Conservatives love to frame their pro-life arguments with “morality” issues, distinguishing between what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong,’  ‘Wrong’, to them, is the destruction of embryos to fetuses at any stage, no matter the circumstance or threat to the living, breathing person whose body houses said fetuses.  Based on this strict set of moral guidelines, though, we are left with situations such as the ones outlined below.

• An Indiana doctor helped a ten-year-old rape victim abort her fetus when her home state would have forced her to birth the child.  This deeply angered right winged pro-lifers, though they never spoke to the child, her family, or her doctors.
• A woman with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy in Michigan was sent home to “wait it out” while she waited for the unviable pregnancy to pass, hoping her fallopian tube wouldn’t rupture.
• In Louisiana, a woman miscarrying at 16 weeks was denied appropriate miscarriage management because even though the pregnancy was unviable, her fetus still had a heartbeat. So, she was forced to go through hours of delivery, hours spent in agony—suffering a hemorrhage and nearly a liter loss of blood.
• There have been reports of more than two dozen women in Texas whose miscarriages weren’t treated because of embryonic or fetal heartbeats. Several of the women wound up hemorrhaging or being admitted to the intensive care unit; one woman’s uterus ruptured, and she had to undergo a hysterectomy.

Are situations like that good, ethical, and moral?  Are they “pro-life”?  I really don’t see how they are.

With abortion bans leading to situations like women dying from birth, rape victims forced to give birth, girls too young to safely – and legally- carry a pregnancy forced to become mothers—there’s a question we must ask ourselves: is it really a morality issue? In my opinion, anyone who actually cared about what’s ‘right’ would find these situations extremely alarming. 

The truth is, this has never been morality issue.  No, it is misogyny and the desire to control women’s bodies in the highest order. 

The way new laws work, banning abortion options outright, or limiting abortions past 6 weeks, signals that women are merely vessels for delivering new life, not as fully formed individuals with our own needs and desires. In the eyes of old Republican men (most representatives are men and the average age in the House and Senate ranges from 57 years old to 65 years old.) and the we women are just baby making machines who must shut up and do what we’re told. They force women to give birth even if they aren’t ready- physically, financially, or otherwise-  because, to them, our lives aren’t really our own. 

Misogyny isn’t only hatred of women, but also about controlling and punishing the women who challenge male dominance. This is why they’re insistent on taking our reproductive rights away and punishing us for resisting. 

Furthermore, it discourages male accountability. The penalties for abortion are far more severe than those for rapists. Men also aren’t legally required to stay and help raise the child of the women forced to birth it.  Well, there is child support, right?  Despite the fact that a check doesn’t account for the physical and emotional support a partner can and should provide to a woman during pregnancy and postpartum, according to the 2018 US Census,  “just 43.5 percent of custodial parents get the full amount of support they’re entitled to. And more than 30 percent don’t receive anything at all.”  In total, over $114 billion dollars is owed to single parents raising children on their own.  

The politicians who passed the anti-abortion laws have never spoken to these women, being completely unaware of the dangerous situations they’re in. In fact, most of them are men, and biological men will never know what it’s like to be in danger of pregnancy and forced birth. This is why abortion shouldn’t be in the hands of politicians, but rather a conversation between a doctor and the mother. More specifically, a doctor with a degree—who specializes in the profession and understands each individual situation in depth—would know more than a politician.

Sources:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/10-billion-in-child-support-payments-going-uncollected-according-to-estimates/

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-tps03.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/29/politics/republicans-roe-v-wade/index.html

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