abortion pro choice essay

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Abortion Debate — Pro Choice (Abortion)

Argumentative Essays on Pro Choice (abortion)

What makes a powerful pro choice essay topic.

When it comes to crafting a compelling pro choice abortion essay, the selection of a captivating topic is paramount. A well-chosen topic has the potential to make your essay shine and captivate the reader's attention. So, how can you brainstorm and discover the perfect essay topic? Here are some expert recommendations:

• Consider your passions: Embark on a journey of brainstorming topics that truly ignite your interest. By doing so, you ensure that you remain engaged throughout the writing process, allowing you to produce an essay that is truly compelling.
• Immerse yourself in research: Dive deep into the vast sea of information surrounding the pro choice abortion movement. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, you can identify potential essay topics that will expand your knowledge base and captivate your readers.
• Analyze the ongoing debates: Stay up-to-date with the latest discussions and controversies surrounding pro choice abortion. By analyzing diverse viewpoints and arguments, you can find inspiration for unique and thought-provoking essay topics.
• Evaluate personal experiences: Reflect upon your own encounters or experiences with the pro choice abortion movement. These personal insights can provide invaluable perspectives and make your essay more relatable to your readers.
• Consider your target audience: Ponder upon the diverse readership that your essay will reach. Choose a topic that appeals to both supporters and skeptics of pro choice abortion, ensuring a broader and more impactful discussion.

Overall, a good pro choice abortion essay topic should be thought-provoking, relevant, and capable of sparking meaningful discussions.

Best Pro Choice Abortion Essay Topics

Here, we present some of the most compelling pro choice abortion essay topics:

• The Empowering Role of Pro Choice Abortion in Women's Reproductive Rights Movement
• Analyzing the Ripple Effect: The Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on Society
• The Ethical Enigma: Exploring the Considerations of Pro Choice Abortion
• Untangling the Web: A Critical Analysis of the Media's Portrayal of Pro Choice Abortion
• Unearthing the Roots: Examining the Historical Background of the Pro Choice Abortion Movement
• The Dance of Equality: The Intersectionality of Pro Choice Abortion and Feminism
• A Constitutional Right or a Moral Dilemma: Delving into the Controversy of Pro Choice Abortion
• Unveiling the Unseen: The Psychological Effects of Pro Choice Abortion on Women
• Abortion Access and Healthcare Disparities: A Closer Look at the Impact
• Shifting Paradigms: The Influence of Pro Choice Abortion on Religious Beliefs and Practices
• Unmasking the Numbers: Exploring the Economic Implications of Pro Choice Abortion
• Pro Choice Abortion and Population Control: A Deeper Examination
• The Global Tapestry: A Comparative Analysis of Pro Choice Abortion Perspectives
• Unlocking the Mind: The Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on Mental Health
• Examining the Opposition: Religious versus Secular Arguments against Pro Choice Abortion
• The Symphony of Empowerment: The Relationship between Pro Choice Abortion and Women's Empowerment
• Peering into the Crystal Ball: Predictions and Challenges for the Future of Pro Choice Abortion
• Through the Prism of Diversity: Exploring the Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on LGBTQ+ Rights
• Beyond Statistics: The Role of Pro Choice Abortion in Reducing Maternal Mortality Rates
• Analyzing the Legal Frameworks: A Global Perspective on Pro Choice Abortion

Engaging Pro Choice Essay Questions

To ignite meaningful discussions, consider these thought-provoking questions for your pro choice abortion essay:

• What are the main arguments employed by supporters of pro choice abortion?
• How does the pro choice abortion movement differ across various countries?
• What are the ethical implications of pro choice abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities?
• How does the media shape public opinion on pro choice abortion?
• What are the potential consequences of restricting access to pro choice abortion?
• How does pro choice abortion intersect with racial and socioeconomic disparities?
• What role does religion play in shaping attitudes towards pro choice abortion?
• How has pro choice abortion influenced women's reproductive healthcare policies?
• What are the psychological effects experienced by women who choose pro choice abortion?
• How has the pro choice abortion movement evolved over time?

Pro Choice Abortion Essay Prompts

Consider these essay prompts to explore various angles of pro choice abortion:

• Imagine a world where pro choice abortion is universally accepted. Describe the potential positive outcomes and challenges.
• Write a persuasive essay arguing that pro choice abortion is an inherent human right.
• Create a captivating dialogue between two individuals with contrasting views on pro choice abortion.
• Analyze the impact of pro choice abortion on the future of gender equality.
• Compose a compelling personal narrative about a woman's journey in making a pro choice abortion decision and its consequences.

Addressing Pro Choice Abortion Essay FAQs

Here are answers to frequently asked questions about writing pro choice abortion essays:

Q: What are the key elements of a compelling pro choice abortion essay?

A: A compelling pro choice abortion essay should possess a powerful thesis statement, well-researched arguments supported by credible evidence, and a clear logical structure. Additionally, incorporating personal experiences and maintaining a balanced tone can elevate the impact of your essay.

Q: How can I address counterarguments in my pro choice abortion essay?

A: Address counterarguments by presenting them objectively and refuting them with logical reasoning and evidence. This demonstrates your ability to consider different perspectives and strengthens your overall argument.

Q: How can I make my pro choice abortion essay stand out?

A: To make your essay stand out, choose a unique and thought-provoking topic, present original arguments supported by credible sources, and employ engaging and persuasive language. Incorporating personal anecdotes or real-life examples can also make your essay more memorable.

Q: Is it important to consider the opposing viewpoint in a pro choice abortion essay?

A: Yes, considering the opposing viewpoint is crucial to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Address counterarguments respectfully and refute them with strong evidence to strengthen your own argument and showcase your ability to engage with different perspectives.

Q: Are there any specific guidelines for referencing sources in a pro choice abortion essay?

A: Yes, it is important to properly cite all sources used in your pro choice abortion essay. Follow the guidelines of a recognized citation style, such as APA or MLA, to ensure accurate and consistent referencing. This adds credibility to your essay and avoids plagiarism.

Remember to always consult your instructor or follow any specific guidelines provided for your essay assignment. Happy writing!

Abortion Should Be Illegal Essay

A pro-life perspective on abortion, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Abortion: a Controversial Issue

Pro-choice argument in the debate on abortion, pro-choice arguments in support of abortion, pro-life and pro-choice abortion: the rights of the foetus vs the rights of the woman, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

The Arguments of The Pro-choice Faction in The Abortion Debate

Pro-choice is the right choice: reasons to make abortion legal, why abortion should be legalized, abortion in the united states: why i choose pro-choice, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

Argumentation of Anti-abortion and Abortion-rights in United States

Woman vs society: pro life and pro choice views on abortion, evaluation of pro-life vs pro-choice point of view, a pro-choice view of the issue of abortion, pro-choice abortion as a right to women, supporting pro-choice is pro-women decision, the many rhetorical devices used by the pro-choice women right's movement of the 20th century, debating the ethics of abortion: abortion as murder, give a voice to women: pro-choice view on abortion, pro-choice abortion: it’s women’s choice to do with their bodies what they want, a comparison of pro-life and pro-choice ideologies, abortion and women’s freedom to choose, protecting the unborn: the pro-life position against abortion, why abortion is ethically right, pro choice: why abortion should remain a legal right, a pro-choice perspective on the controversial topic of abortion, pro-choice and pro-life arguments in the abortions debate, pro-life and pro-choice views on abortion in terms of religion, the role of the american women’s health movement and roe v. wade case in modern day women’s fight for reproductive rights, evaluation of the abortions-rights ideology in the united states.

The pro-choice movement is a collective advocacy effort that upholds the principle of individual autonomy and reproductive rights, asserting that individuals should have the legal freedom to make decisions regarding their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion.

The pro-choice movement has a rich history that spans several decades, characterized by significant milestones, activism, and legal battles. It emerged as a response to the restrictive abortion laws and societal stigmatization surrounding reproductive choices, aiming to challenge and change the status quo. During the mid-20th century, trailblazers such as Margaret Sanger played a crucial role in advocating for birth control and setting the stage for reproductive rights activism. The pro-choice movement reached a significant milestone with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade in 1973. This pivotal decision granted women the constitutional right to choose abortion, solidifying the legal foundation upon which the movement was built. However, the pro-choice movement has not been without its challenges. It has faced opposition from anti-abortion groups, prompting pro-choice advocates to organize, mobilize, and form influential organizations like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Grassroots activism, public awareness campaigns, and strategic lobbying have been vital in defending and expanding access to abortion services. Throughout its history, the pro-choice movement has also sought to address the societal stigma surrounding abortion. By sharing personal stories, fostering empathy, and promoting open dialogue, activists have aimed to destigmatize abortion and create a more compassionate and understanding society.

A significant portion of the population supports the principles and goals of the pro-choice movement. Many people believe that individuals should have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion. They argue that access to safe and legal abortion services is essential for reproductive autonomy, gender equality, and the overall well-being of women and marginalized communities. This perspective emphasizes the importance of comprehensive reproductive healthcare and the removal of barriers that restrict access to abortion. At the same time, there are individuals who hold reservations or have moral objections to abortion. Some may believe in the sanctity of life from conception or have religious or cultural values that influence their stance. These individuals may align themselves with the anti-abortion movement and advocate for stricter regulations or the complete prohibition of abortion. Public opinion on the pro-choice movement is also influenced by factors such as education, socioeconomic status, political ideology, and personal experiences. Cultural shifts, increased awareness about reproductive rights, and public discourse have contributed to a greater acceptance and understanding of the pro-choice position in many societies. In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on intersectionality within the pro-choice movement, recognizing that reproductive justice intersects with other social justice issues, including race, class, and LGBTQ+ rights. This broader perspective aims to address the diverse needs and experiences of individuals seeking reproductive healthcare and advocates for policies that promote equitable access to comprehensive reproductive services.

The topic of the pro-choice movement is crucial as it centers on the fundamental principles of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and gender equality. It emphasizes the importance of individuals having the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion. The pro-choice movement highlights the significance of safe and legal access to reproductive healthcare, ensuring that individuals have the power to determine their reproductive futures. By advocating for reproductive rights, the movement challenges oppressive structures, fights against stigma, and strives to create a society where individuals are empowered to make informed choices about their reproductive health, free from judgment and coercion.

The topic of the pro-choice movement is worthy of an essay because it encompasses profound social, ethical, and legal dimensions. Exploring this subject provides an opportunity to delve into the complexities surrounding reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and the ongoing struggle for gender equality. Writing about the pro-choice movement allows for an examination of historical milestones, legal battles, and the impact on individuals and society. Additionally, it prompts critical analysis of the intersections between reproductive justice and other social issues like healthcare access, socioeconomic disparities, and cultural norms. By exploring this topic, one can contribute to the discourse, promote awareness, and foster a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of the pro-choice movement.

1. The pro-choice movement extends beyond the United States: While the pro-choice movement gained significant momentum in the United States, its influence is not limited to a single country. 2. Intersectionality plays a crucial role in the pro-choice movement: The pro-choice movement recognizes that reproductive rights intersect with other social justice issues, such as race, class, and LGBTQ+ rights. 3. Access to abortion services remains an ongoing battle: Despite the landmark ruling of Roe v. Wade in the United States, access to abortion services continues to be a contentious issue. Numerous states have implemented restrictive laws, such as mandatory waiting periods, targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws, and limitations on insurance coverage. These efforts have led to a patchwork of access across the country, with disparities in availability and barriers for individuals seeking reproductive healthcare.

1. Steinem, G. (2015). My Life on the Road. Random House. 2. Norris, A., Bessett, D., Steinberg, J. R., Kavanaugh, M. L., & De Zordo, S. (2011). Abortion stigma: A reconceptualization of constituents, causes, and consequences. Women's Health Issues, 21(3), S49-S54. 3. McNeil, R. M., & Berer, M. (2017). The abortion law in Northern Ireland: Lessons for the United States. Guttmacher Policy Review, 20, 98-103. 4. Luker, K. (1984). Abortion and the politics of motherhood. University of California Press. 5. Rees, D. I., Sabia, J. J., & Argys, L. M. (2017). A review of the effects of abortion policies. Southern Economic Journal, 83(4), 823-869. 6. Stotland, N. L., & Bryant, A. G. (2020). ACOG practice bulletin No. 225: Management of pregnancies with substance use disorders. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 135(6), e274-e298. 7. Jones, R. K., & Jerman, J. (2017). Population group abortion rates and lifetime incidence of abortion: United States, 2008-2014. American Journal of Public Health, 107(12), 1904-1909. 8. Clark, A. (2017). Reproductive rights and the state: Getting the birth control, RU-486, and morning-after pills and the Gardasil vaccine to the US market. Law and Policy, 39(2), 139-165. 9. Upadhyay, U. D., Weitz, T. A., & Jones, R. K. (2013). Barriers to abortion and their consequences for patients traveling for services: Qualitative findings from two states. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 45(2), 84-91. 10. Roth, R. A. (2003). Making women pay: The hidden costs of fetal rights. Cornell University Press.

