Pro-Life, Pro-Choice: Shared Values in the Abortion Debate

Introduction and Background

1 My personal views about abortion have changed throughout the years. As a teenager, being the product of a Catholic home, I was very “pro-­life.” I believed that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception and that its right to life trumps the bodily rights of women. While I conceded (with hesitation) that abortions are permissible in cases when the mother’s life is threatened, I did not make any allowances for fetuses created through rape or incest. In college I took classes in applied ethics and bioethics , and was introduced in each class to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s influential article “A Defense of Abortion,” in which she argues that even if the fetus is considered a person with all the moral rights thereof, this does not mean a woman can be compelled to gestate it. This is because no person’s right to life imposes an obligation upon others to make large bodily sacrifices in order to respect that right. After much inner turmoil, Thomson’s argument convinced me, and I spent the remainder of my college and graduate school career being very ardently “pro-­ choice.” In my dissertation, I argued that embryos and fetuses possessed no moral standing until at least midgestation because it is only then that they acquire the necessary neural apparatus for conscious awareness, and that early- to midpregnancy abortions are no different from using contraception because both methods prevent the existence of a human person. Introduction and Background Pro-­ Life, Pro-­ Choice 2 On Saturday, May 10, 2008—the day before Mother’s Day—I discovered I was pregnant with my first child. Twelve weeks later we had our first ultrasound, and I was in awe of how much was happening inside my body even though I could not feel it. As the technician talked to my husband and me and assured us that the pregnancy was progressing well, I watched my little fetus somersault around in my belly. I couldn’t believe she could do so much at such a young age. During the drive home I stared at my first ultrasound picture and heard a voice in my head that was utterly foreign to me given the beliefs I had held for the previous ten years: I could never bring myself to abort this fetus, and abortion, I found myself thinking, is certainly not akin to contraception . The months that followed continually reaffirmed my newfound respect for fetal life; every kick, every movement, every reaction to her father’s voice incited a sense of awe. I realized that regardless of the myriad philosophical debates concerning fetal personhood, once I was pregnant very little of it mattered. Gestating my daughter did something for me that no amount of studying was able to do: it forced me to look at pregnancy, birthing, and abortion as real issues in the lives of real people, including both women and fetuses. I was torn, so in my mind I recounted all the reasons I identified as pro-­ choice. I still believe that abortion choice is an essential aspect of women’s reproductive freedom. In order for women to get ahead in terms of their education and careers they have to be free to obtain an abortion if they ever become pregnant before they are ready to become mothers. Raped women should not be forced to gestate a fetus that is a permanent reminder of the violence and violation they endured. Motherhood is such an identity-­ altering role that it must be one that women choose for themselves. Children should be born into a home where they are wanted and cared for, and to parents who are secure enough in their lives to provide for them materially and emotionally. The consequences of criminalizing abortion will not be an explosion of healthy babies being born to happy mothers, but rather the death of fetuses and women at the hands of illegal abortion providers—­ indeed, almost half of abortions around the world take place in countries with restrictive abortion laws. Finally, Thomson’s argument still 3 Introduction and Background rings true to me: I cannot endorse any policy that compels one subset of the population to give their bodies over in a physically demanding, intimate, and potentially dangerous way in order to sustain the lives of another subset of the population. Nevertheless, I could no longer justify my position by dehumanizing fetuses, by writing...