We’ve been talking a lot the past few days about the recent study which demonstrated that the abortion rate is no higher in countries where abortion is legal than where it’s illegal. Zuzu just wrote about Matthew Yglesias’s post, and she’s right that it does ooze with the privilege of never having to worry about pregnancy. But Matt touched a nerve with me too, for different reasons — he brought up a very fundamental issue in the abortion debate that commenters on the pro-life Catholic blog Vox Nova have been discussing:
Will outlawing abortion decrease the abortion rate? And does it even matter?
Now, as a reproductive justice advocate, I want to see the abortion rate decrease for the same reason that I want to see the rate of most surgeries remain low — because preventative care is better. It’s better to avoid abortion, just like it’s better to avoid a root canal. But even though it’s better to avoid it, when you need it it’d damn well better be there. So I support access to contraception and comprehensive sexual health education because (a) I think women and men have a right to bodily autonomy and to information, and (b) because contraception and safer sex tools are part of preventative health care. I want to see abortion legal because I believe that women have a right to control their own reproduction, and abortion is a part of that. I’d also like to see abortion be rare because no one has abortions for fun, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of women would like to avoid circumstances where they seek out abortion — whether those circumstances are birth control failure, being pregnant when you don’t want to be, having a wanted pregnancy go wrong, surviving rape, experiencing a change in life circumstances that turns a wanted pregnancy into an unwanted one, and on and on. Many of those circumstances are avoidable; some aren’t. Plus there’s the fact that we’re human, and since humans tend to be imperfect, we institute a whole series of safety nets in order to make sure we have as much recourse as possible when we find ourselves in situations we don’t want to be in. We usually wear our seat belts, but if we get into a car wreck the paramedics come no matter what.
So that’s where I’m coming from — and it leads to a view that abortion absolutely must be legal, safe and accessible, and I agree with Matt that the case for reproductive freedom most certainly does not hinge on the question of whether outlawing abortion decreases the abortion rate.
But that question does matter in part of a multi-pronged policy position. And here, I’d like to take on the question — and a few other points — in a way that I hope will challenge the mainstream “pro-life” view, not in a way that solely reflects my human rights ideals as a basis for reproductive justice (although I think it does that, too).
A commenter over at Vox Nova (I can’t remember the exact thread), in response to the Guttmacher study, said something to the effect of, “Does it matter whether or not illegalization decreases the abortion rate? Laws against rape don’t stop people from raping and laws against domestic violence don’t stop wife-beating, but we still make them illegal.”
It’s an argument I hear a lot, and it approaches the point that Matt makes from a different angle: When we’re talking about an issue of fundamental justice — which both sides think it is, just from radically different positions — why should the rate of occurrence influence its legal status?
First, I’ll say that I do think outlawing abortion would decrease the abortion rate. I think that decrease would be negligible, but I would imagine that there are a small number of women who would not terminate their pregnancies if they knew they couldn’t do so safely and legally. I’m fairly certain that there are already women who desperately want to terminate their pregnancies but aren’t able to because anti-choicers have made abortion access incredibly limited in a lot of places. But I’ll emphasize that the number of women who would carry to term if abortion were illegal would be small. Abortion is already not a decision that women take lightly. Women usually weigh their options carefully and decide accordingly. When you really feel like you can’t have a baby, you really feel like you can’t have a baby, and the stats that Matt criticizes demonstrate that millions of women, all around the world, will go to the most extreme measures to terminate their pregnancies. I’ve volunteered for an organization that houses low-income women coming to New York for abortions. They come from all over the country, and they’ve scraped together everything they have — everything — to pay for the procedure. They sell whatever they can. They’re willing to sleep on park benches or in Grand Central station. There are already women, in the United States, going to great lengths to access abortion. Illegalization won’t stop that, and that claim is bolstered by the WHO statistics.
In that way, (among others) abortion is unlike most other acts that we qualify as crimes. I suspect that if abortion were criminalized in the U.S., we’d see an immediate drop in the rate, and within a few years see it go back up again as underground networks of abortion providers were established and as women collectively figured out ways to self-terminate or to go abroad for the procedure. But that’s neither here nor there.
