The Truth Of Abortion

There is a lot to debate about the politics of Ideology and the current Supreme Court’s rightward lurch and decades of political maneuvering by Conservatives to make America’s Institutions serve their agenda. Any institution gets its power not from the top but from the people who support it, and the mistake they have made is that very few people (around 25%) support overturning Roe vs Wade. There is no political legitimacy to this power grab and it will result in a landslide of victories for the left in the next several election cycles as outrage compels voters to the polls.

Abortion was not a hot political topic when Roe Vs. Wade was first decided. Indeed, the Supreme Court which made the decision was made entirely of men, all but one white, and the court was dominated by political and social conservatives. Planned Parenthood V Casey had even more conservatives on the court and still upheld the right to abortion, and it is only after decades of underhanded stacking of the court with staunch Catholics whose legal opinions are rooted entirely in their interpretation and invocation of “tradition” and “history” rather than the Constitution have they been able to overturn this precedent, though somehow typically ignorant to the longer arc of progress and the impermanence of any status quo, let alone one as pithy and contrived as this.

The reason that abortion has become a politically divisive topic where it was not when Roe was first decided is that Roe became an expedient wedge issue used by both the right and left to muster political support. Political parties often do this to gain or hold power, using issues which may passionately appeal to their base as rallying fodder to motivate voters to the polls. The left does it with the environment, social justice, and the rights of the LGTBI+ community and the right does it with taxes (although they seem to have abandoned that in the last 4 years), xenophobia, and upholding tradition.

Politics in the United States under these waning years of the Baby Boom generation are nothing if not a perfect illustration of Us Versus Them ideology. This is nowhere more illustrative than in social media with conservatives gloating over their perceived victory without any real consideration of how this affects the lives of their friends, family, and neighbors, those who are poor or disenfranchised, and with total disregard for women and girls who will die without access to safe abortion services, and thus belies the real conflict at the heart of this issue, which is about power over others.

Abortion has occurred throughout the entire history of the human experience, because carrying a baby to term can be a harrowing experience for women. Until recent years the mortality rate for mothers was about 600 for every 100k pregnancies which declined to 12 per 100k by 2007. In even earlier times it was much, much higher. Giving birth is a very risky experience, and even if a mother does survive there still can be all sorts of medical complications and risks. I regularly coach women who experience debilitating postpartum depression or injury from labor. Becoming pregnant means facing the risks of being pregnant, which unlike many other aspects of life can, sometimes, actually mean death or disability, which is why abortions have always existed, because of the potential threats to the life and wellness of a mother, to say nothing of the obligations and burdens of being a parent. The only thing Roe V Wade did was codify legal access to safe abortion. Abolishing access to safe abortion forces women who want or need abortions to seek it through less effective and safe means which results in more deaths of women, girls, and mothers or their imprisonment. Heartless and conniving conservatives will say such women deserve it, or go and murder abortion care providers, betraying their own claims to hold life as sacred and their true posture of control and authoritarianism.

Much of the debate around abortion is centered around the embryo and fetus and whether or not they constitutes life. This argument is disingenuous and naive because at no point in any part of reproduction is anything dead. Sperm is alive, and so are eggs. Conception is the joining of gametes but gametes themselves are still living cells which are alive and not just dead or inanimate tissue without value. Conservatives like to evoke conception as a sacred event because they feel shame and derision for most other aspects of life, including mortality itself and especially excretory functions like ejaculation, lactation, or the menstrual cycle which are in fact indispensable to reproduction. But all life is sacred, not just at conception, and part of the reason pro-abortion advocates like myself advocate for abortion protections is because we also value the life of the mother as much or more than the life of a fetus, and believe the government should not be putting people in jail for obtaining or providing an abortion.

One of the primary goals of anti-abortion movements is actually in support of racist, white nationalism by groups of people who believe in the concept of a white race and in turn fight for white supremacy over other people with different skin color. The people who support these movements hate that white women can get an abortion and not be forced to carry a child to term which they believe impairs the ability of white people to grow in numbers, and they actively enflame and exacerbate religious and xenophobic fears in order to generate increased support for their objectives. To this end, you have been lied to about the nature of conception, abortion, and what an embryo and fetus really are in order to make people feel emotionally connected to an embryo as if it is an actual child, but in reality a fetus is not conscious and is not capable of hosting consciousness until it can actually survive outside the womb.