Relevant topics

• Pro Life (Abortion)
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• Homelessness
• Animal Testing
• Death Penalty
• I Have a Dream

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Bibliography

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Read our research on: Gun Policy | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Key facts about the abortion debate in america.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings

Public Opinion on Abortion

Majority in u.s. say abortion should be legal in some cases, illegal in others, three-in-ten or more democrats and republicans don’t agree with their party on abortion, partisanship a bigger factor than geography in views of abortion access locally, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

There’s a Better Way to Debate Abortion

Caution and epistemic humility can guide our approach.

If Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization becomes law, we will enter a post– Roe v. Wade world in which the laws governing abortion will be legislatively decided in 50 states.

In the short term, at least, the abortion debate will become even more inflamed than it has been. Overturning Roe , after all, would be a profound change not just in the law but in many people’s lives, shattering the assumption of millions of Americans that they have a constitutional right to an abortion.

This doesn’t mean Roe was correct. For the reasons Alito lays out, I believe that Roe was a terribly misguided decision, and that a wiser course would have been for the issue of abortion to have been given a democratic outlet, allowing even the losers “the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight,” in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Instead, for nearly half a century, Roe has been the law of the land. But even those who would welcome its undoing should acknowledge that its reversal could convulse the nation.

From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate

If we are going to debate abortion in every state, given how fractured and angry America is today, we need caution and epistemic humility to guide our approach.

We can start by acknowledging the inescapable ambiguities in this staggeringly complicated moral question. No matter one’s position on abortion, each of us should recognize that those who hold views different from our own have some valid points, and that the positions we embrace raise complicated issues. That realization alone should lead us to engage in this debate with a little more tolerance and a bit less certitude.

Many of those on the pro-life side exhibit a gap between the rhetoric they employ and the conclusions they actually seem to draw. In the 1990s, I had an exchange, via fax, with a pro-life thinker. During our dialogue, I pressed him on what he believed, morally speaking , should be the legal penalty for a woman who has an abortion and a doctor who performs one.

My point was a simple one: If he believed, as he claimed, that an abortion even moments after conception is the killing of an innocent child—that the fetus, from the instant of conception, is a human being deserving of all the moral and political rights granted to your neighbor next door—then the act ought to be treated, if not as murder, at least as manslaughter. Surely, given what my interlocutor considered to be the gravity of the offense, fining the doctor and taking no action against the mother would be morally incongruent. He was understandably uncomfortable with this line of questioning, unwilling to go to the places his premises led. When it comes to abortion, few people are.

Humane pro-life advocates respond that while an abortion is the taking of a human life, the woman having the abortion has been misled by our degraded culture into denying the humanity of the child. She is a victim of misinformation; she can’t be held accountable for what she doesn’t know. I’m not unsympathetic to this argument, but I think it ultimately falls short. In other contexts, insisting that people who committed atrocities because they truly believed the people against whom they were committing atrocities were less than human should be let off the hook doesn’t carry the day. I’m struggling to understand why it would in this context.

There are other complicating matters. For example, about half of all fertilized eggs are aborted spontaneously —that is, result in miscarriage—usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Focus on the Family, an influential Christian ministry, is emphatic : “Human life begins at fertilization.” Does this mean that when a fertilized egg is spontaneously aborted, it is comparable—biologically, morally, ethically, or in any other way—to when a 2-year-old child dies? If not, why not? There’s also the matter of those who are pro-life and contend that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest. That is an understandable impulse but I don’t think it’s a logically sustainable one.

The pro-choice side, for its part, seldom focuses on late-term abortions. Let’s grant that late-term abortions are very rare. But the question remains: Is there any point during gestation when pro-choice advocates would say “slow down” or “stop”—and if so, on what grounds? Or do they believe, in principle, that aborting a child up to the point of delivery is a defensible and justifiable act; that an abortion procedure is, ethically speaking, the same as removing an appendix? If not, are those who are pro-choice willing to say, as do most Americans, that the procedure gets more ethically problematic the further along in a pregnancy?

Read: When a right becomes a privilege

Plenty of people who consider themselves pro-choice have over the years put on their refrigerator door sonograms of the baby they are expecting. That tells us something. So does biology. The human embryo is a human organism, with the genetic makeup of a human being. “The argument, in which thoughtful people differ, is about the moral significance and hence the proper legal status of life in its early stages,” as the columnist George Will put it.

These are not “gotcha questions”; they are ones I have struggled with for as long as I’ve thought through where I stand on abortion, and I’ve tried to remain open to corrections in my thinking. I’m not comfortable with those who are unwilling to grant any concessions to the other side or acknowledge difficulties inherent in their own position. But I’m not comfortable with my own position, either—thinking about abortion taking place on a continuum, and troubled by abortions, particularly later in pregnancy, as the child develops.

The question I can’t answer is where the moral inflection point is, when the fetus starts to have claims of its own, including the right to life. Does it depend on fetal development? If so, what aspect of fetal development? Brain waves? Feeling pain? Dreaming? The development of the spine? Viability outside the womb? Something else? Any line I might draw seems to me entirely arbitrary and capricious.

Because of that, I consider myself pro-life, but with caveats. My inability to identify a clear demarcation point—when a fetus becomes a person—argues for erring on the side of protecting the unborn. But it’s a prudential judgment, hardly a certain one.

At the same time, even if one believes that the moral needle ought to lean in the direction of protecting the unborn from abortion, that doesn’t mean one should be indifferent to the enormous burden on the woman who is carrying the child and seeks an abortion, including women who discover that their unborn child has severe birth defects. Nor does it mean that all of us who are disturbed by abortion believe it is the equivalent of killing a child after birth. In this respect, my view is similar to that of some Jewish authorities , who hold that until delivery, a fetus is considered a part of the mother’s body, although it does possess certain characteristics of a person and has value. But an early-term abortion is not equivalent to killing a young child. (Many of those who hold this position base their views in part on Exodus 21, in which a miscarriage that results from men fighting and pushing a pregnant woman is punished by a fine, but the person responsible for the miscarriage is not tried for murder.)

“There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?”

That strikes me as right; with abortion, we’re dealing with an awesome mystery and insoluble empirical questions. Which means that rather than hurling invective at one another and caricaturing those with whom we disagree, we should try to understand their views, acknowledge our limitations, and even show a touch of grace and empathy. In this nation, riven and pulsating with hate, that’s not the direction the debate is most likely to take. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying.

• - Google Chrome

Intended for healthcare professionals

• Access provided by Google Indexer
• My email alerts
• BMA member login
• Username * Password * Forgot your log in details? Need to activate BMA Member Log In Log in via OpenAthens Log in via your institution

Search form

• Advanced search
• Search responses
• Search blogs
• News & Views
• Abortion rights:...

Abortion rights: history offers a blueprint for how pro-choice campaigners might usefully respond

• Related content
• Peer review
• Agnes Arnold Forster , research fellow
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

In October 1971, the New York Times reported a decline in maternal death rate. 1 Just 15 months earlier, the state had liberalised its abortion law. David Harris, New York’s deputy commissioner of health, speaking to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, attributed the decline—by more than half—to the replacement of criminal abortions with safe, legal ones. Previously, abortion had been the single leading cause of maternity related deaths, accounting for around a third. A doctor in the audience who said he was from a state “where the abortion law is still archaic,” thanked New York for its “remarkable job” and expressed his gratitude that there was a place he could send his patients and know they would receive “safe, excellent care.” Harris urged other states to follow the example set by New York and liberalise their abortion laws.

Just two years later, in 1973, the US Supreme Court intervened. In the landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that the constitution protected a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion, and in doing so, struck down the “archaic” abortion laws that still existed in many states.

As surely everyone knows by now, Roe v. Wade was repealed on 24 June 2022, setting off a wave of fear, uncertainty, rage, and apprehension among those committed to the right to choose. Thirteen states with “trigger bans,” designed to take effect automatically if the ruling was ever struck down, are due to prohibit abortion within 30 days. 2 At least eight states banned the procedure the day the ruling was released. Several others are expected to act, with lawmakers moving to reactivate their dormant legislation. But as the 1971 New York Times article indicates, banning abortion only bans safe abortion.

In November 1955, Jacqueline Smith found out she was about six weeks pregnant. Historian Gillian Frank describes what happened next. 3 Unmarried and anxious about the social consequences for mothers and babies born out of wedlock, Jacqueline and her boyfriend Daniel started looking for methods to end the pregnancy. On the 24 December 1955, Daniel paid a hospital attendant, $50 to perform an illegal abortion in the living room of the boyfriend’s Manhattan apartment. Just a few hours later, Jacqueline was dead. Before abortion was legalised in Great Britain in 1967, the situation on this side of the Atlantic was similar.

As the New York Times article suggests, these names were just some of thousands of women who lost their lives to backstreet abortions or forced birth, and of many more who had their lives irreparably altered by being made to carry babies to term that they were not able to care for or that they simply did not want. But if history foreshadows a terrifying history for women in America, it also offers a blueprint for how pro-choice campaigners might usefully respond.

Roe v. Wade was a landmark legal decision, but it came only after decades of grassroots feminist activism. In early 1960s California, radical activist Pat Maginnis taught women how to fake the symptoms that would get them a “therapeutic abortion” (then the only legal kind). 4 She founded a group called the Society for Humane Abortion that demanded the repeal of abortion laws and ran an underground network focused on helping women obtain safe abortions, compiling lists of abortion providers outside the US, and providing women with tips on how to evade suspicion at the Mexican border. While some doctors and others were advocating reformed abortion laws in the first half of the twentieth century, it was feminists like Maginnis who were the first to publicly insist that abortion should be completely decriminalised. In 1969, the radical feminist group Redstockings organised an “abortion speakout” in New York City, where women talked about their experiences with illegal terminations. This history shows that women have always been at the forefront of pro-choice activism, and sadly will have to be once again.

But abortion rights also need to be protected closer to home. While abortion is legal in Northern Ireland, millions of women, girls, and people remain without access and must travel to England to receive appropriate reproductive care. Similarly, due to the legacy of nineteenth-century legislation, abortion remains a criminal offence in England—and doctors must lend their substantial social and political capital to the campaign to overturn the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. 5

The world is radically different to how it was in the 1960s. But two things remain constant. Reproductive rights are fundamental to women’s health, safety, and autonomy. And if access to abortion is to be reinstated or expanded in both the United Kingdom and the United States, then healthcare professionals need to be led by, and work in collaboration with, feminist activists.

Competing interests: AA-F’s research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Provenance and peer review: commissioned, not peer reviewed.

• ↵ The New York Times. Decline in Maternal Death Rate Linked to Liberalized Abortion. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/13/archives/decline-in-maternal-death-rate-linked-to-liberalized-abortion.html?searchResultPosition=1
• ↵ NPR. 'Trigger laws' have been taking effect now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107531644/trigger-laws-have-been-taking-effect-now-that-roe-v-wade-has-been-overturned
• ↵ Slate. The Death of Jacqueline Smith. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/jacqueline-smiths-1955-death-and-the-lessons-we-havent-yet-learned-from-it.html
• ↵ NPR. Inside Pat Maginnis' radical (and underground) tactics on abortion rights in the '60s. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/29/1047068724/pat-was-an-early-radical-abortion-rights-activist-her-positions-are-now-common
• ↵ Freeman H. The Guardian. Abortion should be a medical matter, not a criminal one. The law needs to change. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/uk-abortion-criminal-offence-24-week-time-limit

Find anything you save across the site in your account

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Is Abortion Sacred?

By Jia Tolentino

Twenty years ago, when I was thirteen, I wrote an entry in my journal about abortion, which began, “I have this huge thing weighing on me.” That morning, in Bible class, which I’d attended every day since the first grade at an evangelical school, in Houston, my teacher had led us in an exercise called Agree/Disagree. He presented us with moral propositions, and we stood up and physically chose sides. “Abortion is always wrong,” he offered, and there was no disagreement. We all walked to the wall that meant “agree.”

