Abortion: A matter of principle
A comment on yesterday's blog containing statistics about abortions:
"So basically restricting abortions to the first 15 weeks would affect 6% of all abortions. Though for Planned parenthood it’s all or nothing."
Yes. It is a matter of principle.
A 15-week cutoff is not a compromise. It is a defeat.
I experienced "Second Wave Feminism" in real time as a young adult. The changes of 1960s and 1970s went far beyond the primary goal of "First Wave" feminists, who sought the right to vote.
Books by Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) challenged the notion of women having as their essential nature a limited sphere at home and hearth, bearing and raising children. Nor did they need have a limited supportive role to men outside the home. Women could have careers, not as nurses and secretaries, but as doctors and as the boss.
Feminism was part of an era of social change we are still working through. There were hippies. War protests. Earth Day and Environmentalism. A Black Civil Rights Movement. Homosexuals became more visible and acknowledged.
In the early 1960s reliable oral contraceptives--"the pill"--became available, which gave women far greater control of pregnancies, with giant consequences for women in the modern workplace, and in their sense of sexual agency. The book, Our Bodies Ourselves, 1970, was part of the movement. Guess what? Women wrote that they liked sex. (When I was a county commissioner in the 1980s a local group of Evangelical ministers met with me to demand that the book be removed from the Jackson County library. The book remained.)
Second Wave Feminism also coincided with the shipping container revolution of world trade. Women in the workplace wasn't just about women's self-actualization. Family-wage manufacturing jobs were moving offshore. Incomes flattened. Women became breadwinners because it took two incomes to be middle class.
Second Wave Feminism insisted women were citizens, people with agency on their own. They weren't baby machines who belonged to a father and then a husband. The notion of woman as fully empowered required re-thinking a deeply embedded notion in Western Civilization. Judeo-Christian texts make this hierarchical relation of the sexes sacred, "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church."
Roe v. Wade was foundational to feminism because it judged to be Constitutional women's child-bearing autonomy. Women owned themselves, their own bodies, at least until the fetus had independent "viability."
A Supreme Court decision in favor of the Mississippi case, which allows states to end abortions after 15 weeks, has surface political appeal. It would allow some 94% of abortions to continue. It would reduce the least popular abortions, where the fetus has become more recognizably "human." A 15-week deadline may reflect the overall sensibilities of swing voters who want some abortions, but not too many and not too late.
The feminist problem with it is that it reverses Constitutional agency for women as child-bearers. Feminist principle demands childbearing be the woman's choice as a fully empowered citizen, in her own way juggling the multiple and conflicting wife-family-student-career-mother-parent roles of a woman during childbearing years.
A 15-week cutoff is doomed to displease people who believe that life begins at conception. It will also displease people who consider non-viable fetuses to be the woman's business and no one else's. A 15-week abortion cutoff could be an armistice in the abortion wars, if it reduces some of the urgency on either end, and if a solid majority of the public agrees that terminating a 15 week pregnancy is early enough. It will not, however, be a peace treaty. There are principles in conflict.