Whose Life is it Anyway?

A young woman who looks to be in her late teens or early twenties quietly exits her doctor’s office and is greeted by a familiar male voice.  When asked, she nonchalantly informs him that everything went fine.  Then, without warning, she lowers her head into her hands and begins to sob uncontrollably.

This is the final scene from the 2006 documentary, Lake of Fire, and the woman in question has just had an abortion.  What makes the scene significant is that it poignantly illustrates how agonizing the experience can be for the women around whom the abortion debate should be centred but who, tragically, are too often left out of the discussion altogether.

When President Obama delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame last Sunday, he was forced to address the issue of abortion in front of a crowd whose views are diametrically opposed to his own.  To his credit, he went further than most politicians would have in asserting his pro-choice ideals by stressing the need to come up with a policy that recognizes the “equality of women.”  But he couldn’t bring himself to use the term women’s rights.  We often hear the term reproductive rights but seldom do we hear any mention of women’s rights, or human rights.

Many of the pro-choice arguments are purely pragmatic, like highlighting the fact that we can effectively reduce abortions by enacting sound economic policies and implementing a more progressive approach to sex education.  It is also argued that placing restrictions on women’s access to abortions forces some would-be mothers to resort to back-alley abortions that endanger the health of the woman.  In their 2006 book, Freakonomics, Dubner and Levitt even go so far as to attribute the United States’ dramatic decrease in crime in the early 90’s to the landmark 1973 supreme court decision of Roe V. Wade, which effectively made abortion legal.  The argument here is that most women seeking abortions do so because they cannot provide the nurturing environment necessary to raise a healthy, happy and productive child.  Therefore, since abortion was now legal, many of these unwanted children who, in the early 90’s would have been approaching the prime age bracket for launching a career as a criminal, were never born in the first place.

Other arguments call into question the philosophy underlying the pro-life movement.  Personally, I’ve always found it somewhat arbitrary that the church could unilaterally declare that life begins at conception with no apparent scientific (or even scriptural) rationale whatsoever.  But these arguments are merely academic in light of one truth that trumps all those mentioned above, and that is that all women, like all men, have an inalienable right to self-determination with respect to their own bodies.

Even if one believes that a zygote or a fetus is a full human life and is entitled to the legal protections afforded other humans, that person must ask themselves, does that entitlement trump a woman’s right to exercise control over her own body.  I believe the answer is no.  And in fact, North American society is virtually unanimous in this believe when it comes to other forms of self determination…

I recall a conversation I had with one of my colleagues at a summer job several years back.  He was a devout Muslim and staunchly pro-life.  I made the argument that the woman should ultimately determine whether she will expel a fetus from her body rather than having a male-dominated government force her to play the role of unwilling host by carrying the child to term, whether or not she conceived the child consensually.   To which my co-worker responded with  the analogy, "the government of Canada can’t simply expel a refugee knowing that that person will inevitably return to a situation where his or her life is in danger."

I suppose this would have been an excellent point were it not for the fact that it’s completely false.  The truth is Canada can and does knowingly reject the applications of immigrants whose lives will be in peril should they return to their country of origin.  To see this, one need only look at Canada’s policy on HIV/AIDS.  It is the policy of the ministry of Citizenship and Immigration to automatically reject all immigration applicants who are known to be HIV positive on the grounds that they would place an undue financial burden on our healthcare system.  The majority of these individuals come from developing nations and many will have no access the treatments and medicines needed to keep them alive once they return to their home countries, so it stands to reason that we have sent numerous aspiring Canadians to their deaths in order to save money.

Now, while I don’t particularly agree with this policy, I believe this is a debate that we must engage in as Canadians. Furthermore, any attempt by some outside governing body, such as the UN, to force Canada to accept these applicants would constitute a gross violation of our national sovereignty.  But this is precisely what the pro-life movement wants.  They want to government to infringe upon the individual sovereignty of women.  Although, in their defense, this is hardly a new paradigm.  Whether it is the right to determine ones spouse or the right to decide who you sleep with, the right of a woman to make her own reproductive decisions is just the most recent in a long line of very personal decision-making processes that women have historically been excluded from.

It seems clear that this ideology, which prevents women from making independent and informed decisions about their own bodies is rooted in an ethos which sees the woman as a mere vehicle through which life is propagated and denies her her full humanity.  Consequently the woman’s rights are subordinate to that of the fetus.   There is no more vivid demonstration of this than a case that occured in Brazil earlier this year.

Back in March, a 9-year-old Brazilian girl was found to be pregnant with twins resulting from an alleged rape by her stepfather.  Because the girl’s body was so small and therefore unequipped to handle the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth, the doctor determined that carrying the child to term would have endangered to life of the girl as well as the twins, and so he agreed to perform an abortion.  This was legal under Brazilian law which prohibits abortion but allows for exceptions in cases where the mother’s health is at risk.  However, the Catholic church excommunicated both the doctor and the girl's mother for allowing the abortion.  The girl’s stepfather retained his membership in the church.  This is the extreme but logical byproduct of the perverted reasoning behind the pro-life movement. 

The notion that abortion is murder unjustly compounds the intense guilt experienced by young women like the one mentioned at the beginning of this article.  This is unfortunate because, the hysteria surrounding abortion is largely fabricated by religious dogma.  I liken this to the hysteria surrounding the loss of ones virginity.  Not to equate the two, but virginity exists solely as a concoction of patriarchy and, like the conception=life trope, it has no basis in science or biology.  Moreover, the concept of virginity, much like the idea that a woman is morally obligated to carry all pregnancies to term, is founded entirely upon the commodification and ownership of the female body by men.  Only after we free ourselves from these archaic obsessions can we even begin to have a reasoned and productive debate about abortion policy.  This would not only benefit all human beings, both men and women, but fetuses as well.

AlexsJenkins