Missing Links in Abortion Narratives
‘We do not ordinarily treat mental health concerns, financial strain, ‘bad timing’ or career flexibility as justifiable reasons for taking a human life or abandoning one’s child. Why think that abortion can be justified on such grounds?’
‘If unborn humans fail to count as persons because they are not fully conscious, then newborns are not persons either. Are we really prepared to say that infanticide is permissible?’
‘If it would be wrong for a pregnant woman to smoke, drink heavily, or take heroin by virtue of the fact that she’s impairing the life of her child, surely it is also wrong for a pregnant woman to abort her child? Abortion is the ultimate impairment!’
So go just a few examples of standard pro-life arguments defending the right to life of the unborn. There are many more lines of thought that we could add to this list from the array of pro-life apologetics on offer. Taken all together, I believe the pro-life case wins over the pro-choice case: the proposition that abortion is morally wrong (at least in all cases but those in which there is a conflict between the physical life of the mother and continuation of the pregnancy) is one that should have long since commanded wide assent.
However plausible and persistent the pro-life case may have been, it has failed to convince its audience. In developed countries around the world, the personhood of the unborn is effectively denied in law. This is particularly so in our own country, as, state by state, we have over recent years embraced abortion up until birth, for any reason.[1] In academia, the Overton Window—the range of politically acceptable viewpoints in any given community—has continued to shift, and pro-life scholars find themselves on the back foot, having to fight for increasingly minimal claims: articles defending ‘after birth abortion’ (infanticide) are no longer fringe, and pro-life academics must spend as much time now defending the right to conscientious objection as they do making personhood arguments. And, in popular culture, it is no longer considered objectionable to be ‘pro-abortion’ rather than merely ‘pro-choice’: to regard abortion as a positive social good rather than a regrettable, necessary evil.[2]
The idea that abortion is a positive social good can be summed up in three simple words: women need abortion. By the idea that women need abortion, I am not referring to the claim that, in those rare, life-threatening conditions (such as the ectopic pregnancy), an embryo or foetus must be removed so that a woman’s life can continue. Nor am I even referring to that seemingly moderate (and now quite passé) pro-choice slogan that abortion should be ‘safe, legal, and rare’ (if abortion is a positive social good rather than a regrettable, necessary evil, why should it be rare?). I am referring to the idea that women need abortion like women need food. Or exercise. Or freedom from arbitrary arrest. The idea that women need abortion is the idea that, if women are going to live normal lives, achieve equality with men, or have the ability to adequately plan and organise their futures, then abortion availability must be part of the package as a basic necessity. This is the line of thought behind the more contemporary placard slogans: ‘Abortion is healthcare’; ‘Reproductive rights are human rights’; ‘On demand, without apology’; ‘Abortion is normal’.
The progression from pro-choice to pro-abortion is, to anyone with even mild pro-life intuitions, a disturbing cultural shift. Disturbing though it is, however, it is really not surprising. Indeed, it was inevitable. The idea that abortion is a positive social good—the idea that women need abortion in the way that I have described—is an idea that any post-sexual revolutionary society must necessarily be committed to.
A society cannot both maintain the appearance of being feminist and be committed to the ethos of the sexual revolution without also endorsing abortion on demand. Over the past two decades, this insight has been slowly dawning on a growing number of prominent academics (particularly amongst leading female American legal scholars).[3] It is worth our while, as Christians, to understand this insight.
Behind most widely believed falsehoods, there are grains of truth. And the grain of truth behind the idea that women need abortion is the idea that, in any just human society, the human reality of reproductive asymmetry requires a response. Reproductive asymmetry refers to the simple reality that sex has different and unequal consequences for men and women. Women get pregnant, and men do not. Depending on how human society responds and organises itself, this biological fact can either be the source of grossly unfair inequalities between men and women, or it can remain a mere (and indeed beautiful) difference. The questions we must ask ourselves, then, is: why is the world so convinced that the solution to reproductive asymmetry must be abortion availability? What social and cultural conditions have made it seem true that ‘women need abortion’?
