Dear White Nationalist Theocrats: Women are not Livestock
To the editor, Press Enterprise, 6.24.22:
I’ve had two abortions, and you can spare me your condemnation, faux-compassion, or self-righteous religiosity. I know of what I speak from personal experience, in light of the science, and as a professional philosopher who regularly teaches medical ethics to aspiring doctors and nurses. What matters in this letter, however, is whatever support I can lend to those who care about human rights and who recognize the catastrophic effects of overturning 1973 Roe V. Wade.
Consider the facts:
(1) Healthcare is a human right: reproductive healthcare is vital for any person capable of pregnancy. It includes access to a wide variety of services, including abortion. It depends on the safe, confidential communication between persons and their physicians. Like all healthcare, reproductive healthcare depends on a relationship of trust and confidence in one’s doctor, a right available for exercise far too little in this country to poor women, and far too taken for granted by the wealthy. The right to privacy is implicit throughout the Constitution regardless the absurd claim made by Justice Alito to the contrary that without explicit reference, no such right exists. If we follow this logic, our rights are few and vacuous. Despite the absurdity of Alito’s reasoning, however, a number of states have made clear that abortion is only the first right on the chopping block. Other healthcare rights include access to the morning after pill, contraception, and privacy of interstate travel — not to mention the right to privacy of relationship and the right to marry for LGBTQ citizens. The decision to overturn Roe will impact not only access to healthcare for every American, but the life of every American. Some of us will remain citizens. But for those capable of pregnancy in the future, now, or in the past: we have been demoted to livestock.
(2) The personhood argument: in direct violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the current SCOTUS arguments appeal to religious conviction — not science. They conflate biological status with personhood, but these are not the same. Developing human embryos are not, for example, capable of consciousness or pain until at least gestational week 28. Hence, if consciousness is essential to personhood, an embryo cannot qualify. If biological status alone confers personhood, and thus the right to life, this right must either be extended to all living things, or only to Homo Sapiens in virtue of some relevantdifference. That difference cannot be consciousness since (a) we share consciousness in common with countless species, and (b) it’s not available to the fetus until week 28. To reject (a) is hypocrisy. To insist on (b) fails on the science. Upshot: as Judith Jarvis Thomson spells out in”A Defense of Abortion” (1970), there is no right not to be killed; there is a right not to be killed unjustly, and developing embryos do not meet the criteria for “unjustly.”
(3) The potentiality argument: the potential to develop consciousness no more confers a right to life that outweighs a woman’s right to choose than, say, a pumpkin seed growing out of the compost. The potential to become a thing is not logically equivalent to being that thing: a pumpkin seed is not a pumpkin (J.J. Thomson: an acorn is not an oak tree). A person capable of pregnancy moreover, is an actual person whose rights are not in dispute — except under the theocratic statutes of thirteen states such as Texas and Oklahoma whose misogynist vigilante- inspiring laws will not only drive abortion underground, but will make access to ordinary prenatal and gynecological care difficult especially for poor women. What doctor will be willing to face the threat of this level of liability and surveillance? How will she afford this kind of malpractice insurance? Anyone, moreover, who doubts the violence of the pro-life movement need merely go here: https://www.justice.gov/crt/recent-cases-violence-against-reproductive-health-care-providers.
(4) The Vaccine/Mask Comparison: The comparison of reproductive rights to the refusal to mask or be vaccinated is logically bankrupt. Claiming a right to bodily autonomy to secure an abortion implies no risk whatever of infection to others; refusing to mask and/or become vaccinated — especially against virulent viral strains of Covid-19 — does. Unless you hold that you’ve no moral duty to the welfare of others — unless you are prepared to reject the very premises of democracy — this comparison is ludicrous.
(5) The end to abortion myth: overturning Roe will not end, or likely even diminish, abortion. It simply affords us the luxury not to look. It puts a slimy stamp of approval on self-righteous religious cowardice. We all know abortion will continue. Those who would end safe access have other motives patriarchal and theocratic — none of which are consistent with American values, none of which are anything but a prelude to dystopian futures like the Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps autocrats like Ted Cruz, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, Mitch McConnell, or Tucker Carlson think women are looking forward to returning to our “place,” that denying us a basic human right protects us from our own incapacity to make difficult moral decisions. Ridiculous. Overturning Roe is a Pyrrhic victory. Its costs in blood and suffering are the altered death certificates of what will soon become countless women and girls who sought out abortions in quarters unsafe and unsanitary, or who aborted themselves, hemorrhaging to death or expiring from infection. We all know this too. Anyone, moreover, who would count as victory the trauma inflicted on a 12 year old raped by her father, or forcing a woman to carry to term in place of essential cancer treatment, or tracking a women across state lines like a profit-driven bounty hunter to turn her in for a “criminal” act, does not deserve to be counted as anything but depraved.
Truth: overturning Roe has nothing to do with “saving babies.” This blighted SCOTUS decision is the cynical and calculated strategy of a growing white Christian nationalism borne long before the BIG LIE Trump administration. Its aims are to define and control the lives of women. Its goal to turn women, girls, and our offspring into property. Its advocates simply saw in Trump the chance to get their way. Justice Coney Barrett may make this clearest when she insists that adoption obviates the need for abortion. Ignoring entirely the actual impacts of pregnancy on a women’s life and family, she opines that women can just give up their babies. Apparently callous disregard for women’s and girl’s lives, especially the poor, is a core principle of this strain of religious extremism. Denying access to reproductive healthcare is a form of institutionalized mass violence imposed in the name of god. It is eugenics. Fact is, abortion can be ended by nothing less than complete control of the movements of the able-to-be-impregnated from the age of eleven to sixty. Lock us up, or recognize our fundamental right to reproductive healthcare — and get your damn religion out of our bodies.
Wendy Lynne Lee, Professor
Philosophy
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
1144 words.
