I Have Only Begun to Talk About Abortion

Continuing the clearing of my desktop, this one was written as a diary for Daily Kos after the Stupak anti-abortion amendment was incorporated into the House version of healthcare reform. I decided the diary was futile for a setting like Daily Kos, so I scrapped it. But here its ghost lives on. It's not my best work on this subject, written fast and furious as it was. The title is a riff on the title from another diary, written by somebody else in the community who was also exasperated with Stupak. That diary inspired me to write this.









Saturday night we were betrayed by sixty-four Democrats who voted with every Republican to pass a Democratic amendment denying federal funding for abortion care. Then, Sunday, reading the comments in Angry Mouse's diary, “,” we were betrayed again. Her stirring declaration of self-worth should have been greeted with adulation and affirmation from a progressive community frustrated to the point of tears and fury at the repeated subjugation of women by our own elected leaders. Instead it attracted broad disagreement and nitpicking.

We are not so different from the religious freaks who nurture the anti-choice movement. Yes, our ideas are superior. But that's about it. In our critical thinking we are as negligent; in our judgment we are as emotional; and in our strength of mind we are as dogmatic...as the freaks. We are as sanctimonious as they are. We are as egotistical as they are. We are as petty as they are. We pride ourselves as clear thinkers who live in the “reality-based” world. We're not. We pride ourselves as caring people who are deeply concerned with living ethically. We're not. We pride ourselves as liberal, but really we're just as reactionary and gullible as religious conservatives. We may support noble causes, but most of us do so for all the wrong reasons. We are only coincidentally the champions of liberty and justice.

And, so, every time someone like Angry Mouse comes along and tells it straight, “Just the facts, Ma'am,” we can't see the truth for what it is. If our own beliefs tell us something else, the truth hasn't got a chance. This is one way in which conservatives are more honest than us: At least they call their beliefs “beliefs.” We call ours every kind of thing they're not: factual, reasonable, logical, compassionate, intelligent, thoughtful. Lies, lies, and self-delusion.

Today the odious conventional wisdom in our community is that the life of an unborn baby is more important than the self-determination of an adult woman. The notion that a woman should be able to have an abortion up to the day she gives birth is considered extreme, even counter-productive. How did we get to this point? It's because, as Angry Mouse pointed out, our political leaders and issue strategists are weak-kneed on abortion, apologizing for it, insisting that it should be rare, and often declaring outright that they themselves are against it. Essentially, the modern liberal defense of abortion is that it is a necessary evil. Why? Because every abortion involves the death of an unborn baby. This is how our leaders have framed the issue, and so this is what we, ourselves, believe the truth to be. We even feel proud of ourselves for being able to find some common ground with the other side in that we can all agree that abortion should be rare, a last resort.

But you know what lies down that road? The compartmentalization of abortion rights. First trimester, second trimester, third trimester. Rape. Incest. Health. Survival. Family planning. And you know what the religious freaks do? They pick off abortion rights, one section at a time. And we let them. They frame it in terms of the child. “Won't somebody think of the children?!” they wail. And we buy it. We give the freaks their concessions. They want more. We protest. They hold firm. We give in. Eventually we get so accustomed to our strategic retreats that we don't realize how hypocritcal and self-defeating we have become. We utterly fail to recognize that we have bought in to the propaganda of the enemies of sexual equality.

At every point during gestation, a pregnant woman is still a human being, and her choice to seek an abortion would be no more or less valid in one instance than in any other. Yet the conservative ideology, which has become our own, tells us that the development of the fetus creates some kind of boundary at which the baby prevails and the mother has lost her right to terminate the pregnancy—if indeed she ever had such a right, since abortion is often legal on paper but out of reach in one hundred practical ways. The religious freaks like to talk about boundaries such as “viability” and “conception,” or any number of other milestones in the reproductive process. And, lo and behold, those same frames of reference have cropped up here on the left, so that in the comments of Angry Mouse's diary there were multiple people who came out supporting abortion restrictions on these very terms.

Every single one of us who argues that there should be any restrictions whatsoever on any woman's right to control her body is wrong, and wrong for one simple reason: They have assumed that the life of the fetus outranks the choice of the mother. In so doing, they have argued that women be subjugated to a restriction that strips them of their very humanity: the control of one's own body.

In Western thinking, both life and choice are held up as two sides of the same coin, but in reality they are frequently at odds: Choice can get a person killed pretty fast. And life can condemn someone to an existence of no choices. We got one thing right, though: They're both important. But which is more important, when the two come up against each other, as they do in abortion? You already know where this is going to end. But join me for the walk.

Most of us say “life” is more important, as that's where the abortion debate is at nowadays. “Life” is simply a more powerful word than “choice.” Perhaps it's because anyone with a mind to ponder the issue is alive, and can relate to being alive more readily than to the somewhat abstract concept of “choice.” We can blame our forbearers for that: In the course of history, choice has been just about the only thing held in even lower regard than life itself: For every act of killing, there are a million acts of subjugation. Thus, choice probably seems more flexible than life, since freedoms won and then lost may someday be regained, but a life lost is gone forever.