Strings attached
These questions should be of interest given the originally pro-life roots of feminism. The earliest ‘first wave’—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, 1872 Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, and equal rights amendment author Alice Paul to name a few—were resolutely pro-life. Leading figures of women’s movements in 19th century America were notable for their involvement in abolition movements, and their commitment to the rights of vulnerable humans extended also to children, whose right to life, they believed, began ‘while they yet remain the foetus’ to use Woodhull’s words.[4] The same women who fought against unjust marriage laws and for equal political representation (you cannot accuse them of being anti-woman!) did not endorse abortion as a woman’s ticket to freedom, equality, or human flourishing.
And yet, the pioneers of feminism were painfully aware of the injustices that can arise from reproductive asymmetry. In the pre-contraceptive world they inhabited, they were frequently confronted with the reality of abortion as a desperate last resort that many abandoned women were driven to after having been seduced by an unmarried lover’s false promises.
The first wave feminists inhabited a pre-sexual revolutionary world in which the traditional Christian sexual ethic—the expectation that sex be reserved for marriage—had been socially normative for a long time, and these women were among the most eager to see it consistently upheld. Pre-contraception, the social necessity and commonsensical nature of chastity and the Christian sexual ethic were obvious. Tragically, this did not stop powerful men from seeking to find exploitative ways around it through affairs, prostitution, or seduction of more innocent and inexperienced prey. Awareness of such selfish exploits drove the anger behind Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which condemned male lust and sexual selfishness, and which praised the virtue of chastity as the solution to many social ills. As Wollstonecraft’s work went on to influence the coming generations of suffragettes, feminist pioneers continued to rail against the old ‘sexual double standard’ (the underbelly old-world conviction that women ought to be chaste and celibate outside marriage, but that manly men ought not). According to Catholic feminist legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, ‘Votes for women! Chastity for men!’ was a feminist slogan of the suffragist era.[5] Although they may have objected to particular unjust marriage laws and practices, the first wave feminists, by and large, viewed marriage as an institution important to the flourishing of the human race, necessitated by, as Wollstonecraft put it, ‘the long and helpless state of infancy’.[6] Marriage, for them, was an institution that needed to be redeemed rather than rejected.
In their endorsement of the traditional Christian sexual ethic, the earliest feminists were in step with a venerable idea in Western thought that stretches back to Aquinas and Aristotle: sexual intercourse has a twofold telos—a twofold natural purpose, function, or reason for existing. Firstly, reproduction. Secondly, marriage: that relationship in which the reproduction is to take place so as to be most beneficial to the offspring who result from reproduction.
Under this traditional worldview, abortion is not the solution to sexual asymmetry. Rather, the preemptive, systemic solution to reproductive asymmetry is for human beings to walk in step with the twofold telos of sex. The consequences of sex for men and women are different. But they are only unfairly unequal assuming we are treating sex as an individualistic enterprise, in which strings may or may not be attached: in which the man can ‘walk away’ relatively trouble-free from the consequences of sex, while women cannot. The solution to sexual asymmetry, then, is to maintain the strings, and to insist on the standard that sex be reserved for marriage. In this traditional worldview, marriage is society’s way of tying the sexually active man to his biological offspring in compensation for the fact that his body does not.
Within a framework that asserts that reproduction and marriage are the twofold telos of sex, the idea that abortion is a positive social good can make no sense. If the Christian sexual ethic is true, abortion can only ever be a sign that human life is malfunctioning; that something has gone wrong: either behaviourally (individuals or whole societies are engaging in sex without sufficient respect for the ends for which sex exists) or biologically (an abnormal, life-threatening condition has tragically necessitated the removal of an embryo or foetus). If human life is being lived aright—if all is going well both biologically and behaviourally—then abortion should not be necessary. As the first wave feminists saw things, abortion was ultimately an exploitation of women, and a means of subsidising sexual behaviour that pushes against the grain of the human design.
