence of stupidly thinking that maybe the man might take responsiblity for contraception?

Your post has made me feel really angry, MsHighwater (maybe you should change it to MsHighhorse!).

flamingobingo, really? You don't think that if a grown woman has unprotected sex she ought to think there might be a teeny tiny chance that she might get pregnant? Really?

It doesn't matter if she has unprotected sex, she still has the right to decide what happens to her body. Not anybody else's. Just her's.