Five years ago, I had a second trimester miscarriage. Sixteen weeks into a very much wanted pregnancy, severe cramping came over me very quickly, and I started to bleed. For some reason I can no longer recall, I had a measuring cup in my bathroom, and when I called the midwife to let her know I was in trouble, she wanted to know how much blood I was losing.
8 ounces in about 30 seconds.
Hang up the phone, she said, and call 911.
By the time the ambulance arrived, I had lost over half the blood in my body, and my blood pressure had dropped to 60/40. And I had, wrapped up in a tissue, the body of my unborn son. He was not a “fetus”. He was a tiny little human being who had died before he could be born.
Perhaps owing to my Germanic blood and my experience with a late term miscarriage, my views on abortion are decidedly practical and lean perhaps towards the Machiavellian.
Abortion is killing a human being. This does not seem the slightest bit controversial to me. Calling an unborn human a “fetus” might make the killers feel better, but it doesn’t change the fact that aborting a baby is killing a human. I think of it as similar to calling the enemy a “gook”, or a “Kraut” or a “raghead”. You dehumanize your victim to make it easier to kill him.
As a society, we sanction the use of lethal force in any number of ways. I doubt there are any modern cultures that prohibit the use of lethal force against an equally lethal threat, meaning that every citizen has the right to use lethal force in the right circumstances. We have military forces and police officers and armed bank guards and the death penalty (which I don’t agree with at all). We disconnect life support machines in hospitals knowing the outcome will be death.
By that logic, the only acceptable moral justification for abortion would be when the unborn baby really does present a lethal threat to the mother. And that does happen. It happened to Savita Halapannavar in Ireland, and since abortion for any reason is prohibited in Ireland, Savita died.
http://judgybitch.com/2012/11/14/holy-shit-ireland-you-suck/
I had a very similar condition. In my case, the baby was dead, and had come out of my body, but the placenta was still inside me, and I had an emergency D&C to remove the “products of conception” as they are called. After I was put into hypothermia because there wasn’t enough time to warm the blood for the transfusion. That was fun. In Savita’s case, the baby was still alive, with no hope of surviving, and she was allowed to die of the eventual infection that set in.
When a pregnancy literally and uncontrovertibly threatens a woman’s life, abortion is morally justified.
But that isn’t why most abortions are carried out.
Aborting a baby because it suffers from some catastrophic abnormality opens up a whole can of ethically fraught worms. In that scenario, the baby is being killed not because it poses a threat to the mother’s life, but “for its own good”. Often, the abnormality is simply that the baby carries the dreaded extra chromosome that results in Down Syndrome. But if we can abort a baby because it is defective, why not euthanize newborns with undetected abnormalities who weren’t aborted but surely WOULD have been, had the parents known about the condition?
Why not allow parents to decide if the baby is “good enough”?
Obviously, that is grotesque, but not more grotesque than a late term abortion.
Most abortions are carried out in the first trimester because, for whatever reason, a woman does not want to be pregnant. Perhaps she feels too young. She is too poor to care for her child. She has other plans. She does not want to parent with the father of the child. She conceived the child as a result of rape or incest.
None of those things pose a threat to a mother’s life. They are not strictly morally justified. I am personally very much in support of women aborting children they cannot afford – the last thing the world needs is more poor people. And women who do not have the voluntary support of the fathers should also not be having children. We don’t need any more single mothers, either. Ideally, the children should be placed for adoption, but there are two giant problems with that: it’s easier to kill a baby you can’t see than it is to give away a baby that you have cradled in your arms.
Adoption is a very emotionally hard choice to make. Abortion seems easier, especially in a culture that treats unborn humans as nothing more than a gooey gob of cells. A fetus.
And most adoptive couples are white, in search of white children. There. I said it. Black babies, and brown babies are less valuable on the adoption markets. Most adoptive couples are white and they prefer white babies. Yes, that is profoundly racist. I’m not making it up. It’s true.
Just because something is really ugly doesn’t make it false.
So if we are going to allow women to abort babies because they just don’t want them, even though that is not a morally justifiable reason, but is instead the least worst choice for society as a whole, how can we then set any limits on why and when a woman can use lethal force against her own unborn child?
It’s fun to watch feminists spin their wheels when confronted with an uncomfortable dilemma: what if a woman wants to abort a baby simply because the baby is a girl?
The whole “fetus” argument gets dropped in a heartbeat when that happens. Suddenly the unborn babies are not clusters of cells at all, but “girls”.
The figure [of missing girls] is 60 million, about the population of the entire UK, which Hundal surmises is comprised by those “aborted before birth, killed once born, died of neglect because they were girls, or perhaps murdered by their husband’s family for not paying enough dowry at marriage.”
Should the genocide continue, there will be an extra 28 million men of marriageable age.
http://jezebel.com/where-are-indias-60-million-missing-girls-the-tragic-1091500375
While there is certainly a problem with neglect and murder in India, it looks like most of those girls were victims while still in the womb.
Abortion is killing girls in India.
