144. Abort This.

I was getting ready to do a post on my new veggie lifestyle when I decided to peruse my blogroll before I started writing.  I was two-thirds of the way through when I came across a Slate post on feminism.  The teaser said "Nora Ephron Defines Feminism in a Single Sentence."  How could I not click on that?  And so I did.  The piece actually includes short essays from five different women.  I never got past the second one.
From Ms. Ephron:

I know that I'm supposed to write 500 words on this subject, but it seems much simpler: You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

And that was the end of my veggie post. 

My problem with this statement isn't that it defines me out of feminism (which it does).  It's that it purports to have the single best interest of women at heart and to have exclusive access to the right principle by which one determines that interest.  By this logic, if I understand it, the way to get to women's best interests is to start by securing their right to abortion.  That's the entryway.  As if abortion is the Jesus-figure of women's rights, and you can't get to the Promised Land without it.

That's wrong for the same reason that an immoderate belief in a "right" to abortion is wrong  It is not a rationally defensible argument.  Define feminism however you want.  But don't tie it to a person's position on an issue on which perfectly reasonable and compassionate people can have opposing opinions.  If the only arguments against abortion were religious ones, then okay.  Non-religious people might think the rest of us were ridiculous.  But there are other, perfectly secular reasons to reject the pro-choice argument.  Here are three:

One. The argument that it's a woman's body, and that she can do whatever she wants with it, is just factually inaccurate.  It's not her body.  It's someone else's body, inside of her body.  It's not her brain, it's not her heart, it's not her kidney's that will either be allowed to develop, or sucked out and thrown away.  We're not talking about a woman's right to cut off her own hand, or shred her own appendix.  And if we were talking about that, how many women would be as quick to do to their own limbs and organs whatever is done to a fetus when it is aborted?  Let us please distinguish between a woman's own body and the body of a child whose pain she may or may not feel.  There is a difference.

Two. Just because it's inside you doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.  Even if we concede that the unborn child is a physical being distinct from it's mother, there's still the argument that a woman has a right to decide what takes place inside her own body.  This is also (mostly) false for the same reason that we don't have an unlimited right to do what we want to people in our own homes.

For instance, you couldn't legally send out an open invite to a party, have someone you hadn't expected show up, and then panic and shoot them in the head. They broke no law, they weren't trespassing, they didn't force their way in.  You invited them, the way a person who has consensual sex without birth control invites a kid to be conceived.  Whether or not you desired for them to come is beside the point; you put out the invite and opened the door.  Their presence is your own doing.  You ought not be able to extinguish their existence for your own convenience.

Three. An unborn child is alive.  We can argue about what it means that it can't live on it's own outside the womb.  But at least we can all agree that the little thing taking up food, space, and oxygen in it's mother's womb is alive.  And reasonable people get to disagree on whether or not it's okay to kill living things.  Honestly, if rational, compassionate people can be vegetarians, it has to be okay for them to be anti-abortion.  It doesn't mean that they're putting the interests of the child above those of the mother.  It just means that they think the child's life deserves some consideration, that it has some value, whatever that may be.

Does all of this mean that abortion should be illegal?  From a religious standpoint, the answer is obviously Yes.  From a political one, not so much.  I don't have the heart or the religious conviction to tell rape and incest victims that they have to carry their abusers' children to term.  I also know that curious 14 year-olds make stupid mistakes and that it might be easier if they had a way out of them.  However, none of this means that abortion is a "right."  It only means that sometimes there are compelling reasons to do things we wish we never had to do. 

For those of us who don't fall into either of those groups, those of us who just thought it felt better without a condom, there really isn't a great grown-up defense for abortion.  We know where babies come from.  We know how not to get pregnant when we don't want to be pregnant.  But we're human, and sometimes we cross our fingers and try to get away with things.  When we get caught, we ought to be mature enough to acknowledge that our circumstances, inconvenient as they are, are of our own making.  We ought to be able to admit that it's not necessarily all about us anymore.  And if we decide to have an abortion, we ought at least to be willing to contend with the reality and the value of the life that we're ending, and not imagine and insist that it was nothing.

This is not a backward argument for a woman to make.  It is a perfectly reasonable argument for a woman who loves and respects and believes in women to make.  It is the argument of a woman who believes in the fierce intelligence and integrity of women, and who trusts them to exercise their sexual responsibilities as readily as they exercise their sexual rights.  It is a feminist argument.