Then I raised my hand and, according to my journal, said, “I think it is always morally wrong and absolutely murder, but if a woman is raped, I respect her right to get an abortion.” Also, I said, if a woman knew the child would face a terrible life, the child might be better off. “Dead?” the teacher asked. My classmates said I needed to go to the other side, and I did. “I felt guilty and guilty and guilty,” I wrote in my journal. “I didn’t feel like a Christian when I was on that side of the room. I felt terrible, actually. . . . But I still have that thought that if a woman was raped, she has her right. But that’s so strange—she has a right to kill what would one day be her child? That issue is irresolved in my mind and it will eat at me until I sort it out.”

I had always thought of abortion as it had been taught to me in school: it was a sin that irresponsible women committed to cover up another sin, having sex in a non-Christian manner. The moral universe was a stark battle of virtue and depravity, in which the only meaningful question about any possible action was whether or not it would be sanctioned in the eyes of God. Men were sinful, and the goodness of women was the essential bulwark against the corruption of the world. There was suffering built into this framework, but suffering was noble; justice would prevail, in the end, because God always provided for the faithful. It was these last tenets, prosperity-gospel principles that neatly erase the material causes of suffering in our history and our social policies—not only regarding abortion but so much else—which toppled for me first. By the time I went to college, I understood that I was pro-choice.

America is, in many ways, a deeply religious country—the only wealthy Western democracy in which more than half of the population claims to pray every day. (In Europe, the figure is twenty-two per cent.) Although seven out of ten American women who get abortions identify as Christian, the fight to make the procedure illegal is an almost entirely Christian phenomenon. Two-thirds of the national population and nearly ninety per cent of Congress affirm a tradition in which a teen-age girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy allowed for the salvation of the world, in which a corrupt government leader who demanded a Massacre of the Innocents almost killed the baby Jesus and damned us all in the process, and in which the Son of God entered the world as what the godless dare to call a “clump of cells.”

For centuries, most Christians believed that human personhood began months into the long course of pregnancy. It was only in the twentieth century that a dogmatic narrative, in which every pregnancy is an iteration of the same static story of creation, began both to shape American public policy and to occlude the reality of pregnancy as volatile and ambiguous—as a process in which creation and destruction run in tandem. This newer narrative helped to erase an instinctive, long-held understanding that pregnancy does not begin with the presence of a child, and only sometimes ends with one. Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.

The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention. For most of history, women ended unwanted pregnancies as they needed to, taking herbal or plant-derived preparations on their own or with the help of female healers and midwives, who presided over all forms of treatment and care connected with pregnancy. They were likely enough to think that they were simply restoring their menstruation, treating a blockage of blood. Pregnancy was not confirmed until “quickening,” the point at which the pregnant person could feel fetal movement, a measurement that relied on her testimony. Then as now, there was often nothing that distinguished the result of an abortion—the body expelling fetal tissue—from a miscarriage.

Ancient records of abortifacient medicine are plentiful; ancient attempts to regulate abortion are rare. What regulations existed reflect concern with women’s behavior and marital propriety, not with fetal life. The Code of the Assura, from the eleventh century B.C.E., mandated death for married women who got abortions without consulting their husbands; when husbands beat their wives hard enough to make them miscarry, the punishment was a fine. The first known Roman prohibition on abortion dates to the second century and prescribes exile for a woman who ends her pregnancy, because “it might appear scandalous that she should be able to deny her husband of children without being punished.” Likewise, the early Christian Church opposed abortion not as an act of murder but because of its association with sexual sin. (The Bible offers ambiguous guidance on the question of when life begins: Genesis 2:7 arguably implies that it begins at first breath; Exodus 21:22-24 suggests that, in Old Testament law, a fetus was not considered a person; Jeremiah 1:5 describes God’s hand in creation even “before I formed you in the womb.” Nowhere does the Bible clearly and directly address abortion.) Augustine, in the fourth century, favored the idea that God endowed a fetus with a soul only after its body was formed—a point that Augustine placed, in line with Aristotelian tradition, somewhere between forty and eighty days into its development. “There cannot yet be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation when it is not formed in flesh, and so not yet endowed with sense,” he wrote. This was more or less the Church’s official position; it was affirmed eight centuries later by Thomas Aquinas.

In the early modern era, European attitudes began to change. The Black Death had dramatically lowered the continent’s population, and dealt a blow to most forms of economic activity; the Reformation had weakened the Church’s position as the essential intermediary between the layman and God. The social scientist Silvia Federici has argued, in her book “ Caliban and the Witch ,” that church and state waged deliberate campaigns to force women to give birth, in service of the emerging capitalist economy. “Starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion, and infanticide,” Federici notes. Midwives and “wise women” were prosecuted for witchcraft, a catchall crime for deviancy from procreative sex. For the first time, male doctors began to control labor and delivery, and, Federici writes, “in the case of a medical emergency” they “prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother.” She goes on: “While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state.”

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the most influential figures of the Reformation, did not address abortion at any length. But Catholic doctrine started to shift, albeit slowly. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V labelled both abortion and contraception as homicide. This pronouncement was reversed three years later, by Pope Gregory XIV, who declared that abortion was only homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he identified as occurring around twenty-four weeks into a pregnancy. Still, theologians continued to push the idea of embryonic humanity; in 1621, the physician Paolo Zacchia, an adviser to the Vatican, proclaimed that the soul was present from the moment of conception. Still, it was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX affirmed this doctrine, proclaiming abortion at any point in pregnancy to be a sin punishable by excommunication.

When I found out I was pregnant, at the beginning of 2020, I wondered how the experience would change my understanding of life, of fetal personhood, of the morality of reproduction. It’s been years since I traded the echo chamber of evangelical Texas for the echo chamber of progressive Brooklyn, but I can still sometimes feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision. I have come to believe that abortion should be universally accessible, regulated only by medical codes and ethics, and not by the criminal-justice system. Still, in passing moments, I can imagine upholding the idea that our sole task when it comes to protecting life is to end the practice of abortion; I can imagine that seeming profoundly moral and unbelievably urgent. I would only need to think of the fetus in total isolation—to imagine that it were not formed and contained by another body, and that body not formed and contained by a family, or a society, or a world.

As happens to many women, though, I became, if possible, more militant about the right to an abortion in the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving. It wasn’t just the difficult things that had this effect—the paralyzing back spasms, the ragged desperation of sleeplessness, the thundering doom that pervaded every cell in my body when I weaned my child. And it wasn’t just my newly visceral understanding of the anguish embedded in the facts of American family life. (A third of parents in one of the richest countries in the world struggle to afford diapers ; in the first few months of the pandemic , as Jeff Bezos’s net worth rose by forty-eight billion dollars, sixteen per cent of households with children did not have enough to eat.) What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. I had not been forced by law to make another person with my flesh, or to tear that flesh open to bring her into the world; I hadn’t been driven by need to give that new person away to a stranger in the hope that she would never go to bed hungry. I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.

Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt, to me, like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake. The debate about abortion in America is “rooted in the largely unacknowledged premise that continuing a pregnancy is a prima facie moral good,” the pro-choice Presbyterian minister Rebecca Todd Peters writes . But childbearing, Peters notes, is a morally weighted act, one that takes place in a world of limited and unequally distributed resources. Many people who get abortions—the majority of whom are poor women who already have children—understand this perfectly well. “We ought to take the decision to continue a pregnancy far more seriously than we do,” Peters writes.

I gave birth in the middle of a pandemic that previewed a future of cross-species viral transmission exacerbated by global warming, and during a summer when ten million acres on the West Coast burned . I knew that my child would not only live in this degrading world but contribute to that degradation. (“Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt ten thousand tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets,” David Wallace-Wells writes in his book “ The Uninhabitable Earth .”) Just before COVID arrived, the science writer Meehan Crist published an essay in the London Review of Books titled “Is it OK to have a child?” (The title alludes to a question that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asked in a live stream, on Instagram.) Crist details the environmental damage that we are doing, and the costs for the planet and for us and for those who will come after. Then she turns the question on its head. The idea of choosing whether or not to have a child, she writes, is predicated on a fantasy of control that “quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.”

In late 2021, as Omicron brought New York to another COVID peak, a Gen Z boy in a hoodie uploaded a TikTok , captioned “yall better delete them baby names out ya notes its 60 degrees in december.” By then, my baby had become a toddler. Every night, as I set her in the crib, she chirped good night to the elephants, koalas, and tigers on the wall, and I tried not to think about extinction. My decision to have her risked, or guaranteed, additional human suffering; it opened up new chances for joy and meaning. There is unknowability in every reproductive choice.

As the German historian Barbara Duden writes in her book “ Disembodying Women ,” the early Christians believed that both the bodies that created life and the world that sustained it were proof of the “continual creative activity of God.” Women and nature were aligned, in this view, as the material sources of God’s plan. “The word nature is derived from nascitura , which means ‘birthing,’ and nature is imagined and felt to be like a pregnant womb, a matrix, a mother,” Duden writes. But, in recent decades, she notes, the natural world has begun to show its irreparable damage. The fetus has been left as a singular totem of life and divinity, to be protected, no matter the costs, even if everything else might fall.

The scholar Katie Gentile argues that, in times of cultural crisis and upheaval, the fetus functions as a “site of projected and displaced anxieties,” a “fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future.” The more degraded actual life becomes on earth, the more fervently conservatives will fight to protect potential life in utero. We are locked into the destruction of the world that birthed all of us; we turn our attention, now, to the worlds—the wombs—we think we can still control.

By the time that the Catholic Church decided that abortion at any point, for any reason, was a sin, scientists had identified the biological mechanism behind human reproduction, in which a fetus develops from an embryo that develops from a zygote, the single-celled organism created by the union of egg and sperm. With this discovery, in the mid-nineteenth century, women lost the most crucial point of authority over the stories of their pregnancies. Other people would be the ones to tell us, from then on, when life began.

At the time, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, a country founded and largely populated by Protestants. But American physicians, through the then newly formed American Medical Association, mounted a campaign to criminalize it, led by a gynecologist named Horatio Storer, who once described the typical abortion patient as a “wretch whose account with the Almighty is heaviest with guilt.” (Storer was raised Unitarian but later converted to Catholicism.) The scholars Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon have argued that these doctors, whose profession was not as widely respected as it would later become, used abortion “as a wedge issue,” one that helped them portray their work “as morally and professionally superior to the practice of midwifery.” By 1910, abortion was illegal in every state, with exceptions only to save the life of “the mother.” (The wording of such provisions referred to all pregnant people as mothers, whether or not they had children, thus quietly inserting a presumption of fetal personhood.) A series of acts known as the Comstock laws had rendered contraception, abortifacient medicine, and information about reproductive control widely inaccessible, by criminalizing their distribution via the U.S. Postal Service. People still sought abortions, of course: in the early years of the Great Depression, there were as many as seven hundred thousand abortions annually. These underground procedures were dangerous; several thousand women died from abortions every year.

This is when the contemporary movements for and against the right to abortion took shape. Those who favored legal abortion did not, in these years, emphasize “choice,” Daniel K. Williams notes in his book “ Defenders of the Unborn .” They emphasized protecting the health of women, protecting doctors, and preventing the births of unwanted children. Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, argued, as their successors do, that they were defending human life and human rights. The horrors of the Second World War gave the movement a lasting analogy: “Logic would lead us from abortion to the gas chamber,” a Catholic clergyman wrote, in October, 1962.

Ultrasound imaging, invented in the nineteen-fifties, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people—doctors, politicians, activists. In 1965, Life magazine published a photo essay by Lennart Nilsson called “ Drama of Life Before Birth ,” and put the image of a fetus at eighteen weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible, deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being—a “spaceman,” as Nilsson wrote, floating in a void, entirely independent from the person whose body creates it. They became totems of the anti-abortion movement; Life had not disclosed that all but one had been taken of aborted fetuses, and that Nilsson had lit and posed their bodies to give the impression that they were alive.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to allow abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or medical emergency. A group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis began operating an abortion-referral service led by the pastor of Judson Memorial Church, in Manhattan; the resulting network of pro-choice clerics eventually spanned the country, and referred an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand women to safe abortions. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today held a symposium of prominent theologians, in 1968, which resulted in a striking statement: “Whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” Meanwhile, the priest James McHugh became the director of the National Right to Life Committee, and equated fetuses to the other vulnerable people whom faithful Christians were commanded to protect: the old, the sick, the poor. As states began to liberalize their abortion laws, the anti-abortion movement attracted followers—many of them antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics—using the language of civil rights, and adopted the label “pro-life.”

