Whether the Fetus is "Alive" or Not is Immaterial
Ultimately, what constitutes "living" for the purposes of rights discussions is indefinable and therefore the rights of the person carrying the fetus overrides even generous fetal entitlements.
In “The Great Replacement and the Racist Opposition to Abortion Rights” I wrote about the leaked Supreme Court decision which revealed its intent to overturn the abortion rights precedent set in Roe v. Wade with the increasingly fascist and extremist preoccupation with birthrates and white replacement theory in mind:
Indeed, treatment of women and LGBTQ+ individuals the world over is lacking even in the putatively most advanced nations with the healthiest economies, and a large contributor to this regressive tendency is the fascist need to keep the population growing to account for the demographic needs of capital (which depends on an ever-increasing growth in profits), the military, the church, as well as the maintenance of social programs and the supply of young workers to care for and support the aging population. These “collective” problems will more and more frequently win out over what will be misattributed to selfish, individualistic concerns about rights; in the same way that the war in Ukraine and high gas prices were recently deemed more important than even attempting to combat the existential threat of climate change, the Supreme Court’s revealing citation of a CDC document containing the phrase “domestic supply of infants” in its leaked Roe decision is only the beginning. As the population dwindles, the burden on women in Western nations will come to resemble that found in developing countries, and they will be asked to set aside their rights as well as their health for the good of the population. But this will not be just any population: the recent turn against abortion rights is racist in nature as well as generally regressive.
The opposition to abortion rights can be seen as part of a general opposition to freedom of choice in one’s private life which is connected to other social issues such as gay marriage and trans rights. The same kind of slippery slope logic applies: allow gay marriage, for example, and this will result in the eventual dissolution of the family. Allow young people to begin the process of transitioning, and more of them will choose to do so out of a desire to follow trends. Allow the fetus, a putatively living thing, to be harmed and soon babies and even children will be similarly cast aside. None of these arguments are based on any real or perceived legitimate threat, because of the directional nature of these social movements—they are not arguing for the limiting of others’ rights, only for their own to be recognized, so there is no scenario in which the marginalized will suddenly transform their bid for equality into a bid for exclusionary supremacy. There is no argumentative slippery slope which leads to “abortions” (or murder) foisted upon the rest of us, because our rights are not solely based on the fulfillment of some nebulous “living” criterion. The fetus has no rights to begin with, so the abrogation of those rights is an inherently nonsensical concept that carries no attendant danger for anyone who has been born and accorded human rights. The inverse, however, does carry a slippery slope danger: the decision to restrict the rights of anyone to do as they please with their body is highly interconnected with anti-LGBTQ+ moralism and the fear that alternatives to the right-wing Christian conception of the nuclear family are superior for a sufficient number of people to challenge its political and moral hegemony. The logic is the same, and in any of these cases, is entirely lacking merit and only cynically employed as a cover for their clumsy, dangerous attempts to cling to power.
Even if the fetus was established as a living being, the right of the mother to terminate it is still a more pressing concern by all but the most misogynist perspectives. Any kind of moral calculus would confirm this: we would not require someone with a functioning heart give up their life in order to transplant that heart to a recipient who needs it to live, for example. Where two lives cannot coexist, the more self-sustaining and developed life naturally takes precedent, lest we begin to afford equal rights to actual parasites who can only live by draining the life of others. But this is unnecessary, because the only real argument for the rights of the fetus is, as argued in the previous entry above, a purely Christian one, a source of morality which has no place in a deliberative system in which not everyone shares the same spiritual beliefs. Even in a system wherein everyone was Christian, there exists within that particular religious umbrella a number of beliefs concerning the godly perspective on abortion, so simply appealing to the purported edicts of a purported otherworldly being is a nonsensical concept under even the most generously homogeneous society. Yet this religiosity is tellingly the most common justification for the restriction of abortion rights in the United States—this is no surprise, because there is no consistent atheistic ideology possible that would see the fetus as anything other than an unwelcome and parasitic organ of the mother which can be discarded as they please.
In the end, right-wing movements are unapologetically irrational in their claims and therefore are forced to employ propaganda, lies and deceit, and worst of all, bullying, spying, and violence:
The Supreme Court is shortly expected to issue its decision on a challenge to Roe v. Wade that will—if a leaked draft version of the opinion holds—end federal protection for abortion access across the US. If that happens, it will have far-reaching consequences for millions of people. One of those is that it could significantly increase the risk that anti-abortion activists will use surveillance and data collection to track and identify people seeking abortions, sending authorities information that could lead to criminal proceedings.
