Reply
Sun 30 Sep, 2018 04:10 am
Because most of the pro-life people I've known are female, I tend to dismiss the criticism of pro-life as 'anti-woman.' However, for the sake of broadening my understanding of the issue, I would like to understand other perspectives I may not have considered. The following are reasons I think some people might consider abortion laws 'anti-woman.' (please don't make up rationalizations to justify pro-choice because you favor sexual liberation).
1) feminism sees politics and law as domains traditionally controlled by men and therefore they find it unfair for men to make laws that affect women's bodies, which those men are not directly subject to for their own bodies.
This is sort of a 'taxation without representation' issue. Presumably it would be resolved by creating a special task force of female delegates to represent women and deliberate and effectuate regulations and protections regarding female-body issues such as abortion.
Problem: the problem I can see with this is that men are also affected by abortion, though their bodies are not directly effected. The child-bearing capacity of the human species is designed naturally to place the responsibility for womb-baring on females, so men are naturally dependent on women to have children. Therefore if men are to have equal rights in reproduction, political control must have a say over women's bodies. This may not seem fair to women, but you could say it's not fair to men that they are naturally deprived of wombs and thus the capacity to reproduce independently without the cooperation of women.
2) women would face more abuse if acquiring abortion required incrimination of the sperm-bearer as rapist. If a rape report is required to gain access to abortion, abortion-seeking women will be caught between a rock and a hard place with protecting their impregators without having their babies. E.g. if a man is desperate to avoid fatherhood, yet he doesn't abstain from sex to avoid it, and his sex partner gets pregnant and he knows about it, he may use violence to effectuate a miscarriage or even commit murder. As such, a woman who goes the police and reports her impregnator as a rapist may also face retaliation by the man and/or his friends/family. So that would put pressure on women to carry the pregnancy to term, even in cases of rape where states made laws to allow abortion.
3) any other examples you know of or can think of why/how abortion regulations wouldn't adequately protect women against violence and/or other attempts to control/manipulate them in regards to pregnancy? Can you think of ways that pro-life could do more to simultaneously protect women without giving up their goal of ending abortion as an act of violence against fetuses?