Most abortions actually occur during the embryonic state, before twelve weeks of gestation, when an embryo is extremely undeveloped and not even remotely close to being capable of hosting consciousness any more than heart cells or liver cells are conscious. The so-called heart-beat of a fetus is not in fact a real heart beat at all and does not start in a fetus, but in an embryo, and the imagery of a heart is invoked in order to illicit anger and other emotions in those who believe themselves to be pro-life, to anthropomorphize an embryo (meaning to apply human emotions and experiences to something that is not really human). Human embryos actually have a tail until the 8th week of gestation, because of our shared evolutionary history with other animals on this earth, and is difficult to visually distinguish it from a dolphin fetus.

Most anti-abortion people think of a fetus being aborted and imagine themselves as a little baby fetus being sucked out of their mother’s womb by a vacuum and chopped into little bits and discarded in the trash. This is a dark, morbid fantasy projection and the demonstration of how most conservatives actually do not believe in God or the afterlife but are instead obsessed with and driven by an intense fear of death. If you, as a person of faith, believe in God and that children go to heaven then according to your logic any aborted embryo or fetus goes right to heaven. So it’s a little strange to be so intensely obsessed with abortion when it has nothing to do with you and your own life, unless you yourself are actually also intensely afraid of dying and thus projecting your fears onto the world around you.

An embryo or fetus before viability is NOT a conscious entity any more than is a liver or a brain outside the human body. It is all alive and living tissue, and at every point in reproduction an embryo or fetus is alive, but it is not conscious. Electrical conductivity, nerves, organs, and cells are living, growing, and functioning always. Even tumors can grow teeth and other body parts, but it is not considered a life. A famous anti-abortion activist used to be an abortion care nurse and claims she was inspired to change her views after witnessing a leg of a fetus recoil when it came in contact with a metal probe. But the problem is that, yes, a fetus is alive, it was ALWAYS alive, that is what cells and tissues are—living life that is alive and living. What part of biology don’t you understand? We don’t recoil at the idea of taking out an extra kidney, or part of a liver, or resectioning the gut, so how many organs can you remove before a body is longer a human? A dead brain will still respond to contact with stimuli because that is how living tissue works. It conducts electricity and responds to stimuli, automatically, not because it is conscious and deciding to do so. That is not how biology works.

A fetus is much like a separate organ growing in and dependent on the mother’s body until it is finally done developing and can survive outside the womb on its own. Until that time it is an extension of the mother’s body and thus subjugated to her rights and privileges first and foremost. No person should be required by the state to give their body so another person can survive.

Viability was a decent, moral, and prudent compromise for abortion rights, riding the line between abortion access and limiting abortions to a point which made most rational sense both biologically, culturally, and morally. But the refusal to compromise at all by power-hungry, conservative ideologues will simply cause their entire crusade to implode spectacularly because societies must always find common ground and consensus, and the refusal to acknowledge the humanity and needs of others and those who require access to abortion will, in the end, only serve to undermine and expose everything that such unyielding authoritarianism desires, which is not to protect the unborn but to control and dominate life and everyone in it. But this is an impossible task because no human can control life, and is a refusal to accept life on God’s terms which is why they always, ultimately, fail.

Outlawing abortion also does not stop abortion. Many women become desperate if they are forcibly pregnant, destitute, or struggling and there are many ways to end an abortion without the care of a health professional. Legal abortion only makes it safer. If your response to that problem is that women who die from self-administered abortions deserve it, you truly do not care about life at all, only your own self-centered desire for control. Access to education, economic equality, sex education, contraceptives, paid family leave, and other social programs which make pregnancy and starting a family easier are policies which actually do reduce abortions.

A great deal of this ruling, the general obsession with control by the right and the apathy and impotence of the establishment left are the result of severe intergenerational trauma suffered by the Baby Boom generation as further discussed in my book, The Perfect Child. Sex is often used as a cudgel to control others, especially in relationships, and if yours are dominated by conflict surrounding sex you can read my article Sex and Power in Relationships. If you’re having a hard time getting pregnant, read my article How To Get Pregnant. Justice Coney Barrett is actually a feminist in disguise, and more on the Us Versus Them conflicts currently dominating political discourse. Or, if you find it difficult to get opportunities for sex in the first place, you might like my article, How To Get Laid.