W. A. Criswell, a Dallas pastor who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970, said, shortly after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade , that “it was only after a child was born and had life separate from his mother that it became an individual person,” and that “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and the future should be allowed.” But the Court’s decision accelerated a political and theological transformation that was already under way: by 1979, Criswell, like the S.B.C., had endorsed a hard-line anti-abortion stance. Evangelical leadership, represented by such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority , joined with Catholics to oppose the secularization of popular culture, becoming firmly conservative—and a powerful force in Republican politics. Bible verses that express the idea of divine creation, such as Psalm 139 (“For you created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” in the New International Version’s translation), became policy explanations for prohibiting abortion.

In 1984, scientists used ultrasound to detect fetal cardiac activity at around six weeks’ gestation—a discovery that has been termed a “fetal heartbeat” by the anti-abortion movement, though a six-week-old fetus hasn’t yet formed a heart, and the electrical pulses are coming from cell clusters that can be replicated in a petri dish. At six weeks, in fact, medical associations still call the fetus an embryo; as I found out in 2020, you generally can’t even schedule a doctor’s visit to confirm your condition until you’re eight weeks along.

So many things that now shape the cultural experience of pregnancy in America accept and reinforce the terms of the anti-abortion movement, often with the implicit goal of making pregnant women feel special, or encouraging them to buy things. “Your baby,” every app and article whispered to me sweetly, wrongly, many months before I intuited personhood in the being inside me, or felt that the life I was forming had moved out of a liminal realm.

I tried to learn from that liminality. Hope was always predicated on uncertainty; there would be no guarantees of safety in this or any other part of life. Pregnancy did not feel like soft blankets and stuffed bunnies—it felt cosmic and elemental, like volcanic rocks grinding, or a wild plant straining toward the sun. It was violent even as I loved it. “Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide,” the evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin points out in an essay titled “War in the womb.” Many of the genes that activate during embryonic development also activate when a body has been invaded by cancer, Sadedin notes; in ectopic pregnancies, which are unviable by definition and make up one to two per cent of all pregnancies, embryos become implanted in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and “tunnel ferociously toward the richest nutrient source they can find.” The result, Sadedin writes, “is often a bloodbath.”

The Book of Genesis tells us that the pain of childbearing is part of the punishment women have inherited from Eve. The other part is subjugation to men: “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you,” God tells Eve. Tertullian, a second-century theologian, told women, “You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of the (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” The idea that guilt inheres in female identity persists in anti-abortion logic: anything a woman, or a girl, does with her body can justify the punishment of undesired pregnancy, including simply existing.

If I had become pregnant when I was a thirteen-year-old Texan , I would have believed that abortion was wrong, but I am sure that I would have got an abortion. For one thing, my Christian school did not allow students to be pregnant. I was aware of this, and had, even then, a faint sense that the people around me grasped, in some way, the necessity of abortion—that, even if they believed that abortion meant taking a life, they understood that it could preserve a life, too.

One need not reject the idea that life in the womb exists or that fetal life has meaning in order to favor the right to abortion; one must simply allow that everything, not just abortion, has a moral dimension, and that each pregnancy occurs in such an intricate web of systemic and individual circumstances that only the person who is pregnant could hope to evaluate the situation and make a moral decision among the options at hand. A recent survey found that one-third of Americans believe life begins at conception but also that abortion should be legal. This is the position overwhelmingly held by American Buddhists, whose religious tradition casts abortion as the taking of a human life and regards all forms of life as sacred but also warns adherents against absolutism and urges them to consider the complexity of decreasing suffering, compelling them toward compassion and respect.

There is a Buddhist ritual practiced primarily in Japan, where it is called mizuko kuyo : a ceremony of mourning for miscarriages, stillbirths, and aborted fetuses. The ritual is possibly ersatz; critics say that it fosters and preys upon women’s feelings of guilt. But the scholar William LaFleur argues, in his book “ Liquid Life ,” that it is rooted in a medieval Japanese understanding of the way the unseen world interfaces with the world of humans—in which being born and dying are both “processes rather than fixed points.” An infant was believed to have entered the human world from the realm of the gods, and move clockwise around a wheel as she grew older, eventually passing back into the spirit realm on the other side. But some infants were mizuko , or water babies: floating in fluids, ontologically unstable. These were the babies who were never born. A mizuko , whether miscarried or aborted—and the two words were similar: kaeru , to go back, and kaesu , to cause to go back—slipped back, counterclockwise, across the border to the realm of the gods.

There is a loss, I think, entailed in abortion—as there is in miscarriage, whether it occurs at eight or twelve or twenty-nine weeks. I locate this loss in the irreducible complexity of life itself, in the terrible violence and magnificence of reproduction, in the death that shimmered at the edges of my consciousness in the shattering moment that my daughter was born. This understanding might be rooted in my religious upbringing—I am sure that it is. But I wonder, now, how I would square this: that fetuses were the most precious lives in existence, and that God, in His vision, already chooses to end a quarter of them. The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting in accordance with God’s plan for them, too? ♦

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Black feminists defined abortion rights as a matter of equality, not just “choice.”

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Pro-Choice, Not Pro-Abortion

Since the Supreme Court’s historic decision Roe v. Wade , the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion has fostered one of the most contentious moral and political debates in United States history. With the passing of New York’s Reproductive Health Act, people are up in arms, passionately defending their opinions. Social media feeds have become a revolving door of overly simplified arguments, emotional personal anecdotes, and people defending their closely held beliefs. Conservative Americans, including many students at BYU, often misunderstand the pro-choice stance.

No One Is Pro-Abortion

Pro-choice advocates are not pro-abortion, but pro-choice, and that is an important distinction. We believe that every woman should have access to quality reproductive care, including abortions when necessary, and that abortions should be safe, legal, and rare . And by rare, we really mean rare. While it is impossible to consider all the potential circumstances that might elicit consideration of an abortion, this phrase generally refers to instances of rape, incest, when the life of the mother is jeopardized, when a fetus is no longer viable, or when the circumstances or environment of the child would be severely damaging or abusive. The idea that women seek out abortions because they love being sexually promiscuous and they just can’t be bothered with a baby is a lie, a misperception unrepresentative of why women seek abortions. Most women don’t make the decision to have an abortion casually. They often wrestle with the decision in profound ways in consultation with their spouse, family, close friends, religious leaders, or medical professionals.

Pro-choice advocates also strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child. This can be done by ensuring women have safe and healthy pregnancies, by providing services during pregnancy and after childbirth, including adoption and social support services, as well as providing protections for women against pregnancy discrimination [1].

A Symptom of the Problem

We can all agree that abortion should be a rare necessity, and the only way to accomplish this goal is to prevent unplanned pregnancy in the first place. This can be done by providing comprehensive sex education in schools and religious communities, ensuring access to accurate information about contraception, and making contraception more affordable and widely available [6] [7]. The current administration has cut funding to such teen pregnancy prevention programs and has instead proposed allocating millions of dollars towards failed abstinence-only programs that often rely on scare tactics and inaccurate information [8] [9].

Since Roe v. Wade , the definition of the right to choose has evolved and expanded, but the principle of women’s autonomy has remained the same. In a subsequent Supreme Court case,

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stated that “the ability of a women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives” [2]. An ability to control reproductive life includes access to comprehensive sex education, family planning and contraception, adequate medical care, a safe environment, the ability to continue or end a pregnancy, and the resources that make that choice possible.

Are we giving women the resources that allow them to make the choice to keep a child? Have we given them the support services that they need? Often pro-life advocates fervently support the child in the womb, but they abort the child in other ways as soon as it is born. They abort the child through lack of healthcare, education, affordable housing, welfare programs, and other life-sustaining necessities.

Limiting Access Is Not a Solution

The most prominent proposed solution among pro-life organizations and supporters is to limit access to abortions. However, even if the United States outlawed all abortions, women who desperately needed an abortion would still have alternatives, but those options would be extremely unsafe and unsanitary. Before abortion was legalized, women frequently tried to induce miscarriages by using coat hangers, knitting needles, radiator flush, or by going to unsafe "back-alley" abortionists [3]. The World Health Organization estimated that unsafe abortions cause 68,000 maternal deaths worldwide each year, many of those in countries where safe and legal abortion services are difficult or impossible to access [5].

Echoes of Oppression

The abortion debate highlights an idea that has long been upheld and promoted around the world: that women never take priority. Throughout history, the U.S. government has told women what they can and cannot do. Women were told that they couldn’t own property, open a bank account, vote, get divorced, attend college, or work outside the home, among many, many other things. For so many women, the pro-life argument echoes the underlying principle that perpetuated the subordination of women for hundreds of years: that their rights are secondary. Women’s rights have never been prioritized. With abortion, the rights of the woman are being considered secondarily, if at all. To focus solely on the rights of the fetus negates its mother's value, personhood, and human rights. We should, therefore, give great consideration to mothers’ rights as well as to those of the unborn.

[1] https://democrats.org/about/party-platform/#reproductive-health

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html

[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/25/news/la-ol-the-coat-hanger-symbol-of-dangerous-preroe-abortions-is-back-20140324

[4] https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2003/01/public-health-impact-legal-abortion-30-years-later

[5] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/42976/9241591803.pdf;jsessionid=FC4673BED7C61B20B8123E60FFA80D23?sequence=1

[6] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0024658&utm_source=AOL&utm_medium=readMore&utm_campaign=partner#s3

[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/

[8] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/545289168/abstinence-education-is-ineffective-and-unethical-report-argues

[9] https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/grant-programs/funding-opportunities/index.html

[10] https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/abortion.htm

If you’re pro-life , you might already be  pro-choice

Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy, University of Toronto

Disclosure statement

Matthew Scarfone receives funding from Fonds de recherche du Québec en Société et culture (FRQSC).

University of Toronto provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA.

University of Toronto provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

View all partners

Many people are worried that the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg puts protections of reproductive rights at increased risk in the United States. With a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court likely to be filled by a president and Senate favouring increased restrictions on these rights, the survival of Roe v. Wade — which ruled that the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s liberty to have an abortion — is gravely threatened.

Public debate about abortion rights is likely to get heated. So it seems appropriate to revisit the moral arguments used to defend both the pro-choice and pro-life positions.

As an ethicist who researches moral beliefs, I examine the moral justifications people give for the things they believe. You likely already know where you stand when it comes to the morality of abortion. But I think going over the arguments supporting long-held views can show an overlooked inconsistency in the pro-life view. It’s an inconsistency that I am hopeful can lead people who are pro-life to support a woman’s right to choose.

Rights and claims

Let’s remind ourselves of the basics. Pro-choice arguments usually appeal to the mother’s right to bodily autonomy , and it is because of the mother’s right to bodily autonomy that abortion is generally morally permissible. Pro-life arguments usually appeal to the fetus’s right to life , and it is because of the fetus’s right to life that abortion is generally morally forbidden.

More sophisticated versions of these arguments appeal to different weighing claims. Someone who is pro-choice can accept that a fetus does indeed have a right to life but insist this right is outweighed by the mother’s right to bodily autonomy . Likewise, someone who is pro-life can accept that a mother does indeed have a right to bodily autonomy but insist that this right is outweighed by the fetus’s right to life .

Read more: A concise history of the US abortion debate

But these two positions are not monoliths. Some people who are pro-life believe there are important exceptions regarding abortion. A moderate pro-life position says that abortion is generally morally forbidden, except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, or when the pregnancy is caused by incest or rape. I’ll focus on the last of these exceptions here. Other pro-life defenders, who are more extreme, reject such qualifiers.

This difference is evident among U.S. Republicans. In May 2019, a coalition of pro-life activists urged the Republican National Committee (RNC) to oppose any exceptions for rape within newly passed abortion laws, because “the value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of one’s conception or birth.”

But in the same month, Donald Trump tweeted: “… I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions — Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother …,” echoing a belief held by Ronald Reagan .

Justifiable exceptions

The moderate pro-life position is also widely shared among the general public. Nearly 75 per cent of Americans think that abortion should be permissible in cases of rape. Since Americans are nearly equally split between pro-choice and pro-life positions, we can assume that many people who are pro-life are among those who think that rape exceptions are justified.