No strings attached
What are the consequences, both logically and empirically, of society embracing a different sexual ethic—one which sees sex as having no telos apart from individual pleasure-seeking, gratification, or self-expression? The consequences are all too obvious. Under the sexual revolutionary ethic, pregnancy is, if unwanted by the pleasure-seeking individual, an interruption to the ‘real’ purpose of sex, rather than a fulfillment of it. In the pursuit of sex, marriage is optional at best, restrictive at worst. Under the sexual revolutionary worldview, what centuries of Christian society accepted as the ‘natural necessity’ of chastity becomes a burden to be overcome, rather than a beautiful virtue to be embraced. And should technology provide the means to overcome it, there is no longer any need for chastity norms.
If this technology-enabled obsolescence of chastity is going to maintain an appearance of fairness toward women—a feminist guise—then it must promise a complete solution to the problem of reproductive asymmetry. Given its all-too frequent failure, the technological solution cannot just involve contraception. It must include back-up contraception as well: easily available and safe abortion for women. If, as the sexual revolutionary ethic would have it, the purpose of sex is individual gratification for everyone—for men and women alike (superficially, a more egalitarian idea than the old sexual double-standard), then women need abortion. Women ought not to be unfairly punished by their biology for striving to pursue the sexual revolutionary telos of sex in their own lives.
History bears witness to the logic. It was only when the sexual revolution and its ethos dovetailed with feminism in the late 1960s that the abortion cause became central to mainstream feminism. It is no accident either that the liberalisation of abortion occurred in the USA in 1973, in New South Wales in 1971, and in Britain in 1967—precisely in the wake of the sexual revolution. Among the most persistent advocates for abortion law reform were sexual revolutionaries such as Hugh Hefner and Lawrence Lader, the latter of whom was instrumental in persuading Betty Friedan, leader of the National Organisation for Women in the 1960s, to make abortion availability one of NOW’s campaigning points. Men like Hefner and Lader had the same insight that the first wave feminists did: for the bodies of large numbers of women to be easily available to men without strings attached, abortion would be required. But where the early feminists had campaigned for chastity and responsibility, the sexual revolutionaries fought for barriers to abortion to be broken down. Make abortion more easily available, and you effectively remove the obligation for men to give commitment while seeking sex, to be prepared for marriage in the event of unexpected pregnancy, and to have to factor in these considerations when pursuing sexual relationships in the first place. Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen put it best:
Akerlof and Yellen were among the first researchers, in the mid-1990s, to popularise the ‘reproductive technology shock thesis’, which can be explained (briefly) as follows. Society’s heterosexual relationships exist in a kind of ‘economy’ in which sex is exchanged, and in which sex has a ‘price’ (relational investment, time, and effort) for those who want it the most (men). Prior to contraception and easily available abortion, the price of sex was very high for most men: usually, the pursuit of sex had to be subsumed under the pursuit of a long-term relationship or marriage. Pregnancy risk made women generally unified in their reticence to engage in premarital sex, and this united front gave women a gatekeeping power over the price of sex. If a woman did get unexpectedly pregnant within premarital relationships, she (and her folks!) could often persuade the man in question to commit to marriage, given that he was unlikely to meet another woman who would not make the same demand. When contraception and easily available abortion came onto the scene, the power dynamics in the sexual economy flipped, and began to favour stereotypically male desires. As more and more women became more willing, with the availability of contraception and abortion, to engage in premarital relationships, the ‘unified front’ protecting the price of sex began to fragment. Thus it was that the technology of contraception and easily available abortion ‘lowered the price’ of sex (or, perhaps more accurately, distorted the real price of sex) and disrupted the mating market. This thesis, as Akerlof and Yellen saw it, made most sense of the US data they observed: since the passing of Roe v. Wade, premarital activity had increased, abortions on unmarried women had increased from around 88,000 per year in the mid-1960s to nearly 1.3 million by the early 1980s, and the custom of ‘shotgun’ marriage had drastically declined.
