I know there are at least a few regular readers who self-identify as “pro-life.” So here’s a question for you: How much time should she do?
One goal of the anti-choice movement is to outlaw abortion. But, as Anna Quindlen points out, anti-choice activists are almost never able to identify what the legal consequences should be for women who terminate their pregnancies. So, pro-lifers, tell me: What should the penalty be? How much time in jail should a woman face for abortion?
Anti-choicers emphasize that a fetus is a person, invested with all the same* natural rights as you or I. Life begins at conception. That fertilized egg has all of its DNA, making it just as human as all of us and endowing it with the right to live. Ok. But if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder — deliberate, pre-meditated murder. That certainly isn’t a new concept for anti-choicers — the “abortion is murder” line has been around for decades now. But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.
Do you support executing women who have abortions?
Do you support jailing them for life? For a few decades?
What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?
Quindlen writes:
Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?
If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?
How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?
Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?
But that’s not the “pro-life” argument.
To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate? What do we do about all those embryos in fertility clinics? Do we force women to implant them and carry them to term? If not, how do we justify forcing women to carry naturally-implanted pregnancies to term? If the answer is that no, we don’t force women to be implanted with embryos, but we don’t kill the embryos either — we just let them be — then would it be ok for pregnant women to simply remove their embryos/fetuses without purposely killing them and just hope for the best?
If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? Fertility treatments? Birth control? Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?
What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky — like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did — negligent homicide?
What do doctors do if they’re faced with a life-threatening pregnancy? Do they force the woman to continue it, knowing it will kill her? I mean, it’s not the fetus’s fault, and it can’t really be construed as self-defense to terminate the pregnancy. And their lives are equal, aren’t they? Do we just let nature take its course, then?
Finally, what about if we’re deciding between an embryo and a born child — who wins out? Lots of feminists have asked this question before and we’ve never gotten a straight answer, so let me try again. Take this hypothetical: There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?
These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies. Because this post is long and I know all your time is valuable, I’ll even let “pro-life” readers off the hook with this one, and I’ll ask that you just answer the first question: How much time should she do?
*This point is highly disputable — after all, no born people have the right to physically attach themselves to someone else and use that person’s body for their own survival, against the will and at the physical expense of the attachee. But that’s another post. Or a Judith Jarvis Thomson article.