While the moderate pro-life position has broad support among the general public, it receives very little attention from moral philosophers. In a recent paper , I have suggested that one reason for this surprising oversight is because the popular view is actually incoherent. But it is not for the reason stated in the letter to the RNC. Rather, bringing out the incoherency requires us to unpack the underlying moral justification for the view.

There seem to be three underlying claims for the moderate pro-life position. The first claim is: a fetus is a human being from the moment of conception, or else at some point during gestation.

The moral point here is that human beings have a right to life, and because a fetus is a human being it too has a right to life. Many people who are pro-choice might deny this claim, but let’s accept it for the sake of argument.

The second underlying claim is: a right to life is stronger than, or outweighs, a right to bodily autonomy.

As we saw above, this is the weighing claim familiar to pro-life positions. It says that a right to life is morally weighty enough to tilt away from a right to bodily autonomy.

And the third underlying claim is: abortion is permissible for a pregnancy caused by rape.

With the three claims on the table, what we can notice is that the third claim is an excusing condition on the second claim. The idea here is that while a fetus’s right to life normally outweighs a mother’s right to bodily autonomy, when the fetus is conceived as result of rape abortion becomes permissible. And that means that the moral justification for the moderate pro-life positions stems from the type of act that rape is. Rape is of course an extreme violation of someone’s autonomy.

Read more: Will the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade? And if it does, what happens to abortion rights?

Moral significance

But now the incoherency reveals itself. Consider the following gloss: the moderate pro-life position says that a right to life is stronger than, or outweighs, a right to bodily autonomy, except when the fetus that has the right to life is created by a violation of … bodily autonomy.

Once we put in the work to unpack the moderate pro-life position, we see that it makes an appeal to the moral significance of bodily autonomy. Crucially, it does this while attempting to explain why the act of rape excuses the ordinary weighting of life over autonomy. But this is incoherent. It says that life is more important than autonomy, except when autonomy is more important than life.

When someone allows for an exception to abortion in cases of rape, they are acknowledging that there are violations of autonomy that can justify abortion. And if some violations of autonomy are appropriate grounds, then it cannot be true that a right to life is morally weightier than a right to bodily autonomy.

Some might think that realizing this inconsistency should push moderate pro-lifers to a more extreme position. But I think that the hard part is convincing someone that autonomy considerations have any relevance regarding reproductive ethics. People who accept the moderate pro-life position are already sympathetic to this point. I believe they can come around to thinking that the law should respect the importance of autonomy more broadly.

• Reproductive rights
• US Supreme Court
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

GRAINS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CHAIRPERSON

Technical Skills Laboratory Officer

Faculty of Law - Academic Appointment Opportunities

Audience Development Coordinator (fixed-term maternity cover)

Human rights abuses are happening right now – start a monthly gift today.

• Videos & Photos
• Take Action

US: Abortion Access is a Human Right

Q&A on How Ban Will Violate Rights of Women, Girls, and Pregnant People

Share this via Facebook Share this via X Share this via WhatsApp Share this via Email Other ways to share Share this via LinkedIn Share this via Reddit Share this via Telegram Share this via Printer

(Washington, DC) – Reproductive rights, including the right to access abortion, are grounded in internationally recognized human rights. Human Rights Watch released a new question-and-answer document that articulates the human rights imperative, guided by international law, to ensure access to abortion, which is critical to guaranteeing many fundamental human rights for women, girls, and pregnant people.

Q&A: Access to Abortion is a Human Right

“Guaranteeing access to abortion is not only a public health imperative, it is a human rights imperative as well,” said Macarena Sáez , women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Though more governments are taking steps to increase access to abortion, others are impeding or outright banning it, putting the rights of women, girls, and pregnant people at risk.”

The question-and-answer document addresses questions around the human rights impacts of restricted abortion access, the health consequences of unsafe abortions, and more.

Where safe and legal abortion services are restricted or not fully available, a number of human rights may be at risk, including the rights to life, to health, to information, to nondiscrimination and equality, to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, to privacy, to decide the number and spacing of children, to liberty, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress, and to freedom of conscience and religion.

Banning or restricting abortion services does not eliminate the need for abortion. Rather than lower abortion rates, restricting abortion access increases the risk of unsafe procedures and creates a danger of introducing criminal laws so that people are reported to the police or prosecuted for suspected abortions. These risks especially affect people living in poverty or who are otherwise subject to systemic discrimination, Human Rights Watch said.  

In the question-and-answer document, Human Rights Watch details how, when abortion is restricted or banned, the worst impact is on girls and marginalized groups, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, people living in economic poverty, and sexual and gender minorities. |

The United States is a party to several international treaties that recognize the rights to life, to privacy and bodily autonomy and integrity, nondiscrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, among others.

Abortion is already inaccessible for many pregnant people in many parts of the US, inconsistent with the country’s international human rights obligations. By removing constitutional protection of the right to access legal abortion, the US will fall further out of line with its human rights obligations, leading to rights violations against many people.  

The US already has the highest maternal mortality rate when compared with 10 similarly situated high-income countries, and Black women in the United States are more likely to die than white women from a pregnancy-related cause, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. 

The US is out of step with the global trend of expanding abortion access. In recent years, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand, among others, have decriminalized abortion or loosened restrictions. Many of these countries relied on human rights commitments and arguments when making this change.

The human rights on which a right to abortion access is predicated are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.

United Nations human rights treaty bodies regularly call on governments to decriminalize abortion in all cases, and to ensure access to safe, legal abortion at a minimum in certain circumstances.

Lack of access to safe, legal abortion can result in forced pregnancy, including among girls.

Your tax deductible gift can help stop human rights violations and save lives around the world.

• United States
• Economic Justice
• Children's Rights
• Sexual and Reproductive Health
• Women's Rights
• Reproductive Rights and Abortion
• Women’s Health and FGM

More Reading

Us supreme court topples roe v. wade in a blow to rights, “the only people it really affects are the people it hurts”.

The Human Rights Consequences of Parental Notice of Abortion in Illinois

Most Viewed

A dirty investment.

“Don’t Punish Me for Who I Am”

Gaza: Israel’s Imposed Starvation Deadly for Children

A Threshold Crossed

Protecting Rights, Saving Lives

Human Rights Watch defends the rights of people in close to 100 countries worldwide, spotlighting abuses and bringing perpetrators to justice

Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today.

Every weekday, get the world’s top human rights news, explored and explained by Andrew Stroehlein.

How To Win Any Argument About Abortion

So you're talking to someone who says something ignorant . And while you know that they're in the wrong, your words escape you. To make sure that doesn't happen, we've compiled a series of reference guides with the most common arguments — and your counter-arguments — for the most hot-button issues. Ahead, how to argue the pro-choice position .

Common Argument #1: A fetus is a human being, and human beings have the right to life, so abortion is murder.

The Pro-Choice Argument: I'm probably not going to convince you that a fetus isn't a life, as that's basically the most intractable part of this whole debate, so I'll be brief:

• A fetus can't survive on its own. It is fully dependent on its mother's body, unlike born human beings.
• Even if a fetus was alive, the "right to life" doesn't imply a right to use somebody else's body. People have the right to refuse to donate their organs , for example, even if doing so would save somebody else's life.
• The "right to life" also doesn't imply a right to live by threatening somebody else's life. Bearing children is always a threat the life of the mother (see below).
• A "right to life" is, at the end of the day, a right to not have somebody else's will imposed upon your body. Do women not have this right as well?

Common Argument #2: If a woman is willing to have sex, she's knowingly taking the risk of getting pregnant, and should be responsible for her actions.

The Pro-Choice Argument: You're asserting that giving birth is the "responsible" choice in the event of a pregnancy, but that's just your opinion. I'd argue that if a mother knows she won't be able to provide for her child, it's actually more responsible to have an abortion, and in doing so prevent a whole lot of undue suffering and misery.

But let's look at this argument a bit further. If you think getting an abortion is "avoiding responsibility," that implies that it's a woman's responsibility to bear a child if she chooses to have sex. That sounds suspiciously like you're dictating what a woman's role and purpose is, and a lot less like you're making an argument about the life of a child.

Common Reply : No, because women can practice safe sex and avoid getting pregnant. If she refuses to use contraception and gets pregnant as a result, that's her fault, and her responsibility.

Your Rebuttal: Not everyone has easy access to contraception , nor does everyone have a good enough sex education class to know how to use it or where to obtain it. But let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that everyone had access to free contraception and knew how to use it correctly.

Even then, no contraception is 100% effective. Presumably, you oppose abortions even in cases where contraception fails (and it does sometimes fail, even when used perfectly). If that's true, you're saying that, by merely choosing to have sex — with or without a condom — a woman becomes responsible for having a child. And that's a belief that has everything to do with judging a woman's behavior, and nothing to do with the value of life.

Common Argument #3: But I'm OK with abortions in cases of rape .

The Pro-Choice Argument: Why only in those cases? Are the lives of children who were conceived by rape worth less than the lives of children who were willfully conceived? If preserving the life of the child takes primacy over the desires of the mother — which is what you're saying if you if you oppose any legal abortions — then it shouldn't matter how that life was conceived.

Common Argument #4: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Your Response: Go home, Todd Akin , you're drunk.

Common Argument #5: Adoption is a viable alternative to abortion.

The Pro-Choice Argument: This implies that the only reason a woman would want to get an abortion is to avoid raising a child, and that isn't the case. Depending on the circumstances, the mere act of having a child in a hospital can cost between $3,000 and $37,000 in the United States. Giving birth is dangerous, too: In the United States, pregnancy complications are the sixth most common cause of death for women between the ages of 20 and 34.

Even before birth, there are costs to pregnancy. In addition to the whole "carrying another human being around in your stomach for nine months" thing, many women, particularly teens, are shunned and shamed for their pregnancies — not only by friends, families, employers, and classmates, but also by advertisements in the subway . There's also the risk of violent retribution from abusive partners and parents.

In short, there are a lot of reasons a woman might seek an abortion. Adoption doesn't address all of them.

Common Argument #6: When abortion is legal, women just use it as a form of birth control.

The Pro-Choice Argument: Do you have evidence of this? Considering that contraceptives are cheaper, easier, less painful, less time-consuming, less emotionally taxing, and more readily available than abortions, it seems odd to suggest that women who've already decided to use birth control would select abortion as their preferred method. It's more likely the opposite: Historical and contemporary data suggests that women will seek abortions regardless of whether or not they're legal, but that when birth control and contraceptives are more widely accessible, abortion rates go down.

Common Argument #7: Abortions are dangerous.

The Pro-Choice Argument: When performed by trained professionals, abortions are one of the safest procedures in medicine, with a death rate of less than 0.01%. The risk of dying while giving birth is roughly 13 times higher. Abortions performed by people without the requisite skills and training, however, are extremely unsafe. An estimated 68,000 women die every year from back alley abortions, which are generally most common when abortion is illegal and/or inaccessible.

If you'd like to examine the health impact of banning abortion, consider Romania, which banned abortions in 1966. That policy remained in place for about 23 years, during which time over 9,000 women died from unsafe abortions , and countless others were permanently injured. That's around two women dying every day. When the policy was reversed, maternal mortality rate plummeted to one-eighth of what it was at its peak under the no-abortion policy.

Abortions and maternal death rates in Romania, 1965-2010. Image credit: BMJ Group

The negative health effects of prohibiting abortion don't end with the mothers. Romania's abortion ban sparked a nationwide orphan crisis, as roughly 150,000 unwanted newborns were placed in nightmarish state-run orphanages . Many of those orphans now suffer from severe mental and physical health problems, including reduced brain size, schizoaffective disorder, and sociopathy.

When abortion is illegal, it becomes exponentially more unsafe for both women and their children. You may not like the fact that women will seek abortions even when they're illegal, but it is undeniably a fact nonetheless.

Common Argument #8: What if Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King had been aborted?

Your Response: Are you saying abortion policy should be influenced by how good of a person a fetus ends up becoming? If that's the case, what if Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot had been aborted?

Common Argument #9: Many women who get abortions regret their decision later on.

The Pro-Choice Argument: This is a pretty common argument. As with shaming of teen moms, it pops up in subway ads.