Image: Rena Schild | Shutterstock.com
As easily available abortion cheapens the price of sex, abortion becomes all the more ‘necessary’ in the new social landscape of cheap sex. As sex becomes ever more casual, ever more severed from marriage, the potential consequences of sexual asymmetry absent abortion become more and more burdensome for women. So it is that the sexual revolution and easily available abortion are two sides of a mutually reinforcing cycle.
Reattaching strings
Easily available abortion will be here to stay unless pro-lifers and thoughtful conservatives can persuade women, as a group, to question the narrative that made it seem necessary in the first place: the sexual revolutionary narrative that the purpose of sex is individual gratification. For it is only under such conditions that ‘women need abortion’. It is only according to the philosophy of the sexual revolution that abortion is a positive social good.
Needless to say, if pro-life personhood arguments are sound, then any clear-thinking person ought to have the following thought: ‘If the sexual revolutionary worldview requires abortion, then maybe that’s a sign that there is something wrong with it!’ True enough. But such a thought process needs to be spelled out explicitly, especially to a society ignorant of history, which has forgotten there was a time before—and therefore an in-principle alternative to—the sexual revolution. Too often, personhood arguments are put forward in piecemeal fashion, awkwardly extracted from the wider moral framework about how human sexual relationships are supposed to unfold, and how life is meant to work.
Too often, unborn babies are represented by pro-life arguments as isolated rights-bearing individuals locked in a rights-trumping battle with pregnant women. Pro-life arguments go better, I have found, when unborn babies are represented as threads within the grand tapestry of human existence unfolding from conception to natural death: as fulfilments of the natural purpose of sex who, when in the womb, are right where they are meant to be.
The link between the sexual revolutionary ethos and pro-abortion sentiment also explains why the work of even the most valiant and generous pregnancy help organisations are seen by abortion advocates as a condescending ploy, as is also the suggestion that these organisations could possibly eliminate ‘the need for abortion’. Consider the following analogy. Suppose we lived in a country that wrote a law stating that a particular ethnic group (let’s say, Eastern Europeans) are forbidden from career paths that provide salaries of more than $50,000 a year. In compensation, however, charities in this country abound to offer ‘support’ for Eastern Europeans to help them accept and cope with the systemic disadvantage. I think you will agree that such a situation is unsatisfactory. It would be better to remove the law (the source of the underlying inequality) and remove the need for the charities, than to believe that the charities somehow render the law unobjectionable. This, I imagine, is why ardently pro-abortion people in a post-sexual-revolutionary world see ‘pregnancy support’ as an inadequate replacement for abortion availability.
A danger in pro-lifers continuing to emphasise the help available from pregnancy support centres, in the absence of emphasis on the need for reviving a traditional sexual ethic, is that pregnancy and responsibility for new life continues to be represented as a woman’s problem. That it is not just a woman’s problem is exactly what the early feminists were trying to help the world to see when they championed the virtue of chastity for men and women alike as a preemptive, systemic, response. This is not to disparage the heroic and essential work that pregnancy help organisations do in the fight for the unborn. It is simply to acknowledge that this work—like pro-life personhood arguments—cannot stand alone. Pregnancy help organisations are responding to women, many of whom come to them as a result of a broken social and sexual system. Better, then, to fix the system; the inequality needs addressing at its source.
The link between abortion and the sexual revolution, then, places a range of challenges at the feet of Australian Christians, who, in comparison with our American brothers and sisters, have been less active on behalf of the unborn. There is a challenge for middle-of-the-road Aussie conservative Christians: those who have pro-life intuitions, and who are quick on their feet with personhood arguments, but who (like good classical liberals parroting John Stuart Mill’s harm principle) don’t like to be too paternalistic when it comes to what people do with their sex lives. If we’re serious about creating a pro-life culture, we may have to be prepared to overstep the boundaries of classical liberal respectability and preach to the non-Christian world what we practise when it comes to sexual ethics (particularly within institutions on the front line of this fight, such as our schools). There is also a challenge, for want of a better label, for ‘progressive’ Christians who would desire for the church to focus more on ‘justice’ issues and less on ‘purity’ issues (‘can we stop obsessing over what people do with their genitals!?’). Given the connection between sex and life, one cannot separate justice and purity.
