A reply to Pip Desmond

In Salient April 24 Pip Desmond made a number of debaters points against the case for legalised abortion. But the issue deserves more serious consideration than this for the anti-abortlonists take high ground. Setting aside "merely" humane or pragmatic considerations they claim to speak for the "right to life". The essence of their case is that a division of life into pre-natal and post-natal is arbitary, and therefore to terminate a pregnancy is synonymous with murder. They muster all the emotional devices they can to reinforce this association, and insist that advocates of abortion are by implication, harpies and murderers, reversing all the conventional priorities of female nature by perpetrating violence upon helpless victims. As such advocates of abortion are made to fit into the conventional picture of feminists as aggressive, castrating women, devoid of the 'charm' that makes women 'safe'. The innvocation of these deep fears of women, and their exploitation by the pro-life advocates is one reason why the issue is so emotionally charged, not to mention paranoid.

The reply to these charges is that the position is itself arbitary. We do in fact distinguish between a child and a foetus. If we say that a foetus must be treated as a human being because It has a potential to become one, then we must treat a sperm or an ova with the same respect: rejecting birth control and taking steps to ensure that each sperm of ova will eventuate in a person. If we treated cells in terms of their potential every menstruating woman, or priest who jerked off would be a "murderer". To be consistent we would have to argue that the "life" of a sperm begins when it leaves the scrotum. Clearly we do not do this, despite the fact that both ova and sperm have a potential for life, we do not give them a "right to life" becauae we make arbitary and pragmatic judgements about these differences. Arguments about when "life" begins are therefore unanswerable and pointless, the definition of 'life' therefore depends on moral decisions which are properly the province of individual choice not group coercion or legislative control.

You can not legalise morality. Since it is not logical, the credibility of the anti-abortionist argument depends heavily upon the portrayal of the advocates of legalised abortion as immoral antagonists of helpless childhood. This characterisation as child haters rests I believe on considerable hypocrisy. Opposition to abolition comes generally from socially conservative groups whose claim to care deeply about the santity of human life must be evaluated in the light of their inactivity in doing anything to actually improve it. Neither the two thirds of New Zealand MPs, who belong to SPUC, nor the Church was volueble in opposition to New Zealand's participation in killing Vietnamese children. Their right to life was less clear. The Church bans the pill but not napalm.

Clearly men who fail to speak against bombing children with anti-tank bombs from six miles up in the air have a poor claim to speak for the right to life. But the full inconsistency of their argument did not become clear to me until I faced the situation myself. Faced with an unwanted pregnancy due to contraceptive failure I 'chose' to risk my life with an abortion not because I am hostile to children or indifferent to the value of human life, but on the contrary because I life in a society which values children so little that it penalises women for having them. Society does not concede, let alone guarantee, their right to life except in the specific situation in which the mother is, or is forced to become, a dependant. Social conformity is the actual price of the 'right to life'.

Of course no one is advocating abortion as a positive good. It is a pragmatic solution to immediate problems. Of course I would rather live in a society where we could approach our bodies and accept our sexuality directly, and therefore seek contraception in a forthright way, and where children are so valued that their birth need not be avoided, or women penalised, ostracised, or damaged for life by the sin of giving birth. But alas, we live now in a society where a woman's life can be ruined, married or not, by an unwanted pregnancy. She and she alone will carry the burden and bear the damage. All we are seeking is a humane and less destructive option to this social barbarism. This is the sane way to deal with a social problem.

Allowing abortion is part of rationalising our attitude to conception. Reliable (accurate within 3%) figures tell us that there are 2½ million cases of child battery a year in the US. (No similar figures exist for New Zealand). This means that one child in ten suffers gross physical abuse. Most of these pregnancies are planned, but we encourage pregnancy for all kinds of reasons other than concern with children. The infertile are made to feel less than human. Fertility is consistently confused with virility, and conception is celebrated as an achievement a personal affirmation which in its egotism has little indeed to do with respecting the right to life of any other being. A 'proof of fertility is been as an essential affirmation of sexual identity. Our society, quite irrationally, makes the person who does not bear children less than real, and the refusal of abortion is one of these pressures toward pregnancy. To allow it would be in my opinion a step toward making pregnancy a matter of deliberate choice, undertaken not from egotism, but as a step toward an appreciation of the full meaning of the right to life.

The aspect of the anti-abortion position that I most dislike, apart from the obvious distortion of abortion advocates, is its punative tone. Far from being concerned with the quality of human life they totally dismiss the welfare of the people involved to insist that sexual sin must be paid for, Dr Dunn. SPUC's founder and leading light insists that any woman desiring contraception is neurotic. He is of course being consistent, every ova and sperm must be given its 'right'. Dunn may be an embarrasment to Ms Desmond, with his hostility to sex education and birth control, but what he shows so clearly is the fear of separating sexuality from its 'natural' function — and penalty. Having an abortion is seen as an escape from the just price that society Inflicts on the unmarried mother. The anti-abortionists concentrate on this immorality, rather than on the situation of the married women, who, as experience in countries where abortion is legal shows, are the people most affected by unwanted pregnancy. There seems to be an unspoken concern that if abortion is allowed women will escape their penality and there wilt be no sanction, and therefore no control of morality. It is this desire to enforce morality which I find particularly objectionable. To refuse women the ability to control their own[bodies is to try and coerce morality, and hence denies the very foundation of moral choice.

It is. I think, this vindictiveness which gives the key to the virulence of the emotions which the issue arouses. This coercive quality gives the clue as to why the most repressive persons should be the most worked up over the issue, The view of sexual morality they seek to defend is manifestly out of line with social behaviour. We life in a society where 53% of all first births are conceived before marriage, and in which 31% of all brides have children within seven months of marriage. In the younger age group pregnancy is the normal precipitant of marriage. It is I think this disparity between belief and practice which explains the hysteria the question evokes. The attempt to insist upon a totally different pattern of sexual morality is an attempt to deny this reality. We live in a society which makes sexuality a cause of guilt, and it is this uncase which drives people to the impassioned denial. Hence the paradox that it is the most coercive and conservative sections of the population, and the most repressed who oppose abortion.

This, perhaps more than consistency, is my strongest reason for rejecting the anti-abortionist position. I see the denial of control of ones body as part of a sexual repression which teaches women to feel guilty about their sexuality. To feel that their bodies are a source of shame, which have to be hidden, disguised, made-up, compressed, enlarged, deoderised, denles-and eventually paid for. Female sexuality has persistently been seen as a disruptive force and its control as vital to social stability. I see this legislation therefore as a punative attempt at social manipulation, a totally illegitimate form of social control.

To suggest that I made any kind of moral choice when I had an abortion is to make a mockery of choice. My choice was neither moral nor immoral because I risked my life, I can assure you, from hard necessity not from depraved preference.