This is a bad argument. Should the government ban people from doing things they sometimes regret? Think of everything you've ever regretted — not moving after college, dating the wrong person — and ask yourself if you wish there had been a law to prevent you from doing that thing. You probably don't, because you probably believe people should be able to choose their own paths in life regardless of whether they regret those choices later on. I agree, which is part of why I'm pro-choice .

Common Argument #10: Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay for things they find morally disagreeable.

The Pro-Choice Argument: By that rationale, America also shouldn't have a military, since that's funded by taxes, and many taxpayers find American foreign policy morally disagreeable. Also, the Hyde Amendment prevents most public funds from going toward abortions. But that's a moot point, because these are two separate arguments. Believing that abortion should be legal doesn't require you to also believe that taxpayer dollars should fund abortions.

Common Argument #11: What if your mother had aborted you?

The Pro-Choice Argument: Well, if I'd never come into existence in the first place, I probably wouldn't have any strong feelings on the matter. Anyway, I love my mother very much and respect her right to make whatever decisions are right for her body and life.

The best pro-choice arguments , in summary:

• A "right to life" doesn't imply a right to use someone else's body to sustain a life.
• Women do not have a "responsibility" to have children, and certainly don't assume such a responsibility by virtue of deciding to have sex.
• Outlawing abortion is very dangerous, both for women and their children.
• Adoption still requires women to carry a baby to term and then give birth, both of which are also inherently dangerous.
• Abortions, on the other hand, are quite safe.
• Banning abortion violates a woman's right to control her own body.

This article was originally published on March 5, 2014

• Presidential Search
• Editor's Pick

Cambridge Residents Slam Council Proposal to Delay Bike Lane Construction

‘Gender-Affirming Slay Fest’: Harvard College QSA Hosts Annual Queer Prom

‘Not Being Nerds’: Harvard Students Dance to Tinashe at Yardfest

Wrongful Death Trial Against CAMHS Employee Over 2015 Student Suicide To Begin Tuesday

Cornel West, Harvard Affiliates Call for University to Divest from ‘Israeli Apartheid’ at Rally

The Pro-Choice Argument

There are those who hold that contraception unfairly manipulates the workings of nature, and others who cannot see the fetus as a child until the umbilical cord is cut. Invoking an almost religious fervor on both sides of the issue, abortion is one of the most emotionally potent present political controversies. Motherhood is a powerful institution in American life, and both the "Pro-choice" (supporting a woman's right to choose) and the "Pro-life" (anti-abortion) forces see the other as attacking the foundations of the mother-infant bond.

Social analysis argues forcibly for the need for safe, legal and affordable abortions. Approximately 1 million women had abortions annually until the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and abortion had become the leading cause of maternal death and mutilation (40 deaths/100,000 abortions compared to 40 deaths/100,000 live births according to National Abortion Rights Action league.) An estimated 9000 rape victims become pregnant each year (FBI 1973); 100,000 cases of incest occur yearly (National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, 1978). Two-thirds of teenage pregnancies are not planned, because many do not have adequate access to contraceptives (NARAL). And the taxpayer price of supporting a child on welfare is far greater than that of a Medicaid abortion. But the issue that provokes such anger surrounds the fetus's right to life--its status as a potential human being. Anti-abortionist proponents usually take the position that conception is life and therefore abortion is murder and violates the rights of the unborn, or that there is an inherent value in life and abortion is murder because it destroys that value.

The Supreme Court decided in 1973 that the unborn fetus had no constitutional rights until the third trimester (24-28 weeks), as it is incapable of functioning independently from the mother until that time. Right-to-Lifers claim that because the fetus will develop into a human being, it demands the same paternalistic protection that is extended to animals, children and others subject to exploitation and maltreatment. The fetus must be accorded the same constitutional rights as its mother.

Two arguments delineate the problems in giving the fetus these equivalent rights. The first looks at individual rights as the products of a social doctrine. Animals and children are unavoidably present within a society, and to ensure that they remain functioning members of that society they must be protected from exploitation by other societal members. Different political platforms advocate different rights--the right to free medical care, the right to minimal taxation--but all demarcate the interaction of the individual within the group. A person's rights protect him from future harassment, but to actually obtain those rights he must already be a member of the group providing him with those protections. An Australian cannot lay claim to American rights until he is on American soil (or its equivalent). He may have a guarantee that should he enter the United States, he will be accorded many of those protections. But the guarantee depends on his entrance onto American territory. In analogous fashion, until the fetus is actually, not potentially, a member of society, it does not have constitutional rights.

One could object that the fetus in the womb is as signally present in society as the child in the crib, that each are equally members of society. Yet surely the conception of "member" involves some minimal interaction. The fetus reacts to society of the outside world solely through the medium of the mother. Strictly speaking, then, society has no legal responsibility to the fetus, but rather to the mother.

This seems like a rather harsh position, but we can distinguish between the rights of the fetus and the action that a mother might feel morally compelled to take. Consider the following situation: suppose you were to return home one day and find a stranger camped out in your living room and peacefully eating the ham sandwich you saved for dinner. You would be tempted to throw him out in the street. Almost everyone could agree that you had the right to eject him.

But suppose he told you that he could not live outside of your house; perhaps one of his enemies waits outside your door. Moreover, he informs you that he needs food and clothing and someone to talk to--he needs your presence much of the day. He becomes more demanding: you must work less, earn less, give up jogging.

Introduce a complication: your food is strictly rationed, or perhaps your heating, on subsistence level for a single person. If the stranger stays with you, your life will be seriously endangered. You might be very upset, but if it came down to the wire you would probably kick him out of the house. Again, most people would agree you were within your rights to do so.

The difficulty of course arises when it would be possible for you to support him and take care of him, but you would rather not. You might agree if the demand were only for an evening, but hesitate if it were for the rest of your life. Do rights then depend upon the time factor? You could claim a certain moral responsibility towards another human being. But it is hard to say that he has the right to force you to support him. You are not legally required to help an old lady across the street.

One counterargument declares that willing intercourse implies acceptance of a possible pregnancy--that in effect you invited the stranger in, that you knew what you were in for and that he now has the right to demand your help. But faulty contraception is like a broken window. When you return to your suite and find your stereo missing, do you accede the thief's right to take it because your window is easily pried open? The abortion issue thus forces a clarification of the nature of the individual and his social rights. Although we may feel morally constrained to protect the future child, the fetus does not have the right to force us to do so. In the traditional dichotomy of church and state, to restrict abortion is to legislate morality.

The staunchest opposition comes from those who hold absolutely that conception is life. But belief in the inherent value of life is not a trite axiom: it avows some faith in the quality of existence beyond the moral injunction "Thou shalt not kill." It becomes easy to see as hypocritical those anti-abortionists--particularly men--who condone extra-marital intercourse (or even intramarital intercourse) yet would refuse to financially and emotionally support the child conceived because of faulty contraception. The only morally consistent value-of-life position is to have intercourse only if one is willing to accept a child as a possible consequence, and participate in the quality of the child's life. This in part lies behind the Catholic prohibition of premarital sex.

As a personal doctrine few would reproach those who follow it. But pragmatics belie its application to all society, rape being the prime instance where the woman is not free to choose to become pregnant. The restriction of federal support to cases of rape, incest and probable death of the mother suggests an interesting quality-of-life argument: that potentiality is not absolute but must be prorated. Due to society's dread of incest, such a mother and her child would be spared a psychologically unbearable life. In case of danger to the mother's life we do not hear that the 'child' has potentially far more years of happy, productive life than the mother. Rather, the argument runs that the mother's life should not be sacrificed for the child who would bear such a tremendous burden.

Yet an unwanted child may be born into a household with an equally heavy psychological toll. If the potentiality of life thesis rests on an understanding of the inner qualities of life, then abortion is a necessity rather than a crime. Those who deny the right to an abortion under any circumstances fail to see that their argument undercuts itself. Abortion provides a unique understanding of the "inherent good" of existence. It is morally irresponsible to believe that a pregnancy must be brought to term even in case of the mother's death simply because it is a matter of nature and out of our hands when we have the medical means to save the mother. The case involves a comparison of the life-value of the mother and the child: the final decision must evaluate the process of existence--the value of life as it is lived. The inherent value of life cannot be an a priori constant if a choice is to be made between two lives.

Once the quality of life-as-it-is-lived is introduced into the argument, we can say that abortion provides the possibility of improving that quality. Motherhood is a remarkably special bond between mother and child, perhaps the most important relationship we ever have. It requires tremendous emotional capacities, and raising children should be one of the most conscious decisions we make. Many of those who have abortions when young have children later in life, when they are more emotionally and financially equipped to handle them. Contraception is at most 99 per cent safe, and abortion must be available to allow women the freedom to provide the optimum conditions for their child's growth.

According to a 1978 Clark University study, 83 per cent of Massachusetts supports the woman's right to choose. But the trend of recent legislation is distinctly anti-abortion, the result of an extremely well-organized and funded "Pro-life" movement (which some link to the New Right). On the federal level, the 1976-7 Hyde Amendment, a rider on the Labor-HEW appropriations bill, cut off federally funded abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and "medically necessary" instances, defined by the Supreme Court as long-lasting physical or psychological damage to the mother's health.

In 1977 this clause cut 99 per cent of all reimbursements (250,000-300,000 annually prior to the cut-off); this year "medically necessary" has been replaced by probable death of the mother. Military women are similarly restricted under the Dornan Amendment; the Young Amendment funds no abortions at all for Peace Corps women. Employers may refuse to include abortion coverage in their company health plan under the Beard Amendment. Fifteen states have called for a constitutional convention to introduce the prohibition of all abortions: 19 more would fulfill the requisite number of 34.

In Massachusetts the Doyle Bill would cut off state funds in the same manner as the Hyde Amendment. Formerly an adjunct to the budget it was passed and signed as a bill this year. Appealed by MORAL (the Massachusetts Organization for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), the bill is under injunction and pending review by the Federal District Court on the basis of a Supreme Court decision that all medically necessary services must be available to the poor. As of last May, hospitals are no longer required to perform abortions upon demand except in case of probable death to the mother. Legislation restricting abortions to hospitals with full obstetrical care (rather than women's health clinics), now before the Massachusetts House, could place the woman in a double bind. Also under Massachusetts debate is an "Informed Consent" bill which essentially amounts to harrassment: the bill requires spouse and parental notification, with consent of parents or courts for minors, full information concerning the viability and appearance of the fetus, description of the aborting technique, anad a 24-hour waiting period after the 'information session' before the abortion could be obtained.

There is a real danger that anti-abortion legislation could become increasingly more restrictive. It already discriminates against women in lower economic brackets. The power of the pro-life people should not be underestimated: they have targeted 12 Congressmen for defeat in 1980, among them Morris Udall and Birch Bayh. We need to inform our politicians of their pro-choice constituency and reverse the further tightening of the over-restrictive and discriminatory legislation.

Tanya Luhrmann '80-3 is working for Abortion Rights Action Week.

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

The Abortion Converts

We used to be anti-abortion. why did we change our minds.

For years I had dreaded the arrival of puberty. The innocence of my childhood would become a memory and I would become a complex thing. I say “thing,” and not person, because I stood to lose my humanity in pieces. At 12 years old I understood, in a limited way, that to my evangelical community my value was principally reproductive in nature. My mind was a secondary consideration. If I showed too much skin, a hint of collarbone or thigh, I would be a stumbling block to the men around me. Not a person at all. An object of desire and of fear, a thing to control. The pulpit was a place for men, and so was the home. At best I could expect to be a middle manager of children, under the authority of a husband. That I might possess some authority over my own body never occurred to me at all. Abortion was thus unthinkable. Each physical development – the start of my period, the growth of my breasts – delivered me closer to a fate that felt like a trap. I lay awake at night, begging God to delay adolescence. He didn’t listen. When my period did begin I hid it for nearly two years.

The beliefs of my childhood were not special to my church. They were shared by thousands of evangelical congregations, and taught as fact in Christian schools and universities like the one I eventually attended. About a decade after God failed to stop puberty, I made an overdue connection in my mind. The Christian right’s treatment of women was bound up with its abortion politics. The same people who didn’t think I should preach, who thought I should submit to a husband because of my sex, also believed I didn’t have the right to control my own reproduction. My wants and needs did not matter. Neither did the health risks of pregnancy. Motherhood did not merely feel like a trap; without the option for abortion, it was a trap. The right’s goal was not the preservation of life, but the preservation of a hierarchy. With this realization, other facts became clear. The right’s opposition to LGBTQ rights, and its specific hostility to trans identities, derived from its commitment to the same hierarchy. The causes of women and LGBTQ people thus overlapped; liberation for one group could not exist without liberation of the other. I realized, then, that I could no longer oppose either abortion rights, or rights for LGBTQ people. Under the thumb of the right, none of us would ever be free.