India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists fear eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13264301
It’s easy to turn up our noses at faraway cultural practices and consider ourselves to be ever so much more enlightened, but it turns out that the practice of aborting girls is one that travels.
Canada has a problem with it, and the National Post calls sex-selective abortion the “real war on women”. When your fetus is a female, it’s not a fetus any more. It’s a “woman”.
The UK has a similar problem, and a recent event there has thrust sex-selective abortions into the spotlight. Reporters from the Daily Telegraph approached abortion providers to see if they would consent to a late term abortion based only on the fact that the baby was a girl.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/dominiclawson/article1310708.ece
It is illegal to abort babies based on sex in the UK, but nevertheless, the Telegraph found two doctors (out of nine questioned) willing to terminate a pregnancy simply because the baby was a girl.
Since it IS in fact illegal to abort babies based on their gender, prosecutors in the UK took an interest in what the Telegraph found. Both doctors were caught on tape agreeing to abort girls. The evidence is a slam dunk.
Prosecutors declined to press charges.
Sources familiar with the Scotland Yard investigation said that prosecutors saw the issue as “sensitive” and that it had become “political”.
Sensitive indeed.
Abortion is one of those issues that highlights the fact that feminism as a political ideology is not concerned with equality and is certainly not concerned with morality. Feminists champion untrammeled access to abortion because it is a visceral, blood-soaked proclamation of the real goal: female superiority.
Women will determine who lives and who dies.
The culture is not quite ready to accept that, so we use ideas like “fetus” to veil the real agenda. If we openly admitted that abortion is killing a human being, and then fiercely defended women’s right to take the life of any human who begins existence inside her body, we are veering dangerously near the truth of the matter.
When abortion is used to murder female humans for no reason other than the fact they are female, the veil is lifted, even if only temporarily. Fetuses become girls. Unwanted cells become women. The embryo becomes human.
And the death of enough of those humans becomes genocide.
Here is Janice Turner, desperately trying to have her cake and eat it, too.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3863067.ece
She begins by claiming that gender-based selective abortions are something only those icky brown people do anyways.
So, other than undercover hacks, who are these girl-killing British mothers? Are they trivial-minded control freaks who, having spawned one daughter, are so furious at this second female foetus that they rush to dispense with it, so they can get cracking on conceiving a boy? Have you come across one? Me neither.
The other scenario is that women settled here from countries where there is a real and acute problem with gender-based abortion, are eradicating female foetuses here.
She then goes on to claim that even if women really ARE aborting their baby girls, it’s not their fault anyways!
Yet it is unfair to blame women for gender-abortion. A third of expectant mothers surveyed in India, with its distorted male ratio of 112, said they would prefer a boy and almost none a girl, but two thirds said they didn’t mind. (Even American men have a distinct preference for boys, while women are evenly split.) The impetus for sons is not generated by mothers. Women do not expel the potential life in their bellies without good reason.
Okay, so whose fault is it then? Whom shall we blame? Who is it that generates the impetus for sons? Who has provided this “good reason” to expel life?
Janice doesn’t really answer, but based on her other columns, I think we can all take a guess at who is to be held responsible for this.
Women’s libido isn’t the problem. Men’s is.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3780119.ece
Men haven’t been keeping their side of the bargain. They’ve ditched their power tools but still won’t pick up a duster.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3675766.ece
Why do men commit almost all the crime?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3768313.ece
It’s all part of desperate spin to retain women’s rights to determine life and death without alerting the wider society to that fact. Sex selective abortion calls into sharp focus the fact that almost all abortions are morally indefensible. The babies pose no threat to the mother’s life. They pose a threat to her accumulation of power.
And power is really what the struggle is about.
I admit 100% that I am still tripping on how I feel about abortion, especially late term abortion. It is a power than women MUST have, because it is in our best interest as a society to make sure that we limit the number of unwanted babies born into impoverished circumstances with no father present.
Those babies tend to grow up and cause mayhem and chaos.
“[C]ontrolling for income and all other factors, youths in father-absent families (mother only, mother-stepfather, and relatives/other) still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from mother-father families.”
But that doesn’t mean the power to terminate human life shouldn’t be tempered with strictly enforced limits.
Ideally, I would like to see all abortions prohibited once the baby has become a person, and I define that in terms of neural activity. Once there is an “I”, a person, a human being who thinks and is self-aware, no one can take the life of that person with the sole exception we apply to all humans: when it presents a lethal threat.
Abortion rights must take into account the reproductive rights of both parties involved. No man should be able to compel a woman into being a mother, but no woman should be able to compel a man into becoming a father, either. In cases where a woman has waited too long, and her baby is a fully conscious human being, she should have no choice but to bear that child. She does not have to assume responsibility for the baby, but neither can she simply kill him.
The biological father should have the first say in assuming responsibility when the mother declines.
The power to end another person’s life comes with huge responsibilities. It cannot reside in one person only, with no limits of any kind.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Feminists will need to pick another method to establish women’s absolute power over life.
Rape, and the regulation of (mostly) male sexuality looks promising, no?
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/out-of-control/
Lots of love,
JB