Abortion and Woman's Rights
by Frederica Mathewes-Green, Vice President for Communication with the U.S. Feminists For Life Published with permission from All About issues publication
The abortion debate seems like an unresolvable conflict of rights: the right of women to control their own bodies, the right of children to be born. Can one support women’s rights and oppose abortion?
Truly supporting women’s rights must involve telling the truth about abortion and working for it to cease.
It is because I still believe so strongly in the right of a woman to protect her body that I oppose abortion. That protection of a woman’s body must begin when her body begins, and it must be hers no matter where she lives - even if she lives in her mother’s womb. The same holds true for her brother.
For years I bought the line that the preborn was just a "glob of tissue." V/hen I ran across a description of a Mid-pregnancy abortion, I was horrified at the description of the syringe’s hub jerking against the mother’s abdomen as her child went through his death throes. I learnt that early abortions are no more kind: the child is pulled apart limb from limb, and sucked through a narrow tube into a bloody bag. Worst of all, I learned that 400 - 500 times a year children are born alive after late abortions, and then made to die by strangulation, drowning, or are just left in a bedpan in a dark closet until their wimpering ceases.
I could not deny that this was hideous violence. Even if there was any doubt that the preborn was a person, if I had seen someone doing this to a kitten I would have been horrified. The feminism that hoped to create a just new society had embraced as essential an act of injustice.
Have Women profited from abortion legality? Someone has profited, but not the woman who undergoes one; the abortion industry makes $500 million dollars a year, and the sale of preborn children’s parts could push that figure into the billions. The women must also undergo a humiliating procedure, an invasion deeper than rape, as the interior of her uterus is crudely vacuumed to remove every scrap of life. Some women will be haunted by the sound of that vacuum all their lives. She can lose her health. In addition to the women who are punctured or killed on abortion tables, there are more subtly damaging effects. The opening of the uterus, the cervix, is designed to happen gradually over several days at the end of pregnancy. In an abortion, the cervix is wrenched open in a matter of minutes. The delicate muscle fibres can be damaged - a damage that may go unnoticed until she is far into a later, wanted pregnancy, and they give way in a miscarriage. By some estimates, the aborted woman’s chance of later miscarriages doubles.
Nicks and scratches can cause scarring which may lead to endmetriosis. If the scars are near the opening of the fallopian tubes, the openings can be partly obliterated. Tiny sperm can swim in and fertilize the egg, but the fertilized egg, hundreds of times larger than a sperm, cannot pass back through into the uterus.
This brings us to the most devastating loss of all: the woman loses her own child. Abortion rhetoric paints the preborn as a parasite, a lump, a "glob of tissue". In fact, it is the woman’s child, as much like her as any child she will ever have, sharing her appearance, talents, and family tree. In abortion, she offers her own child as a sacrifice for the right to avoid change in her life, and it is a sacrifice that will haunt her.
The last loss is of her peace of mind. Planned parenthood recently conceded that as much as 91% of aborted women may experience trauma after abortion, Some suffer depression, nightmares, suicidal thoughts; some wake in the night thinking they hear baby crying. A man who saw his wife gradually disintegrate after her abortion asked, "What kind of trade-off is control of your body for control of your mind?"
Abortion is not a sign that women are free, but a sign that they are desperate.
For all these losses, women gain nothing but the right to run in place. Abortion doesn’t cure any illness; it doesn’t win any woman a raise. In a culture that treats pregnancy and child-rearing as impediments, it surgically adapts the woman to fit in. If women are an oppressed group, they are the only such group to require surgery in order to be equal.
The question remains, do women want abortion? Not like she wants a Porsche or an ice cream cone. Like an animal caught in a trap, trying to gnaw off its own leg, a woman who seeks abortion is trying to escape a desperate situation by an act of violence and self-loss.
If we were to imagine a society that supported and respected women, we would have to begin with preventing unplanned pregnancies. Contraceptives fail, and half of all aborting women admit they weren’t using them anyway. Thus, preventing unplanned pregnancies will involve a return to sexual responsibility.
Further, we need to make continuing a pregnancy and raising a child less of a burden. Most agree that women should play a part in the public life of our society; their talents and abilities are as valuable as men’s, and there is no reason to restrict then from the employment sphere. But during the years that her children are young, mother and child usually prefer to be together. We must also welcome women back into the work force when they want to return.
Women’s rights are not in conflict with their own children’s rights; the appearance of such a conflict is a sign that something is wrong with our society.
Page 4 Pro-Life News Winter, 1992