Well, I think people might not see laws restricting abortion to only cases of rape, incest, or the life of the woman is in danger as "forcing women to give birth" because the women who were not raped were not "forced" to get pregnant in the first place.
This was a point I was planning to go into. I don't think that argument holds a lot of water unless you're starting from a standpoint of misogyny. If you accept that: (1) adults will have sex (2) people aren't perfect then you have to accept that there will be unwanted pregnancies. I don't think the pro-forced-pregnancy crowd is really trying to legislate away (2). So denying (1) is solely misogyny, because no one seriously expects adult men to refrain from sex, yet supposedly reasonable people put forth the point that adult women ought to.
The number of people who advocate rape/incest exceptions is, of course, further evidence that opposition to abortion is not about the morality of killing a fetus, but about passing judgments on women's morality. If killing a fetus is murder, it shouldn't matter how that fetus was created! So, almost nobody even entertains the notion that fetuses and adults have equal moral standing, which means that the supposed "moral complexity" of the question of when life begins is a red herring, and that we shouldn't engage with a disingenuous argument. (Laurence Tribe did a great job of elucidating this point.)
Maybe it makes sense if pregnancy is viewed as a mere temporary inconvenience for the woman versus the permanence of death for the fetus? We do have other laws that sometimes force people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do - going to war (the draft), paying taxes, etc. (I am pro-choice and against the draft, so I'm not saying I think forced pregnancy or forced military service are good ideas.)
Well, you've been pregnant and I haven't, so you're better qualified to address whether pregnancy falls in the same category as paying taxes :-) War is an interesting example since you're obviously being asked to put your life at risk; I don't have an answer right now for why it's different. With that aside, I think that carrying a pregnancy to term is such a burden that we can only accept the idea that it's reasonable to compel a woman to do such a thing because of fundamental lack of respect for women's personhood.
You think advertising could be effective there? (It seems like something the makers birth control could get behind.)
I think it could be, but probably only with the sort of concerted effort that went into anti-drunk-driving campaigns in the '80s (as in, TV show writers were asked to integrate designated drivers into their plots, for example).
ETA: and in case it wasn't clear, where I'm going with all this is to argue that one can only see the legality of abortion as a complicated question if one already accepts women's inferiority to men.
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Date: 2009-12-02 08:50 pm (UTC)This was a point I was planning to go into. I don't think that argument holds a lot of water unless you're starting from a standpoint of misogyny. If you accept that:
(1) adults will have sex
(2) people aren't perfect
then you have to accept that there will be unwanted pregnancies. I don't think the pro-forced-pregnancy crowd is really trying to legislate away (2). So denying (1) is solely misogyny, because no one seriously expects adult men to refrain from sex, yet supposedly reasonable people put forth the point that adult women ought to.
The number of people who advocate rape/incest exceptions is, of course, further evidence that opposition to abortion is not about the morality of killing a fetus, but about passing judgments on women's morality. If killing a fetus is murder, it shouldn't matter how that fetus was created! So, almost nobody even entertains the notion that fetuses and adults have equal moral standing, which means that the supposed "moral complexity" of the question of when life begins is a red herring, and that we shouldn't engage with a disingenuous argument. (Laurence Tribe did a great job of elucidating this point.)
Maybe it makes sense if pregnancy is viewed as a mere temporary inconvenience for the woman versus the permanence of death for the fetus?
We do have other laws that sometimes force people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do - going to war (the draft), paying taxes, etc. (I am pro-choice and against the draft, so I'm not saying I think forced pregnancy or forced military service are good ideas.)
Well, you've been pregnant and I haven't, so you're better qualified to address whether pregnancy falls in the same category as paying taxes :-) War is an interesting example since you're obviously being asked to put your life at risk; I don't have an answer right now for why it's different. With that aside, I think that carrying a pregnancy to term is such a burden that we can only accept the idea that it's reasonable to compel a woman to do such a thing because of fundamental lack of respect for women's personhood.
You think advertising could be effective there? (It seems like something the makers birth control could get behind.)
I think it could be, but probably only with the sort of concerted effort that went into anti-drunk-driving campaigns in the '80s (as in, TV show writers were asked to integrate designated drivers into their plots, for example).
ETA: and in case it wasn't clear, where I'm going with all this is to argue that one can only see the legality of abortion as a complicated question if one already accepts women's inferiority to men.