Furthermore, we ought to view the possibility of moral progress in the sphere of sexual ethics positively. Indeed, there is hope that the tide is already turning as we see a growing list of prominent female voices in the public square in the sex-realist movement offering searing critiques of the sexual revolution: Abigail Favale, Mary Harrington, and, of course, Louise Perry. Perry’s recent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is a lucid, measured, and engaging exposé of all the emotional, psychological, and physical disadvantages besetting younger generations of women raised in a culture of casual sex, and it is heartening to see such a book coming from a young secular writer. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship recently held in London, at which Perry was invited to speak, she said this during an interview with Jordan Peterson:
Her words were met with appreciative applause from fellow panelists and the audience.
Other events in recent years suggest that the time is right for a concerted effort at persuading young women as a group that the sexual revolution has not been in their best interests. As contemporary society struggles to effectively combat epidemics of sexual harassment, by which women are disproportionately harmed, we must finally confront the possibility that we have lost the moral resources to do so. If sex is a merely transactional pursuit of pleasure with no deeper meaning, then a colleague asking you for a night with him in exchange for that extra help on a work assignment is little different from his asking for theatre tickets for his birthday. And as the evidence of the health detriments of abortion continues to mount, so too does evidence that abortion is a false solution to reproductive asymmetry. Women can never really walk away from the consequences of sex in the way that men can. The illusion, provided by abortion, that we can, takes a heavy toll on the minds, hearts, and bodies of many women.
Pro-lifers ought to portray easily available abortion not only as the life-destroying violation of the individual rights of unborn humans, but also as the rotten fruit of a disenchanted and degrading narrative about sexual relationships. Dedicated pro-lifers—and Christians of all stripes—ought to draw attention to the link between abortion and the sexual revolution with confidence, capitalising on the sex-revolutionary-critical momentum that is already growing. The traditional Christian sexual ethic is good news for a broken world. And it is the best hope for the unborn.
Dr Emma Wood is a philosophy lecturer at Campion College and Research Fellow of Women's Forum Australia.
Further Reading:
George A. Akerlof & Janet Yellen, ‘New Mothers, not Married: Technology shock, the demise of shotgun marriage, and the increase in out-of-wedlock births’. Brookings September 1, 1996.
Helen M. Alvaré, ‘Abortion, Sexual Markets, and the Law’. Stephen Napier (ed.), Persons, Moral Worth, and Embryos: A critical analysis of pro-choice arguments (Springer, 2011), pp255-79.
Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a lost vision (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).
Sue Ellen Browder, Subverted: How I helped the sexual revolution hijack the women’s movement (Ignatius Press, 2015).
Sidney Callahan, ‘Abortion and the Sexual Agenda’. Robert M. Baird and Stuart. E. Rosenbaum (eds.), The Ethics of Abortion: Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Third Edition (Prometheus Books, 2001), pp167-78.
Serrin Foster, ‘The Feminist Case Against Abortion: The pro-life roots of the women’s movement’. America. The Jesuit Review January 7, 2015.
Valerie Tarico, ‘Why I am Pro-Abortion and not Just Pro-Choice’. Free Inquiry Vol.36(5), August/September 2016.
[1] See, for instance the loose criteria specified in the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018 (QLD), s 6, which includes ‘current and future physical, psychological and social circumstances’. See also the Abortion Law Reform Act No 11 (NSW) 2019, s 6.
[2] See, for example, Tarico, ‘Why I am pro-Abortion and not just pro-Choice’.
[3] See in particular, Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women, and Helen Alvare, ‘Abortion, Sexual Markets, and the Law’.
[4] Cited in Foster, ‘The Feminist Case Against Abortion’.
[5] Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, p16
[6] Ibid. p52.
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