Here’s a guest post by Euchalon Grandy, swiped from my comments section, offered here with no commentary from me just yet except that I agree with almost everything he says. (Bonus points if you can pick the one spot where I have some qualms.) The first half of his comment is also worth a read. Everything that follows is his; I skipped the “indent quote” feature for better readability.
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OK, so here’s my issue — Not necessarily in your post, but underlying this whole discussion [of withdrawal as birth control] I sense an assumption that unwanted pregnancy is so incredibly awful that it must be avoided at all cost. Thus the ‘wear three condoms, use a diaphram, and you *are* on the pill, right?’ tone.
Now, I understand that for many women, including a sizable portion of American women, abortion is not safe, legal, or available. For those women, extraordinary caution is justified. However, for a good portion of American women, safe, legal abortions are still available. Absent personal religious or moral objections, isn’t abortion OK as a backstop once contraception is used to bring the odds of pregnancy down to a reasonably low level?
What disturbs me is that this extraordinarily cautious approach to contraception implies that abortion is off the table as an acceptable way to end an unwanted pregnancy. It makes me wonder if, after decades of exposure to the abortion prohibition movement, that movement has on some level won our hearts and minds about abortion, if not the right to it. (When I say “we”, I mean feminist and feminist-oriented men and women who have no explicit personal moral objection to abortion).
After all, if we don’t subscribe to the idea that a human being is created at the moment of conception, and if we acknowledge that legal abortions are a relatively safe procedure, why do we give ending a pregnancy through abortion such weight? For a number of practical reasons abortion is lousy as a first-line method of contraception. But as a backup isn’t it similar in function to other methods of contraception? Why do we treat it as an evil to be avoided if we don’t believe it to be evil? When we treat something as an absolute last resort, we strongly imply that there’s something very bad about it.
People like Obama talk about this common ground where ‘we’d all like to see fewer abortions’. I’m not sure I agree. When children enter the world unwanted, I’d rather see more abortions. When women go through pregnancy and labor for no other reason than avoiding having an abortion, I’d rather see more abortions. When young men and women for years deny themselves the joyfulness of a good sex life, I’d rather see more abortions.
For those of us who support the right to an abortion, aren’t we losing ground here? Don’t things get a little worse every year? Gay folks didn’t make much progress until the slogan ‘gay and proud’ came into common usage. When will we come out of the closet? What’s our slogan? I’d suggest, if not ‘pro-abortion and proud’ at least ‘pro-choice and I just don’t think an abortion is a big deal’. Those of us who identify as pro-choice are strong on the political right to an abortion. It seems, however, like we’re conflicted and afraid when it comes to abortion itself. The prohibitionists are very clear on both.
I would like to see a life-affirming narrative that supports abortion rights and abortion. Life-affirming as in the better life the pregnant woman (and often her male partner) can have without the burden of an unwanted pregnancy/child. Life-affirming as in pro-sex, taking a practical but not fearful approach to contraception.
If we take our cue from the prohibitionists and frame this issue as something that takes place only inside the uterus then it’s just an argument about death or not-death and we can’t win. If we expand our vision to outside the uterus then we are pro-better-life, pro-freedom, and pro-sex. With these values on our side, we will prevail over the narrative of death which the prohibitionists have used so effectively, but only if we have the courage to embrace not only the right to an abortion but abortion itself. And it seems to me we ignore this at our peril when discussing contraception.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I don’t think you have to be viewing abortion as something ethically unsound to not want to have to go through having one. Even for those of us who happily accept that the correct number of abortions is “however many the women having them damn well want to have”, an abortion is still surgery. It still requires money, planning, potential recovery time, physical discomfort and/or pain, and abstaining from sex for a few days afterwards. Am I the only one who thinks that the additional contraceptive methods are a lot less hassle?
Full disclosure: I’m one of very few women I know who doubles up on contraception. I use condoms every time and I’m on the pill. My partner and I aren’t monogamous, but I stick to this even when I am. I’m a sex worker, and we have very high contraception usage rates.
I’ve also had an abortion, and lost a LOT of blood. It took me several hours to get home because I couldn’t walk more than a few steps without resting, and several days to recover. If I wasn’t already using two forms of contraception, I probably would have STARTED after that to ensure I didn’t have to do all that again.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Like Hexy (who commented above), I have had an abortion and it sucked and it was NOT no big deal. Euchalon has probably never had an abortion or she wouldn’t be so flippant about it. Abortion is less risky to a woman’s life and future reproductive health than birth, but even where abortion is safe and legal, it carries risks and these risks are far greater than the risks associated with using birth control.
An embryo is a human life and whether to end it is a moral issue that many of us struggle with. I do not believe that an embryo or fetus should be considered a human being with individual rights until after it is born, but it is not nothing. It is entirely dependent on the body of its mother and I will always defend the right of a mother to decide whether to continue her pregnancy-the rights of the mother must always supersede the rights of the fetus she is carrying (I say this with absolute conviction) but to trivialize an unborn child and say that it is nothing would be a mistake.
