By Danielle Whitaker

–

There are 7.5 billion people in the world today—a number that has nearly doubled since the 1970s. In the US alone, one of the richest countries in the world, around 15 million children—that’s 21%—live below the poverty line. Capitalist consumerism has placed us under the very real threat of extinction from dwindling resources, and the children coming into the world today will be the ones to shoulder this burden.

Yet still, right-wing fundamentalists say “not enough.” Never enough. More babies means more people to brainwash means greater likelihood of converting entire populations to [insert misogynistic religion of your choice]. Many aren’t even ashamed to admit it. After all, go forth and multiply, says the Bible. The ideology of Abrahamic religion, one of women’s greatest threats, appears to care very little for this “earthly” life, despite how desperate they are to ensure more and more of it is created whether women want it or not. After all, the Lord’s kingdom is in the afterlife—eternal and limitless. Who cares how badly women and children may suffer here, in this meaningless physical plane? It’s all part of God’s mysterious plan, so we’d better create and save as many souls as we can now. Amen!

I do wonder, though, how adamantly they would continue fighting for forced births if men were suddenly able to get pregnant. Something tells me there’d be an abortion clinic on every corner. The new Starbucks.

“Pro-life” is such a clever load of bullshit, isn’t it? The “life” they are “pro” doesn’t even exist yet. It has no thoughts, no feelings, no fears, no ideas, no dreams or longings or wishes. What of the real lives impacted? What of the life of the child when it’s born? Where are these “pro-lifers” when that unwanted child is brought into poverty, neglect, abuse? Where are these “pro-lifers” when the woman’s life is changed forever against her will as she’s now forced to carry, birth, and parent an unwanted child? What of her life? With nearly half of all pregnancies unplanned and nearly half of those ending in abortion, imagine how many unwanted children would be forced into existence in a world without readily available abortion access. What kind of life would they have?

“Pro-life” is a goddamn lie. “Pro-life” is the Orwellian rebranding of “anti-woman,” and their only counterargument is that “children are a gift from God.”

If unwanted pregnancy is a “gift from God,” your god is a sick misogynist.

This past month, one of our earthly misogynists, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, signed into law the “fetal heartbeat bill,” one of many similar atrocities being proposed throughout the nation that laughs in the face of Roe v Wade as we enter a new wave of anti-feminist backlash. Alabama, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was quick to follow, and other states are close behind. This bill will ban all abortions after six weeks, a point at which most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. But six weeks is a far cry from the moment of conception—apparently, life doesn’t start at the meeting of sperm and egg after all, but only when a heartbeat is detected. I guess “murder” in the first six weeks is perfectly acceptable. Pick a story and stick to it, folks.

So would this mean that individuals with artificial hearts or pacemakers are no longer human? One could easily argue that the breath is an equally romantic symbol of life, and babies don’t take their first breath until after birth.

Additionally, this bill not only bans abortion, but declares the fetus a “natural person” under law, whose rights clearly supersede that of the woman—or in their view, the vessel—who is then forced to carry it, nourish it, grow it, and birth it, at the expense of her own physical and emotional resources.

Even if we could argue that a fetus is no different than a born person, why does this person take precedence over the woman? Is she not also a person—far more of a person, in fact? Why does a “person” with no consciousness, no will, no mind, have more rights than the fully conscious, fully living, thinking, breathing woman with needs and desires of her own?

But really, are we surprised? Women have never been treated as fully human.

This bill means that thousands of “people” in Georgia would instantly become illegally incarcerated. Because nothing says “pro-life” like forcing an imprisoned woman to carry an unwanted child. Spreading the love of Jesus one jail baby at a time.

This bill will also enable the prosecution and imprisonment of women who choose to abort as well as medical professionals who perform the abortions. Because nothing says “pro-life” like destroying the lives of women who refuse to be used as birthing vessels like some kind of dystopian horror novel.

This bill will also make it much, much easier to prosecute women who miscarry—because who’s to say whether it was really a miscarriage after all?

Funny how all this misogyny seems to be bubbling back to the surface at the height of trans activism, when entitled men attempting to colonize womanhood are brainwashing everyone into believing there is no distinct class of “woman,” that female humans should be rebranded as “uterus bearers,” “vagina havers,” or “birthers,” and that our reproductive oppression is “privilege” (because by men’s rights logic, “anyone who has something I want” is privileged).

Hey, remember when The Handmaid’s Tale was fiction?

What makes this even more of a challenge to fight is that it’s not easy to communicate a holistic, rock-solid argument that addresses the root of the issue. After all, we can’t deny that a fetus is indeed a form of life (and radical feminists often lament the misogynistic reality of female-selective abortions in a world that prefers sons). If we try to deny this to bolster our argument, we will appear scientifically illiterate at best, monstrous at worst. A fetus is, indeed, the initial stage of a human life—and we must accept that we support the termination of this particular form of life in favor of another: the woman. The fact is, a woman’s life simply matters more—much more—than a fetus’s life. We mustn’t be afraid to admit the fact that terminating a life under these circumstances is acceptable.

