Column by Alison McCulloch, a pro-choice advocate who is writing a book about abortion politics in New Zealand.
If there’s one thing that always shows up in campaigns against a woman’s right to choose abortion, it’s incendiary language and imagery. Readers of The Gisborne Herald have been treated to some of that on two occasions in recent months, first in October last year, when a Voice for Life statement ran in the paper as if it were an objective news report, and again on February 15, in yet another “news” article, this one an amalgam of material from two anti-abortion organisations — Stop Family Planning and the political party Family First.
The articles, which were both part of a campaign against Family Planning’s application to be able to provide early (less than nine weeks) medical abortions at their Hamilton clinic, included phrases like “licence to kill pre-born children”, “abortion conveyor belt”, the “starving to death” of embryos, and subsequent expulsion of the “corpse”.
Those of us who support the pro-choice position are well used to this. We are frequently called Nazis, murderers, likened to suicide cult leader Jim Jones, and worse. And while we understand and respect the passions of those involved in this debate, it’s difficult to respect the shock tactics and misinformation that frequently accompany them.
In that sense, it’s probably easier for us. Our position is that this is a decision best left to the woman involved. It’s a simple position, it’s clear, it’s easy to understand, and we don’t need to frighten or intimidate people by accusing them of heinous crimes to make our point. Our counterparts, though, believe the state (or the church) should take that decision out of women’s hands and make it for them. In order to achieve that by outlawing abortion, they must convince you and me and a majority of politicians that abortion is the same as murder. Though of course, these days, they’ve realised that it’s politically smarter to portray women who have had abortions as victims rather than murderers, and instead to pin the murder charges on doctors, clinics and pro-choice advocates.
Most of the activists in the current campaign against Family Planning believe not just that life begins at conception, but that personhood does too. In other words, that a fertilised egg is as much a person as a full grown woman. If a woman used emergency contraception, for example, and that prevented a fertilised egg from implanting in the womb (implantation is the point at which a pregnancy is detectable), then that too would be the equivalent of murder.
As it turns out, more than 50 percent of fertilised eggs either fail to implant, or are lost soon afterward. As one philosopher in Britain has pointed out, that means as far as anti-abortion advocates should be concerned, there’s a global “scourge” taking place in which upward of 200 million “people” are dying every year. Well, you might say, that’s natural, and abortion isn’t. But given that hospitals are filled with people who would otherwise die from equally natural causes, shouldn’t abortion opponents be calling for the government to spare no expense to fight this pandemic? Just preventing a small percentage of this embryo loss would save far more “lives” than banning abortion would.
But I digress. Both sides have lots and lots of clever arguments, studies, statistics, personal testimonies, photographs of magnified fetuses or of women who died from backstreet abortions. But for those of us who are pro-choice, it is, as I said, really very simple. Women, as human beings with consciences and intelligence enough to make this important decision in the best interests of themselves and their families, should be left to make it.