Abortion is different from rape and domestic violence in the fundamental way that it’s an act done out of perceived necessity, not out of anger or hate or a taste for hurting. It is an act done to one’s own body, usually out of a sense of self-protection and self-preservation.
Criminal law serves a variety of purposes, but among them are punishment, deterrence, revenge and protection of society at large. I’m of the opinion that our criminal justice system is pretty thoroughly fucked, but I do believe that we need some sort of system for regulating crime and keeping society as safe as possible; I don’t believe that we have a system like that in the United States, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s assume that we do. The purpose of such a system with regard to rape or DV is not just to punish a bad act, but also to deter others from committing that bad act and to protect members of society from people who commit bad acts. And, when carried out properly, it can work. Will it end rape and domestic violence? Of course not. But sexual assault rates have decreased as feminists influenced sexual assault laws and made them more fair. Domestic violence rates have gone down as men lost the right to beat their wives with impunity, and as law enforcement was trained to view such violence as criminal and not as a “personal matter.” As women gained greater social rights, men have had their rights to control and dominate thoroughly challenged. The criminal law itself has shifted to reflect that, and that has further shifted the reality of crime.
So how does abortion fit into our ideas of criminal justice? The punishment aspect is certainly there. But what about deterrence? I would argue that rape and DV laws act as significant deterrents to those crimes, especially when they’re coupled with a criminal justice system that actually takes such claims seriously. Men don’t have a physical need to rape or to do violence to women. However, women do face the biological reality of getting pregnant. And since the earliest days of humanity we’ve tried to control that reality. Often, controlling that reality is a medical necessity — the woman whose body can handle 17 pregnancies and still allow her to be healthy and live to old age is the rare one. Even more often, the reality is a social one. Resources are limited, and women who already have children to care for are going to make that a priority; when one more mouth to feed isn’t an option, it really isn’t an option. When I look at my own life, getting pregnant and giving birth right now is absolutely not an option. There’s a necessity, and sometimes even a desperation, to abortion that seriously distinguishes it from other “crimes.” That necessity is going to have a serious impact on the potential deterrent factor. A man who decides not to rape the woman he went on a date with isn’t giving up a whole lot when he decides to conform with the law. A woman who is considering whether or not to conform with the law when abortion is illegal is feeling like her whole life is at stake.
And so women will — and do — risk everything.
There’s also a balance of harms. When we outlaw rape or domestic violence, the only people who lose are people who commit rape and assault. But when we outlaw abortion, things get trickier, because we know that women die or are injured. So there is a much, much higher cost to criminalizing abortion than there is to criminalizing rape or other forms of violence against women.
We also know that between the woman and the fetus, the woman is the one who can actually survive on her own. We know that the fetus cannot live without being attached to her body. We know that we don’t require people to use their bodies in the service of others without their consent. We know that involuntary servitude is not permitted in the United States, and that it’s morally wrong. We know that there is no legal foundation for compelling someone to involuntarily donate their organs, their blood supply, and the rest of their body in order to keep someone else alive. And so while pro-lifers are quick to brand abortion “murder,” it’s not anywhere near that simple.
There are a whole lot of other reasons why the comparison of abortion to crime is faulty and unlikely to have any real impact, but those, I think, are the basics (other than the standard pro-choice bodily autonomy arguments).
Of course, in order to criminalize abortion, pro-lifers would actually have to admit that their goal is to punish women and not to save babies. When they’ve said that it doesn’t really matter how many women die from illegal abortion, they’re thisclose to admitting it, but not quite there yet. That’s where the “How much time should she do?” question comes in: If abortion is indeed murder, shouldn’t women who terminate pregnancies be tried for murder?
And then there’s the question that Dianne continually raised over at Vox Nova: If life begins at conception, what are pro-lifers doing about the 70 percent miscarriage rate?