But this insight only tells us that choice is harder to uphold, harder to protect, than life, and that life is nigh impossible to restore once lost. It doesn't actually tell us which is more important. To get that, we have to confront the meaning of personhood, which is at the heart of humanity. Mind you, I'm not talking about the definition of personhood, which includes everything from zygotes to corporations, but the meaning of personhood. What makes a human special and set apart from other life?

I'll give you a hint: It's not that we have a heartbeat. It's not that we look cute. It's not that we might feel pain if we were put to death. It's not that we might be capable of living on our own or with machine assistance if we were ripped from our mother's wombs prematurely. No, we share these traits in common with countless other species.

The thing that makes us truly unique, or at least propels us to the top of an elite company of a few incredible species on this planet, is that we are not bound by our instincts alone, but actually possess a high capacity for cognition, which makes us capable of deliberate thought and deliberate behavior—behavior which is made possible by our highly advanced bodies. That's choice. I call it something even more special. I call it self-determination...without which, life is only a series of frustrated dreams and dehumanization.

Everything we are that might be said to make us unique, comes through our conscious experience. We have a way of perceiving our existence that isn't present in any other life form on Earth. Our desires, our passions, our loves, our hates, and everything else that makes us who we are, are told through the narrative of our consciousness. Our cities, our art forms, our conversations and relationships, only have meaning—and only came to exist at all in the first place—because we thought for them to come about. Personhood comes from having an identity. Identity comes straight from the brain, and the lifetime of our experiences. It is our minds, not our heartbeats, which make us persons. Hearts may be a popular symbol for the humanity within us, but they are only symbols. The actual core of humanity is that gray matter in between our ears. More to the point, it's the structure inside that gray matter: the connections. Without that, we're Terri Schiavo.

An adult woman, unless she is severely mentally handicapped, has a developed mind and a strong sense of identity. An unborn baby, on the other hand, possesses none at all! The baby is not brain-dead like Terri Schiavo was, but its gray matter is all empty in a different way: It's too new. The fetus is not yet conscious in the sense we think of the word. It has no language to give form to ideas. It has scant little sensory input, either: just the warm monotone of the womb. It can't think in the way older humans do. It has no memories. It has no philosophy. It doesn't have any “favorites” yet. It has only just begun to accumulate experiences. It has no preferences, no desires, no wishes...only the barest instincts, and those minimal instincts account for every aspect of the fetus' behavior. Even at the moment of birth, the beginning of its identity is still months away. It may have all the genes of a human, and all the vital organs of a human, including a brain, but the personality is only just beginning.

An unborn baby, if nurtured, and fortunate, will become a person in the months and years ahead...but for the duration of pregnancy and even in the months after being born it is simply a sophisticated clump of cells. Alive, but not a person.

So long as an unborn baby remains within its mother's womb, any rights it deserves would fall under the domain of general animal rights: So long as it is alive, the fetus should not be subjected to cruelty or mistreatment. That's good enough. But animals are not entitled to life in the way that persons are. Neither are fetuses, because they are not persons yet. They could become persons, but they aren't yet, and that is an important distinction.

Meanwhile, lest we forget—and how eager we are to forget!—the unborn child's mother is a fully-developed human being with an established identity and a desire to be self-determining: to choose for herself how she will live. Being pregnant and giving birth are no trifling moments in life. When someone is pregnant and seeks an abortion, but is told no by religious bigots or by the laws of the land, and is thereby prevented from acquiring the healthcare she needs to live in accordance with her own wishes, she is forced to undergo a major experience that is totally against her will. Being forced to go through with them against one's will is demeaning, horrifying, infuriating, and just plain unjust.

Angry Mouse laid it out in plain and simple terms:

Either women are full and equal citizens of this country, with the exact same rights that men have -- including autonomy of our bodies -- or we are not.

It really is that simple. The unborn baby is a red herring in this discussion. We get so caught up talking about the rights of fetuses that we become willing to trample all over the rights of actual persons. How sick! How wrong! What is it about human beings that so encourages us to abandon critical thought in favor of believing whatever is convenient?

Just imagine a world where abortion is illegal. It's not hard: In much of the world, abortion is illegal. What might we tell a baby brought into that world against its mother's will?

“Dear one, good morning. Welcome to a world where people are not allowed to determine for themselves how they will live. This is a world where we are all bound by law to submit our dreams and even our own bodies to the will of those who make the law. Dream all you like, but in the end you belong to someone else. You are the property of their moral world. It may be hard, someday, for you to understand that you are truly worthless in their eyes, but, dear one, they do it all for you.”

If a pregnant woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term, then let's give her all the care and support she needs. And if a pregnant woman does not want to carry her pregnancy to term, then let's give her all the care and support she needs. That's what good people do for one another: They care for and support one another. If, by her will, a woman brings another child into the world, then we can care for and support them too. But we have no standing—absolutely none—to decide for her whether or not she will.