What’s so interesting, though, is that “pro-lifers” are exceptionally selective in the lives they seek to preserve. Most of them adamantly support the death penalty and war, and are quick to ignore the lives of existing children who are dying from disease or starvation—not to mention the fact that most of society already accepts terminating the lives of comatose patients who have been declared brain-dead. No one can argue that a fetus has a conscious brain.

That said, we cannot be so naive as to imply that hatred of women is the conscious motivating factor of “pro-life” arguments; in fact, most anti-abortionists wouldn’t consider themselves anti-woman at all, but rather passionate about protecting an innocent life without a voice, however misguided they may be. It is this cognitive dissonance that allows them to truly believe in the morality of their actions, advocating for the protection of a fetus while ignoring the already born children throughout the world who suffer daily. Nonetheless, regardless of their lack of self-awareness, regardless of what they consider to be their motivation, their actions stem from the very core of patriarchal ideology, and this can never be overlooked. This is the root source we must fight.

But the truth is, it’s just not a simple issue to debate, and as a result, even those on our side aren’t always successful at bringing the crux of the issue to light. For instance we’ll often hear how abortion bans would force the victims of rape to carry their rapist’s child—and yes, that is true. That is one horrific consequence of anti-abortion legislation, but it doesn’t address the issue at the root. That is certainly not to say some circumstances leading to abortion aren’t worse than others—of course, circumstances vary widely with varying degrees of trauma. Nonetheless, our stance should never imply that abortion is more acceptable under some circumstances than others—because this is about all women. This is about the oppressed class of women. This is about all women’s bodily autonomy. It doesn’t matter how she got pregnant—whether she was a 12-year-old victim of incest or a happily married woman at the height of her childbearing years who was impregnated by her loving husband. Absolutely every female person is entitled to not bear a child at any point in her life, regardless of the reason.

But you see, in the mind of conservatives, no woman should even want an abortion, ever. There should never be such a thing as an unwanted pregnancy, because no woman should be engaging in sex outside heterosexual marriage, and all children conceived within marriage should be wanted by default, because baby-making is her womanly duty—so love it or be punished.

And if she doesn’t have the means to care for a child, well, you know, poor people deserve to be poor, and so on. Exactly what Jesus would’ve said, right?

The thing is… pregnancy is not parenthood, and a fetus is not the same as a living person. Until a child is born, nurtured and raised for several years, it is not an independent human being; until birth, it is fully dependent on a woman’s body for survival. Even after birth, the woman’s body is required for its growth into an independent being. As a fetus, it is part of the woman, like her skin and her organs and her bones, and therefore, to deny women the right to abortion is literally, unequivocally, to deny her autonomy over her own body. This is the height of female oppression. To deny a human being control over their own body and anything happening inside it, especially when that body is being forcibly used for a purpose against their will, is the ultimate form of dehumanization. To force the duty and responsibility of pregnancy and motherhood upon an unwilling woman… well, “inhumane” would be an insulting understatement. Monstrous is closer to the mark.

“Well, she shouldn’t have sex if she didn’t want to get pregnant,” the bigots will argue. Great idea, how about directing this advice instead to the men who did the impregnating? How about we legislate mandatory vasectomies for men until a woman decides she wants to carry his child? Vasectomies are reversible, after all. Birthing a child is not.

“But what if your mother had aborted you?!” Another favorite. If my mother had aborted me, I would have no opinion on the matter whatsoever because I would never have existed, and my mother would’ve gone on to live the life of her choosing. Next please.

The interesting complication is that anti-abortionists seem to be under the impression that we, wanton heathen harlots, want abortions. As someone who’s actually had one, let me set the record straight right now: no woman ever wants an abortion; what she wants is to never have gotten pregnant in the first place. An abortion is not an easy experience. It is physically and emotionally taxing, to various degrees, regardless of a woman’s reason for it, regardless of how she feels about it, regardless of how sure of her decision she may be. I am not here to make light of what abortion is, to pretend it’s no different than popping a headache pill. The feminist goal is not to increase the number of abortions in the world, but rather to reduce the need for them—to ignite a radical shift in social paradigms that would ensure free, easy access to birth control and reproductive education for all women, everywhere. A radical shift that would eliminate rape and sexual oppression entirely. A radical shift in which men would respect women’s bodies, a shift that would destroy the cultural notion of childbearing as duty, a shift that would prevent virtually all unwanted pregnancies. Our goal is to ensure that no woman is forced into motherhood against her will, that no child is ever born unwanted.

But we’re not there. Those goals are a long way off—and in the meantime, we must fight to protect women.

So how are you going to fight?

–

Be sure to tune into WLRN’s monthly radio broadcast the first Thursday of every month. Our June 6 podcast will focus on abortion rights as we hear from Mary Lou Singleton, radical midwife and women’s health advocate based in New Mexico. Thanks for listening, sharing, and supporting, so we can continue providing community-powered feminist content to women across the world.