Reproductive justice advocates have long placed abortion within a broader constellation of moral claims. As they view it, the right to abortion cannot be separated out from the right to food and shelter and health care. That perspective isn’t always shared by liberals in power. On abortion, elected Democrats can be timid, reluctant to alienate voters in difficult districts. On matters like health-care reform, they rarely speak with one voice. The right to abortion gets buried, often, under euphemisms about access and choice; the same is true for the right to health-care writ large. As the Supreme Court’s verdict in Dobbs looms, it is especially clear to me that liberalism lacks the clarity of the right. It is bloodless, and feckless; I have found no succor there. With Roe so endangered, I ask myself: How would the nation change if the party in power wholly embraced abortion as one moral good among many?

The story of my conversion is fundamentally about power in America: the shape and meaning and terror of it, as is now on display with the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade . The anti-abortion movement had to erase what it could not explain, minimize whatever challenged it, in order for the fetus to take precedence over the person who carried it. A perspective as rigid as ours was doomed to conflict with reality. Conversion is not the loss of belief, but rather its transference. Like myself, other converts found the anti-abortion view is incompatible with the mess and the pain of real life.

Bethany Hellwig is one such person. Not long after she graduated from the same Christian university I attended, a similar process unfolded in her life. For Hellwig, the child of a Southern Baptist minister, it was a deeply personal journey. “I would say one of the first things to change was my stance on LGBTQ people, because I came to terms with my own sexuality. I finally admitted to myself that I was bisexual and that was a part of who I was,” Hellwig tells me. Her position on abortion was among the last she reconsidered, and it was partly due to personal experience. When she and her husband began trying for children, they had difficulty conceiving. When Hellwig experienced a miscarriage, she bled so heavily she went to the emergency room, where doctors performed a dilation and curettage procedure to remove the tissue. While D&Cs, as they’re commonly known, are often performed to remove the remnants of a miscarriage, they can also be part of an elective abortion. “It was an emergency in the middle of the night,” she said. “And I remember thinking, I can’t have a D&C because that’s what an abortion is.” Even though she knew her fetus was no longer alive, she felt “guilty, getting a life-saving procedure.” A friend later suffered an ectopic pregnancy, treated by an abortion. “Things like that really started to change my mind,” she says.

Anti-abortion activists claim personhood for the fetus, but this view can be difficult to sustain. The fetus can be an abstraction , but not the person who has the womb. Josiah Solis found it difficult to oppose abortion once he knew someone who’d had one, though his conversion wasn’t easy. The son of a preacher and the eldest of ten children, told me that his parents were so pro-life that they adopted twins. Once, he planned to follow his father’s example, and left his Michigan home to attend The King’s University, which is attached to the Gateway Church in Dallas, Texas. For a while, Solis even served on staff at the influential megachurch, but over time he grew distant from the church and its conservative ideology. Like Hellwig, Solis is bisexual.

“When the Obergefell ruling came out, it was toward the tail end of my time on staff at church. And we were all told to basically make no comments about it, because this is a bad day for America, which was very conflicting internally for me,” he says. The church’s gun culture also began to bother him, and so, too, did its reaction to Black Lives Matter protests. “I remember thinking, hey, man, I thought we were conservatives,” he says. “In theory, an armed agent of the state shooting a guy 16 times seems bad. And I was like, oh, this isn’t actually about whatever small government or, whatever terms they want to use for their beliefs. It’s about something much larger.” On economic issues, he moved left, too, and voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016. But he still clung to an anti-abortion view, until he learned that a family member had obtained an abortion. It was the first time he’d known someone who’d undergone the procedure. “I knew this person was not evil and did not hate children, and certainly was not some radical leftist by any means, but was in a very difficult situation and made that very hard choice,” he says.

For some, the shift is a radical one. In one of her earliest memories, Sarah Edwards was three or four years old, and she was clutching a sign in her hands down the street from an abortion clinic. Her parents brought her there from their home in Charlotte, North Carolina to protest with their church. “At the time it feels like you’re part of something really important,” she says. Later, when she was about eight years old, she wore a little gold pin with two baby feet on it, pinned to the collar of her dresses. Her church didn’t seem unusual. Nearby congregations erected small white crosses on a lawn to represent babies lost to abortion, which was compared to the Holocaust. “I never heard any other moral crusades really mentioned,” she says. Abortion, she adds, was “the big, urgent moral crisis of our times.”

She started to change her mind gradually, as she gained access to a world outside her homeschool bubble. When her older sister attended college, Edwards began to read her textbooks and learned about the depths of American inequality. Although the books didn’t pertain to reproductive rights, she describes them as “early radicalizing texts” that framed inequality as “systemic” rather than the failings of an individual or the product of a sinful, fallen world. Later, she voted for Barack Obama in 2008, as she agreed with him on almost every issue, especially expanding health care. As for abortion, she adds, “even then, I think I kind of felt like it was more of a private conviction and less of a public one.” On a trip her freshman year of college at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, someone asked her “point-blank” what she thought of abortion. “When they asked me that question, I just realized I couldn’t justify it anymore and that I was too embarrassed to continue,” she says of her prior opposition.

The questions that changed her mind at the age of 18 are questions Edwards believes the pro-choice movement should put to the right: “Who in power is accompanying their calls to end abortion with actionable policy changes that will protect and support pregnant people and their families? Why, amid all these arguments about being pro-family, are men never held to task?”

Her sister, Elisabeth Alvarado, has also changed her mind on abortion, though it was “the last chip to fall” in a broader liberalization over time. Now living in Peru, where abortion is illegal in most circumstances, Alvarado has learned that abortion bans don’t stop the procedure from taking place. “Outlawing it didn’t work,” she says. “There’s a lot of kids living in poverty and a lot of abortions,” though of course they are risky. In recent Facebook posts, Alvaredo has engaged her more conservative friends and relatives directly on the subject. Learning that the average abortion patient is already a mother helped shift her perspective, she wrote, and while her own family and the church community of her childhood did foster and adopt children, “we had to see that these were drops in an ocean of need.” It’s hard to to reach anyone who believes deeply that the struggle against abortion is a matter of good against evil, Alvarado says. She does believe the left could frame its positions as pro-family. “I was on Medicaid with my first two pregnancies, and I had a couple of people commenting on my thread, who were like, well, you say these things about reduction of poverty, but we don’t believe in big government. We don’t believe that that’s pro-family,” she says. She knows better. There was no way, she said, that she could have paid for her births without Medicaid.

Perhaps the most important message anyone can glean from my story, and stories like it, is that power is achievable for anyone. The Christian right is a minority in its own country. With a combination of fervor and elite alliances that handed it key victories like Bush v. Gore , it will likely win the end of Roe . The response from the left should be rage – a passion to match that of the right – and a commitment to organizing. Agree on a goal, in this case the abolition of the hierarchy the right seeks to enshrine. The work of building power will take years, and it will be difficult. There will be setbacks, and failures, as there have been for the right, but freedom is possible.

You’ll never convince everyone. I know that well. My parents still believe the fetus is a person, though I can hear doubt creep in when I tell them that the end of Roe won’t be the end of abortion — the GOP seems to have contraception in its sights. This is further than they had wanted to go; they are becoming outliers within their own movement. It’s hard to know if there will be many evangelicals like my parents. If there are many children like the girl I once was, biding their time for a way out. The world I thought I’d escaped has instead followed me out, and it is everywhere now, an oppressive presence. Sometimes I feel its fingers around my throat. But all is not lost, not yet.

More on Life After Roe

• Trump Boots Anti-Abortion Extremists From His VP Shortlist
• The Best Way to Protect Abortion Rights Is by State Constitution
• Ross Douthat Is Wrong About What Caused a Powerful Pro-Abortion Backlash
• life after roe
• supreme court

Most Viewed Stories

• Paul Krugman Is Right About the Economy, and the Polls Are Wrong
• ‘Sleepy Don’: Trump Falls Asleep (Again!) During Hush-Money Trial
• Trump’s Gettysburg Address Featured a Pirate Impression
• Elon Musk Has Forgotten What Tesla Is
• Marjorie Taylor Greene Attempts Trump Legal Defense, Fails Very Badly
• The Never Trumper Listening to Trump Voters

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

• Paul Krugman Is Right About the Economy, and the Polls Are Wrong By Jonathan Chait
• ‘Sleepy Don’: Trump Falls Asleep (Again!) During Hush-Money Trial By Margaret Hartmann
• Trump’s Gettysburg Address Featured a Pirate Impression By Margaret Hartmann
• Elon Musk Has Forgotten What Tesla Is By Kevin T. Dugan
• Marjorie Taylor Greene Attempts Trump Legal Defense, Fails Very Badly By Jonathan Chait
• The Never Trumper Listening to Trump Voters By David Freedlander

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Opinion 2 questions that would expose Trump’s lies about abortion

An earlier version of this column misspelled the name of Mark Lee Dickson. This version has been corrected.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Donald Trump ’s newly announced position on abortion , except for the obvious — and provable — fact that he doesn’t mean it.

​Let me explain. After Dobbs , with the constitutional right to abortion gone, the most that abortion rights supporters can reasonably hope for from abortion opponents is the kind of leave-it-to-the-states stance that Trump just embraced. Trump outlined his views in a video released Monday , asserting that whatever states decide “must be the law of the land, and in this case, the law of the state.” States “will be different, many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be,” Trump said.

That approach is a terrible outcome for women in antiabortion jurisdictions, but it’s far better than an alternative nationwide rule that Trump had reportedly toyed with. Although a nationwide ban — some reports had Trump endorsing a measure that would prohibit abortion everywhere after 16 weeks — might sound reasonable, it’s anything but. At least as outlined by advocates such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), it would impose a ceiling on abortion access but not a floor.

Under the Graham approach, conservative states that want to impose more draconian limits would remain free to do so; the real impact would be to limit abortion access in states that prefer more permissive rules. And while the vast majority of abortions are performed before 15 or 16 weeks, cutting off abortion access at that point would affect women in many situations where fetal anomalies are not detected until later in pregnancy.

So, leaving the decision to individual states is the best we can expect under these terrible circumstances. Except that Trump’s new paean to states’ rights is utter hogwash.

First, look at his record. This man has been all over the lot on abortion, as politically convenient — from proclaiming himself “very pro-choice” in 1999 to asserting, briefly, in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Trump might have core convictions on some issues. But abortion is not one of them.

Second, look at his words. He told us straight out that his new commitment to states’ rights is driven by politics; we should believe him. “Great love and compassion must be shown when even thinking about the subject of LIFE, but at the same time we must use common sense in realizing that we have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation, which is currently in serious DECLINE, TO WIN ELECTIONS,” Trump said in a social media post on Sunday. In short, this is politics, pure and simple.

Third, and most important, consider the questions Trump can’t, or won’t, answer about his newly evolved position: Would a second Trump administration enforce the Comstock Act , the 1873 law that makes it a felony to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion”? And would the Food and Drug Administration, in a second Trump term, restrict or eliminate access to the abortion drug mifepristone ?

The Comstock Act is antiabortion advocates’ trump card. This antiquated law was a dead letter during the half-century that Roe v. Wade was in place because the constitutional right to abortion would have superseded any attempt to enforce its provisions.

In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the Biden Justice Department said it interpreted the Comstock Act to cover only illegal abortions. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in a memo dated Dec. 23 , 2022, concluded that the law doesn’t bar the mailing, delivery or receipt of abortion medications “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient will use them unlawfully.”

Despite the law’s broad language, the memo said, “over the course of the last century, the Judiciary, Congress, and USPS [the Postal Service] have all settled upon an understanding … that is narrower than a literal reading might suggest.”

Indeed, the memo said, abortion medication could legally be sent even to states where abortion is prohibited because some women in those jurisdictions might be able to use the medication (for instance, if their lives are in danger), and the senders wouldn’t know whether the intended use is unlawful.

