Feminists Against Abortion?

[DontCallMeFrothyDragon]

OK, hoping someone can fill me in here. I was wondering what the arguments against abortion could be, from a feminist perspective? I've always been pro-choice, so I'm a bit confused as to any desire to take away a woman's choice whether to abort an unwanted pregnancy.

It is interesting to note the very early feminist take on abortion was usually negative. Elizabeth Cady Stanton quote:

?There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women??

I think the argument of pro life feminists is that the existence of abortion shows that complete enfranchisement and elevation of women has not yet happened. Women are still being raped and rape goes largely unpunished. Women are still earning a fraction of what men earn. Childcare is expensive. Women are still tied to abusive men long after divorce or separation just because they had children with them. Women who have children find hurdles in their way in the workforce and in the education system that men who have children do not.

Not disputing your points or Stanton's position, Math, but she was writing in 1868. Abortions - and women's life options - were very different things then.

They were and they weren't. The issues that hold women back and things we worry about were all legal then as opposed to illegal now but are still there all the same. Abortion was more dangerous for women then, certainly. I think she was looking forward to the day when women could be mothers and experience that aspect of themselves, whether single or married, young or older or whatever, with no negative repercussions. Maybe she hoped for the sort of social policies found in Scandinavian countries, and of course an end to rapism.

Stanton was a fierce advocate of contraception, against the mood of the times. Clearly, abortions were not safe in those days even when carried out by a doctor, so she was trying to save women from the dangers of the procedure as well as from excessive childbearing. We can't assume she'd be anti-choice were she alive today.

I see the fetishisation of motherhood as one of the most powerful forces against women's freedom (and foetal rights as an extension of the same.) Victorian feminists emphatically did not revere childbearing; it was the single biggest killer of women and a total straitjacket on their lives.

I assume you mean current Scandinavian policies on equal rights, choice and childcare, not their eugenics of the past?!

Oh no, no assumptions about what she might think today. And yes, Scandinavia in more modern times and not the really dark bits in the past (or even current policy wrt Sami issues).

I think the fetishisation of motherhood is definitely a force that works against women's freedom too, mainly because fetishisation brings with it so much baggage. Total respect for the role of parents (mothers and fathers) otoh, would be a welcome alternative.

So it would :) Or I might be really brave and say it will!

I think the issue is that much pro-life rhetoric isn't about abortion being murder, it's about punishing women for having sex. See this very good table here: www.amptoons.com/blog/2006/03/21/why-its-difficult-to-believe-that-anti-choicers-mean-what-they-say/

For those who can't get their head around the issue of abortion constituting the killing or even murder of another person/potential person/proto-person etc.:

This is not really the intent, though, is it? Women do not have abortions in order to kill off their foetuses. I think a more sensible way of looking at this is to say that a woman who has an abortion is declining to put her body at the disposal of the foetus any longer.

Granted, the foetus does need her body in order to survive. There is a definite qualitative difference, though, between deliberately killing and declining to inconvenience oneself - in whichever way(s) - in order to enable somebody/something else to live.

For example, we do not mandate organ donation in our society. Not even when a) the organ in question is not necessary for our own survival (e.g. a kidney) and b) the potential donor is the only donor capable of saving a patient's life.

In fact, we consider it completely acceptable to continue to refuse our organs to someone who may need them for survival even after we are dead and therefore have absolutely no conceivable use for them.

Even if we are directly to blame for the dying patient's situation, e.g. if I cause a car accident in which someone else suffers irreparable injury to their kidneys, our society does not say that we must donate our organs.

I'm not arguing that it is not nice or good to be an organ donor. What I am saying is that in our society we apparently do respect bodily integrity and the right to self-determination above others' right to life in some instances. Of course it's bound to be controversial where women's rights to their bodies are concerned - as always.

Dude, I've been trying for ages to find a way to say what you just did. Cheers!

Looking back to Stanton's writings, there was a strong theme there of women being pressured by men to have abortions and she was completely against that, apparently assuming that women, if they were free and if it were financially possible, would choose motherhood. There was a strong suggestion that abortion was done for the convenience of the men.

'Granted, the foetus does need her body in order to survive. There is a definite qualitative difference, though, between deliberately killing and declining to inconvenience oneself - in whichever way(s) - in order to enable somebody/something else to live.'

I'm not sure how the organ donation provides an adequate analogy here in order to prove the qualitative difference.

'Granted, the foetus does need her body in order to survive' -- that part is very important here. Declining to inconvenience oneself for the sake of the survival of a foetus when the foetus depends absolutely on the mother's body is not quite the same as declining to be an organ donor to save or enhance the life of another when conceivably someone else on the face of the planet could also do this.

declining to be an organ donor to save or enhance the life of another when conceivably someone else on the face of the planet could also do this

Well, that's a dismissal of moral responsibility - you wouldn't be asked unless you were a rare match - which is fully accepted socially and legally.

Thus, I find Dude's analogy appropriate.

'Rare match' is not 'only match' though. Whereas with a foetus, the woman carrying the foetus is absolutely the only person who can do that for that particular foetus (until an artificial womb is invented).

It just seems to me there's a hole in the organ donor argument. A niggling feeling.

That'll be the hole where your right kidney was

Sorry, this unsettled weather's making me flippant.