By “wombless men” Erika Bachiochi, author of Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights (2011) means the culture’s physiological prototype to which all men and women should aspire. “If pregnancy and motherhood are understood as burdensome conditions to women—experiences that represent our inability to compete with wombless men—they will never be given the respect and accommodation they deserve.”
In an online debate sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Social Movements addressing the 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bachiochi suggests that pro-choice and women’s equality movements will crumble of their own accord when their proponents realize that they stand on a foundation of inherent contradictions regarding three key truths.
The nature of abortion: It’s science.
. . . an entire fifth [of Americans] believe that human life begins at birth. This is ignorance of biology at its base, a situation that the media would gladly and rightly correct were the ignorance about, say, the age of the earth or whether women’s bodies can prevent conception when raped.
The nature of Roe V. Wade:
Roe was clearly defined in Doe v. Bolton, the little-known companion case the Court decided the same day. . . . when read together [they allow for] abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of pregnancy.
If polls reveal anything, it is that the majority of the American public is in favor of what they think Roe holds: restrictions on abortion after the first three months of pregnancy. The thing is, we’d have to overturn the 1973 case to get there.
The nature of women’s equality.
Sexual equality via abortion looks to cure biological asymmetry—the fact that women get pregnant and men don’t—by promoting the rejection of women’s bodies. Authentic equality and reproductive justice would demand something far more revolutionary: that men and society at large respect and support women in their myriad capacities and talents which include, for most women at some time in their lives, childbearing.
I agree with Bachiochi’s three points. That said, if pro-abortion claims are so illogical, why are we not any closer to overturning Roe? And it wouldn’t help to answer by concluding that all abortion supporters are bumbling irrational idiots who deny the Truth outright while looking it square in the eye. It’s more complicated than that.
Most pro-choice advocates truly believe that making abortions widely available will lead to less stressful family situations for young, low-income teens; more opportunities for solid high school and college educations and successful careers; stable homes for the children born to a woman when she is emotionally, mentally, and financially ready. And who wouldn’t want these outcomes, on either side of the debate?
Of course we can continue to make logical arguments to appeal to reason, but the problem in many of these cases is that fear, especially the mother’s fear of losing her own dignity (be it through the reaction of her peers or her own sense of failure), wins out over logic. What we need, along with appeals to reason, are more concrete displays of caritas, verifying the dignity of the whole person—and not just of an innocent human life—dignity that does not disappear even in the midst of sin, ignorance, or poverty.
Take the Sisters of Life for example. In working to uphold the dignity of innocent human life, they simultaneously uphold the inherent dignity of the mother, by first acknowledging in their prayers lives that they too are sinner, and then by showing the pregnant mother that she and her child are both worth it. Their Pregnancy Help page says
There are so many unanswered questions, so many seeming impossibilities. But the passion that has already given shape to your hopes and ambitions in life is what reveals the strength you are capable of as a woman, even in the most confusing of circumstances.
So many young women choose to abort not because they fail to recognize the dignity of their child, but because they are consumed by fear and a loss of their own dignity. What the pro-life movement lacks is a greater emphasis on the dignity of all human life, wether innocent or not.
March 6th, 2013 | 3:09 pm
What the Pro-Life Movement emphasizes, or says, means nothing in a culture well-practiced in ignoring them. It will, ultimately come down to what it DOES.
March 6th, 2013 | 4:03 pm
Thank you. I might be considered ‘pro-choice’ in terms of the First Things perspective on the debate, but I thought your piece perceptive and generous in its recognition of the genuine concerns that those who do support the ‘right to choose’ (whatever one might want to call it) have regarding the welfare of the mother as well as the child. Pro-lifers would attract more support if your holistic view was more widely promulgated.
March 6th, 2013 | 5:08 pm
“What the pro-life movement lacks is a greater emphasis on the dignity of all human life, wether [sic] innocent or not.”
I contend that the pro-life movement does emphasize the dignity of all human life, but is ignored when it does so, partly because this emphasis is inconvenient to the opponents of the pro-life movement and partly because ignoring it causes people not to know about it at all. My own area has several pro-life ministries designed to help and support mothers to bear and raise their children, but they are rarely mentioned publicly (in newspapers or on TV news, for example).
March 6th, 2013 | 5:11 pm
The pro-life groups and people I know all support the mother and her dignity as much as the child. It is rather cliche in your conclusion to say that pro-life people only care about the child. That is what the mainstream narrative / pro-abortion narrative wants people to believe. It’s not the reality of the situation. I believe it would be a challenge to find a true pro-life organization that is saving babies that does not help the mother and recognize her dignity.
March 6th, 2013 | 6:51 pm
We are often made aware of the good work the pro-life movement does in running such things as crisis pregnancy centers. The problem, it seems to me, is that the “political wing” of the pro-life movement seems to be almost exclusively interested in making abortions more difficult to obtain, and scarcely interested at all in helping women to either avoid unplanned pregnancies or go through with an unplanned pregnancy and keep the baby (or give it up for adoption). Those in the pro-life movement are generally politically conservative, and as a result of that, they are not likely to support public assistance to help mothers with unplanned pregnancies carry the babies to term.