Which raises a critical question: Would a Trump administration hew to this narrow interpretation of the law? Of course not. And reviving the Comstock Act wouldn’t end only medication abortions — it could end all of them. Because the law covers any “article or thing … intended for producing abortion,” it would also include medical instruments and material.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s Senate Bill 8, a near-total ban on abortion, told the New York Times in February. His ally, pastor Mark Lee Dickson, told me the same . “I do believe that every single abortion facility in America is in violation of these statutes,” Dixon said, referring to Comstock.

And then there is the FDA, which approved mifepristone in 2000 and expanded access to it in 2016 and 2021. The Biden administration is defending that expansion in a case before the Supreme Court . It’s a safe bet to assume a Trump administration would not take the same position.

Indeed, it’s a safe bet that a Trump FDA would reverse itself on mifepristone and yank the drug’s approval. That would be catastrophic for abortion access; the Guttmacher Institute reported last month that medication accounted for 63 percent of abortions, and that number is on the low side because it doesn’t include self-administered abortions or those by women who receive the medications in states where abortion is prohibited.

Trump should be pressed on these two matters: whether a Trump administration would revive Comstock and whether it would ban mifepristone. He won’t answer because it’s not in his political interest to do so. He wants to look reasonable — or what passes for it.

But don’t let Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states rhetoric fool you. A Trump administration would be a grave threat to abortion rights, wherever you live. Women would have only as much reproductive freedom as Donald Trump and his allies would allow them, and we know how little that is.

• Opinion | Now it’s up to Israel: De-escalate or retaliate against Iran? April 14, 2024 Opinion | Now it’s up to Israel: De-escalate or retaliate against Iran? April 14, 2024
• Opinion | How to break up April 11, 2024 Opinion | How to break up April 11, 2024
• Opinion | How Gen Z took over incel slang April 11, 2024 Opinion | How Gen Z took over incel slang April 11, 2024

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Arizona’s Zombie Abortion Ban Is Back. It’s Every State’s Future If Trump Wins.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that its total abortion ban, a seemingly dead law dating back to 1864, is once again enforceable, despite more recent legislation that seemed to supersede it. The zombie ban makes virtually all abortions a felony, imposing a prison sentence of two to five years for any provider. There is no exception for rape or incest. The law was enacted before women could vote, and was long presumed to be permanently unenforceable. But the Arizona Supreme Court’s conservative majority, by a 4–2 margin, has now revived it. Republican governors appointed all seven justices on the bench, and the GOP recently expanded the court to entrench this far-right majority—which had no trouble finding that a ban enacted in an era in which women were chattel remains good law in 2024. As a result of this ruling, in 14 days almost every abortion in Arizona will be a crime, and nearly every clinic will close its doors. For all intents and purposes, it’s 1864 again for pregnant people in Arizona.

The decision should serve as a warning for the rest of the country, in light of ongoing efforts to revive the Comstock Act: In the hands of a far-right court, a dead, openly misogynistic, wildly unpopular abortion ban can spring back to life with a vengeance.

This zombie law was passed in 1864, long before Arizona was a state, and was codified in 1901, at which point it included a narrow exception to save the patient’s life. Much more recently, Arizona has passed less restrictive abortion laws, including a 15-week ban that appeared to wipe out more severe bans that preceded it. In late 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the two conflicting abortion laws in the state had to be reconciled, or “harmonized.” It maintained that abortion would remain legal through 15 weeks when provided by licensed physicians in compliance with the state’s other laws.

But on Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court, tasked with finally “harmonizing” Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban with the total ban dating back to hoop skirts, ruled that in the aftermath of Roe ’s reversal in Dobbs, the total ban takes precedence: The more recent 15-week restriction, wrote the majority, “does not create a right to, or otherwise provide independent statutory authority for, an abortion that repeals or restricts” the 1864 law, “but rather is predicated entirely on the existence of a federal constitutional right to an abortion since disclaimed” by Dobbs. In other words, in “harmonizing” the two laws, the harsher one wins out—even though, as the dissenters noted, the Legislature seemed to override this absolute ban when passing the recent 15-week limit. And so, starting in two weeks, even rape victims at the earliest stage of pregnancy may not obtain a legal abortion in Arizona.

Since Dobbs, nearly two dozen states have banned or limited access to the procedure. Arizona now joins those states with almost no exceptions , according to the Guttmacher Institute. As was the case with the far-right Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation of that state’s constitution last week , the majority simply ignored any evidence that the original meaning and text of the recent law provided greater protections for reproductive freedom. Instead, the majority rejected the Legislature’s evident intent to supplant the Civil War–era law with a more lenient ban. As a consolation, it gestured toward the fact that Arizona voters will likely have an opportunity to enact a ballot initiative restoring reproductive rights. So Arizona now joins Florida as a state in which the high court takes away reproductive freedom with one hand while allowing it to go to a popular vote with the other. Abortion-rights groups say they have enough signatures to put the abortion amendment on the November ballot, creating a fundamental right to receive abortion care until viability. Unlike Florida, where amendments need 60 percent approval to pass, Arizona allows amendments to take effect with simple majority support. (Note, as well, that two justices in the majority on Tuesday have retention elections in November; if ousted, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs can replace them with progressives.)

In an election year in which winning the state of Arizona is an absolutely essential factor for the GOP, the abortion dog continues to catch the electoral car in ways that can only hurt Donald Trump and the GOP extremists who seek to harm women’s health and equality. So long as voters are aware of the game as it’s being played and what the stakes will be, Republicans faces the potential for heaving losses. So these efforts to do that which is extraordinarily unpopular must happen via subterfuge, wink-wink nudge-nudge public statements about states’ rights and not taking a national position on abortion, while the courts and would-be Trump administration functionaries do all the quiet dirty work. The self-evident tension between the massive public rebuke of Dobbs —in the form of state ballot initiatives and referenda , local special elections , and state Supreme Court races —and the unabating efforts by rogue legislatures and fringe Supreme Courts to roll back abortion rights, was in evidence with Donald Trump’s refusal to state a coherent position on abortion on Monday : Turning back the clock for women is a demonstrably losing issue at the ballot box. And when candidate Trump says he wants to return the issue of abortion to the states, what he is really saying is that Arizona is free to return the issue to the time before doctors understood the value of hand-washing . (Also, why would anyone take his word on anything, ever?)

What happened in Alabama in February , in Florida last week, and in Arizona on Tuesday makes it clear that returning the reproductive freedom landscape to the Victorian age requires subverting whatever happens in elections. That’s why this massive rollback will be achieved by antidemocratic measures, including promises to breathe new life into the Comstock Act, and revanchist theocratic decisions from courts attempting to do away with IVF and rape exceptions in the name of fetal and embryonic personhood .

Comstock, in particular, is an instructive comparison here. That 1873 law, read expansively, bans all abortions , including both medication and in-clinic procedures. Indeed, far-right lawyers are at the Supreme Court trying to weaponize it against abortion pills right now. Trump’s top lawyers, including Jonathan Mitchell, have said that they plan to use Comstock as a nationwide ban on abortion if Trump regains office. They tell us that they intend to stay quiet about this scheme until after the election, at which point they will prepare for an executive order accompanied by prosecutions and regulations that make abortion a federal felony in all 50 states. The plot is similar to what just happened in Arizona: Republicans enacted a seemingly moderate 15-week ban, only to stand by and watch as their colleagues on a GOP-packed court resuscitated a total ban passed during the Civil War. Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes—who beat her anti-abortion opponent in 2022 by 280 votes—has said she won’t prosecute violations of the law. But GOP county attorneys have rejected Mayes’ efforts to shield doctors and may well seek to charge any providers that stay open, throwing access into immediate jeopardy.

The next time someone tells you they really worry about abortion rights, but that President Biden is just too old , please gently remind them that Joe Biden is not, in fact 160. That is the age of the law that will soon be sending abortion providers to prison in Arizona if they attempt to assist a victim of rape or incest. If edgy modernity is truly your thing, be afraid of Republican judges who are at war with modernity itself; they will gladly welcome the assistance of pro-choice voters whose apathy facilitates the rollback of women’s equal citizenship. And it’s now abundantly clear that we’re not rolling back the tape to the 1970s or to the 1920s. The project is to set your clocks back to the time when women didn’t even matter enough to have a vote.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Jamelle Bouie

The Smothering of Abortion Rights Reveals Something Else About Republicans

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Last Monday, Donald Trump said that abortion rights were best left to the states. “The states,” he said, “will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.”

The next day, as if answering a captain’s call to fire from the line, the Republican-led Arizona Supreme Court, in an uncanny coincidence, revived a 160-year-old abortion ban, with no exceptions for either rape or incest. In a 4-to-2 decision, the court held that the 1864 ban was “enforceable” and not superseded by more recent legislation. Tasked with reconciling the state’s abortion laws, some more permissive than others, the Arizona court chose the most restrictive option available — one that ties the hands of Arizona residents with the restraints of yesteryear, forged by the settlers of a not-yet-state in the middle of the 19th century.

Beginning next week, a law once thought unenforceable will govern the lives of millions of people who had neither a say in its creation nor, for that matter, its resurrection.

A few thoughts come to mind here.

It does not escape my attention that this law owes its rebirth to an effort by Doug Ducey, then the governor, to expand the Arizona Supreme Court’s membership from five to seven justices. Ducey then stacked this enlarged court with reliable conservatives.

All four of the justices who were part of the majority in last week’s abortion ruling were appointed by Ducey. One of them, Clint Bolick, is a longtime conservative legal activist and the author of “David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary.” He represents a type of judge whom the legal scholars Robert L. Tsai and Mary Ziegler call a “movement jurist,” defined as “someone who is socially embedded in movement-aligned networks outside of the formal legal system and is willing to use a judge’s tools of the trade in the service of a movement’s goals.” (Another Ducey-appointed justice, William G. Montgomery, once said that Planned Parenthood was “responsible for the greatest generational genocide known to man.” He recused himself from this case.)

The United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was not inevitable but once it was handed down, the Arizona Supreme Court was practically fated to move the state’s abortion laws in a reactionary direction. (Which makes it striking that Ducey would express dismay: The ruling, he wrote on X , was “not the outcome I would have preferred.”)

You can say the same for other political institutions in other states. Nearly everywhere Republicans hold power, they fight to rewire the institutions of government in the hope that they will then generate the desired result: more and greater Republican power.

And so we have the North Carolina Legislature gerrymandered to produce Republican majorities, the Ohio Legislature gerrymandered to produce Republican supermajorities, the Florida Legislature gerrymandered to produce Republican supermajorities, and the Florida Supreme Court overhauled to secure and uphold Republican priorities.

The states’ rights case for determining abortion access — let the people decide — falters on the fact that in many states, the people cannot shape their legislature to their liking. Packed and split into districts designed to preserve Republican control, voters cannot actually dislodge anti-abortion Republican lawmakers. A pro-choice majority may exist, but only as a shadow: present but without substance in government.

When the demands of the living do begin to press against the will of Republican lawmakers or Republican jurists, they can respond, with the dead hand of the past. Not the past broadly constructed — one attentive to the silences of those who were missing, excluded or never recorded in the first place — but a narrow past, the main purpose of which is to extinguish new freedoms and forms of living.

Both the federal courts and the Arizona Supreme Court have conjured a past that smothers the right to bodily autonomy. Anti-abortion activists are also trying to conjure a past, in the form of the long-dormant Comstock Act, that gives government the power to regulate the sexual lives of its citizens. As Moira Donegan notes in a column for The Guardian, “Comstock has come to stand in, in the right-wing imagination, for a virtuous, hierarchically ordered past that can be restored in a sexually repressive and tyrannically misogynistic future.”

This effort may well fail, but the drive to leash the country to an imagined vision of a reactionary past should be seen as a silent confession of weakness. The same is true, for that matter, of the authoritarian dreams of the former president and his allies and acolytes.

Conservatives can win, of course. They have real institutional power. But it is important to understand that they are fighting from a position of social, cultural and even political weakness. Even that great champion of conservative electoral strength, Donald Trump, has never won a popular majority.

Put a bit differently, a confident political movement does not fight to dominate; it works to persuade. It does not curate a favorable electorate or frantically burrow itself into our counter-majoritarian institutions; it competes for power on an even playing field, assured of its appeal and certain of its ability to win. It does not hide its agenda or shield its plans from public view; it believes in itself and its ideas.

In this context, Arizona is instructive. Conservatives may have gotten their desired result from the legislature and the courts. But there is still an election in November. And proponents of abortion rights say they have already collected enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Unlike their opponents, they are confident that the public is on their side.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @ jbouie