“Euchalon has probably never had an abortion or she wouldn’t be so flippant about it.” Oh sugarmag, it’s even worse than you suspect, since I’m a guy. That disclosure aside, thanks for sharing your experience (sorry to hear it was a bad one). That abortion can be painful, carries health risks, and is, at best, an unpleasant procedure, I felt goes without saying. Perhaps I should have acknowledged that more explicitly, as well as the fact that this burden falls entirely on the female partner, which is incredibly unjust but also part of the reality in which we all must function.
You seem very clear when you rank abortion as less desirable than effective contraception but safer than pregnancy. We agree about that. Given that ranking, it seems like it should be a pretty simple decision, when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, to choose to end it through abortion. It is in this sense that I mean ‘not a big deal’. If you are willing to comment further, I would be interested to know if your suffering was strictly the result of the physical procedure or if you felt conflicted about having an abortion (I consider both aspects to be valid).
You write that an embryo is a human life. I respect your opinion and your right to act on that opinion. I would, however, question whether this is a simple statement of fact. An embryo is clearly human (the cells are not some other species) and those cells are certainly alive. But to use the term “a human life” slides awfully close to “a human being”. This does not ring true for me so I choose not to use that term. If I considered live human cells to be the definition of a human being then I would have to grieve every time my daughter lost a tooth. I choose not to, just as I choose not to mourn aborted embryos. Deciding what makes a human being is a highly personal judgement — as I see it we must each follow our own paths and make our own decisions.
hexy — Thank you as well for adding your perspective. I love your definition of the “correct number of abortions”. See my comments to sugarmag about my (unintentionally) trivializing the experience of having an abortion. I’m sorry to hear that yours was also a rough experience.
It is my hope that advances in medical technology will make having an abortion safer and easier. Just as we have a long way to go in male contraceptives, I imagine abortions could be a lot better. One reason I object so strongly to the current social climate is that, for now, research into better and safer ways to end a pregnancy must be virtually impossible in the U.S.
Of course I agree with you that contraception beats abortion every time. It seems like a tougher call, however, when it comes to weighing the risk of having an abortion (your experience speaks to the fact that there is no such thing as no-risk sex, even when doubling-up). Here again, we each need to make our own call about what’s an acceptable risk. It is my hope that women make that call free of socially imposed fear and guilt.
The fact that you are a sex worker adds another dimension to all this. I initially conceived of the discussion as pleasure vs. risk, but for you I guess it’s more making-a-living vs. risk. I’ll just have to spend some time thinking about that. Thanks for putting it out there.
First, I’m sorry that both of you went through such hard experiences.
The part I disagree with is that third-from-last paragraph – where Euchalon suggests we shouldn’t see abortion as a source of shame. Suggesting abortion might be “no big deal” portrays it as more trivial than I think most women experience it. Abortion is typically physically traumatic, even when it’s not as complicated as Hexy’s situation. It also kills *something* even if you don’t regard the fetus as having the full rights of personhood. That’s one spot where my own analysis would be different. I happen to know that Euchalon also has religious reasons for seeing a fetus as morally significant, though they aren’t spelled out here, because the main point was to question the shame that even secular pro-choice people attach to abortion, and to ask whether we’ve adopted the view that it’s actually always not just difficult but evil.
I think Euchalon is right to question the moral and practical *necessity* to double and triple up on contraception, especially within a committed relationship, if that surfeit of caution is interfering with pleasure. As your experience shows, Hexy, the only really certain way to avoid pregnancy is abstinence. Even doubling up isn’t 100% sure. Anything else carries some risk – even sterilization, because it can go wrong or couples might not wait the recommended length of time. Used correctly, the pill is better than 99% effective. So if you’re in a monogamous relationship and aren’t at risk of STIs, does adding more methods really decrease your risk enough to be worth the inconvenience and loss of pleasure that goes with condom use? If fear of pregnancy is interfering with pleasure, I can see why people would double up even when monogamous, but then my question would be why the fear is so great?
To clarify, when I fell pregnant the cause wasn’t so much contraception fail as taking-contraception-correctly fail. I gather this is the most common way for failure/pregnancy to occur.
I don’t usually go in for comments with no more contribution than agreement, but Sugarmag’s second paragraph described my stance on the matter exactly – it’s lovely to read a convo so very firmly pro-choice, but that also gives so much recognition to the gravity of choosing abortion.
Sunflower
Euchalon, thanks for clarifying. (Our posts obviously crossed.) I was pretty sure that you were assuming all those caveats were shared common ground for most readers who come here.
I’d be curious to know more about how your Buddhist beliefs inform your ideas about the morality of abortion (if you don’t mind sharing). My understand is that most Japanese Buddhists regard the fetus as alive, or part of life, and that destroying it basically sends it back into the river of life. This is something to be commemorated and mourned, which some people do through mizuko kuyo rituals.
Hexy: Yes, failure to use contraception properly every time is the biggest factor in contraceptive failure, pretty much across methods. The failure rate for the pill rises from less than 1% to 8%. For condoms, it’s 2% versus 17%. (All of this comes from Planned Parenthood’s website.)
Sunflower: One of the many interesting presentations at this philosophy of motherhood conference I attended was on pro-choice arguments that don’t depend on denying the fetus personhood, and that do recognize the moral significance of abortion. If I get the time and energy I’ll blog about it.