Who agrees with the following?
March 6th, 2013 | 7:05 pm
There are far more people in the United States looking to adopt babies than there are babies to be adopted. Suppose legislation were proposed that any women with an unplanned pregnancy willing to carry the baby to term and give it up for adoption would have all her medical expenses paid and would have a guarantee that she would not be discriminated against in any way (e.g., lose her job) for being pregnant and taking whatever time off she needed to give birth and recover. Perhaps she could even be compensated in some way for going through with the pregnancy. It is possible some women might see this as an incentive to deliberately get pregnant, but as long as the number of parents seeking to adopt was equal to or greater than the number of babies born, I don’t see a problem.
March 6th, 2013 | 8:38 pm
Subsidiarity is the idea. You’re right, I do not support the Fed government necessarily offering assistance in such a circumstance, I think the local CPCs deserve my support. The local CPCs and even a national charity could better help than the Fed.
It’s not the help, or paying for the help, we disagree on, it’s the delivery system and where the money should go first.
March 7th, 2013 | 2:43 am
Clearly the best approach, in my judgment, is to have two sides of the circle: the one side, is the protection of the unborn; the other side, is providing the help that pregnant women need, to not only carry the baby to term, but provide properly for herself, and the child afterwards. Sometimes, Republicans have not been as concerned as they should be with providing the other half of the circle.
March 7th, 2013 | 9:04 am
“Sometimes, Republicans have not been as concerned as they should be with providing the other half of the circle.”
I think the article was discussing pro-life groups, not Republicans. I agree with others above, in that any pro-life group or people that I know of also support the pregnant women and their dignity. It’s an inconvenient truth to abortion supporters and enthusiasts, so it is quashed before it gets into their sealed habitats.
March 7th, 2013 | 9:55 am
I think the article was discussing pro-life groups, not Republicans.
peg,
I think Bret Lythgoe was making a point similar to mine. I was making a distinction between the pro-life movement “on the ground” and the political pro-life movement (pro-life politicians, pro-life legislation, and so on).
It’s an inconvenient truth to abortion supporters and enthusiasts, so it is quashed before it gets into their sealed habitats.
I think it is not a matter of a truth being “quashed,” but rather a matter of the politics of the anti-abortion movement being highly visible, and the good work of pro-lifers “on the ground” being largely invisible. For example, Arkansas’s ban, enacted yesterday, on abortions later than 12 weeks is front-page news nationwide. It would be difficult for crisis pregnancy centers to make it into the news in with equivalent prominence.
March 7th, 2013 | 10:16 am
David Nickol
I am dubious about how effective your proposals would be in encouraging women to carry a pregnancy to term.
In the UK we have
1) A health service, free at the point of use, so a pregnant woman incurs no medical expenses at all, for herself or her baby.
2) A statutory right to paid maternity leave, with 90% of average earnings for the first six weeks and £135.45 ($198.48) for the next 33 weeks. Those not in employment get £135.45 a week for the full 39 weeks. There is also a statutory right to take a further 13 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. In addition, it is illegal for employers to refuse to give pregnant employees time off for antenatal care or to refuse to pay their normal rate for this time off.
3) An Equality Act that gives pregnant women protection against unfair treatment, discrimination or dismissal.
There were 196,083 in 2011, (189,931 for UK residents). 36% of these women had had a least one previous abortion. There were 688,120 live births during the same year.
March 7th, 2013 | 2:53 pm
I completely agree–in focusing more on crisis-pregnancy-care, the pro-life movement can concretely embody a holistic, non-judgmental and non-moralistic, respect for human life.
Also, concerning a matter not directly related to abortion, yet directly related to holistic respect for human dignity, too many pro-life Christians are in ignorance, sometimes willful, of the unjust and life-wrecking punishment that child-prisons wreak on troubled inner-city youths.
The work of Heidi Neumark –a “leftist” Lutheran minister—offers a valuable witness to your point. Although she hasn’t yet grasped the embodied, integrated, reasoned anthropology that Erika Bachiochi articulates–her charitable work in youth-prisons incarnates an unconditional respect for the dignity of human life. Of course, the disembodied anthropology that implicitly informs Neumark’s social/political views logistically—in theory– undermines the value of embodied social-justice work. Yet, absent an incarnate care for all human life–regardless of whether that life, at any age, is sinful in any sense–a care visibly embodied in Neumark’s work, an integrated and embodied anthropology becomes a moralistic disincarnate set of principles incapable of moving anyone to an unconditional concern for others.
I add only that caritas and reason aren’t opposed–rather, caritas is the highest form of reason. The eternal Logos desired and loved us before we were anyone and before there was anything. His desire and love for all his sons and daughters is engrained in the human heart. The desire and love to give the caritas given us–a desire that is distorted and misunderstood in original-sin–is the natural-law of human existence. Thus, the logic of human life is a logic of caritas—a logic that moves one to recognize all human life as signs of the infinite Caritas they image.
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