Yes, you read that correctly: If you apply the pro-life definition of pregnancy — which isn’t the one applied by the medical community — the majority of pregnancies never make it to term. Pro-lifers argue that life begins at the point of fertilization, and that as soon as the sperm squirms its way into the egg, a new life has begun and any purposeful termination of that life is murder. The medical community, on the other hand, doesn’t generally weigh in on when life begins, but does say that pregnancy begins at the point of implantation — that is, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining. That’s the first point at which pregnancy can be detected. It’s also an important point because more than half of all fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant. So, if you go with the anti-choice definition of life, more than half of all “unique human beings” never implant, and get naturally flushed out of the woman’s body.
To borrow again from Dianne, if there was a disease that was killing 70 percent of all infants, wouldn’t you be demanding funding to research it? Agitate for a cure?
As far as I can tell, there is not a single organization dedicated to ending pre-implantation “miscarriages.” Not a single pro-life organization lists it as an item on their political agenda.
I know the whole natural vs. purposeful death argument will come in here, but the point still holds: If a disease were killing 70 percent of all Americans, we’d be more worried about that than the murder rate.
And so I submit, once again, that anti-choicers don’t actually believe that an embryo is a human deserving of the same rights that you and I are entitled to. They see embryos as something less than born people. They’ll never admit it, but their actions speak pretty loudly.
Back to Matt. He writes, “The trouble with these kinds of cross-national statistics, though, is that there are all kinds of correlating variables and there’s no way for the kind of survey we’re talking about to isolate the impact of legal change on abortion.”
He’s right. But here’s what we do know: Women have abortions, everywhere in the world, regardless of whether abortion is legal or not. The abortion rate tends to be higher in places where contraception is limited. The abortion rate substantially decreases when contraception use becomes more widespread. Women are willing to go through all kinds of horrific illegal procedures in order to end a pregnancy — that is just how badly some women do not want to be pregnant. Reproductive freedom tends to correlate with greater gender equality, better health care and higher levels of female education, not just internationally but within the United States as well. And when abortion is illegal, it is more dangerous.
So the recognition that illegalization does not end abortion is an important one. The recognition that abortion rates are really really high in a lot of countries where it’s illegal is important, particularly when it’s paired with the evidence that illegal = more dangerous. It demonstrates that women are willing to break the law, in huge numbers, to access this procedure when they have to. It forces us to look at the harm that illegalization creates — not just the physical harm, the maiming and the deaths, but the harm in turning millions of women into criminals. Does the reproductive freedom movement “hinges crucially” on the argument that outlawing abortion doesn’t decrease the abortion rate? Of course not. But it is a practical consideration that should be taken into account; and at the very least, these statistics do demonstrate that outlawing abortion is most certainly not the most effective way to achieve a low abortion rate. If one of the goals is to keep the abortion rate low — and that’s certainly a goal of the pro-choice movement — then these stats matter.
If abortion is illegal, some women will not have abortions. For anti-choice people, that may be enough — any lives saved, they’ll argue, make illegalization worth it. When they make that argument, it’s important to counter with the facts of illegalization: Women will still have abortions, and they will have them in large numbers if they can’t access contraception. Those millions of women will be branded criminals. Some women will die. Some will be seriously injured and maimed. Finally, the countries that have had the most success at lowering the abortion rate have not taken the illegalization route; quite the opposite. The countries with the most “pro-life” policies have some of the highest abortion rates. If the genuine goal of the pro-life movement is to decrease the abortion rate, they should be looking at what works. They aren’t, and I’m definitely not the only one who is highly skeptical when they claim they care about decreasing the number of abortions.
All of those facts emphasize that the anti-choice position is an ideology of punishing women. When you factor in their lack of care for born people and their complete hypocrisy and logical inconsistency when it comes to defining and protecting “life,” you paint a bigger picture of a movement that is obsessed with control, not with life. You paint a picture of a movement that doesn’t actually care what the abortion rate is, so long as they can exert control over women’s lives.
The stats that Matt and others have criticized are a part of painting that picture. No one ever claimed they were the whole thing.