Opponents of abortion have been using methods like license plate tracking for decades. In front of many clinics around the US, it remains a daily reality.
To get to the parking lot at Preferred Women’s Health Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, people often have to drive through a gauntlet of protesters carrying cameras and clipboards, filming their arrival and recording details about them and their cars.
The substantive ability to procure an abortion in the US was never meaningfully established, even when it was putatively a legal right. 90% of US counties lacked an abortion provider even under Roe, and the number of abortions performed had decreased significantly and steadily since the 1980s, largely due to advancements in reproductive freedom and education (which, significantly, are also restricted by anti-choice conservatives). With the death of this Supreme Court precedent, only the rich will be able to access abortions in most cases as interstate travel will be required and the interstate and intrastate inequalities will be greatly magnified—of course, this “loophole” too might soon be deemed illegal:
Is it still legal for Texans to get abortions in other states?
Yes. There are 27 states where the right to an abortion remains protected by state law, according to Politico. Under the Constitution, interstate commerce is left to Congress to regulate. Kavanagh wrote in his concurring opinion that the right to interstate travel likely outlaws states from preventing their residents from traveling to another state to get abortions. The court didn’t officially rule on whether such laws would be constitutional.
In the dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan worried that leaving the door open could lead some states to pass such laws, and that the cost of travel would cause inequities in who can and can’t access an abortion.
“Above all others, women lacking financial resources will suffer from today’s decision,” they wrote.
The real slippery slope can be found in the act of endowing the fetus with a right to life at any point prior to birth. There is no meaningful developmental milestone which causes a 6 week or a 12 week or a 20 week or any number of weeks ban to be any more meaningful a delimiter than any other undeniably arbitrary timeframe. If we concede that abortion can be justifiably banned at any point in the pregnancy, we must concede that it can be banned at any point in the pregnancy, because the concession eschews all rational concerns and opens the door for anti-choice counterarguments such as viability, the existence of a heartbeat, and pain detection in the fetus, none of which amount to a compelling reason to force anyone to carry something foreign in their body. This is not paranoid fearmongering:
Some House Republicans who oppose abortion rights are pushing legislation to implement a nationwide abortion ban at 15 weeks, coming just hours after the Supreme Court released its opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The push for such a ban is a notable effort given that Republicans have a strong chance to take back control of the House in this year's midterms, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy expressed support for the idea on Friday.
The legislation appears unlikely to advance in the Senate in the near future -- due in part to the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Still, the early discussions represent the excitement energizing opponents of abortion rights, eager to capitalize on Friday's victory.
Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey -- one of the GOP's leading anti-abortion voices who said the issue is what inspired him to run for office -- said he's planning to lower his proposed 20-week abortion ban down to 15 weeks in light of the Supreme Court eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion.
The life of the mother is paramount, and this goes beyond the narrow right to stay alive. No conception of the right to life is narrow enough that the quality of that life is immaterial. However, this consideration too is eroded in light of yesterday’s decision:
In an ABC News/Washington Post poll published in May, 82% said abortion should be legal when the woman’s physical health is endangered, 79% said it should be when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, and 67% said it should be when there’s evidence of serious birth defects.
Like the exception in the case of rape and incest, proving that the health of a mother is in danger can be tricky. This too varies state by state, with some focusing on protecting the life of a pregnant person. Other exceptions broaden it out to health as a whole and whether continuing a pregnancy could jeopardize, for example, an organ function.
Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations.
Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”
The mother’s comfort, both physical and emotional, should be included in any just conception of the right to life (after all, if the right to life only requires the bare minimum to keep someone from dying, then maiming and torture would be permissible because it is technically not killing), and insofar as ridding oneself of an unwanted fetal growth contributes to that health, it constitutes a natural right that is being abrogated for no good reason and in fact cannot be rationally denied with any conceivable justification. If a mother wishes to abort it, the reasoning behind her decision and developmental status of the fetus are of zero consequence. She might wish to abort the fetus because of a reason many would consider specious or nonsensical, or even selfish. This does not matter, and assuming that it does is conceding ideological ground which will always lead to the necessary creation of a sort of thoughtcrime tribunal in which some reasoning is valid while others are not (women’s lives are already going to be the subject of much undue scrutiny as a result of this ruling, especially miscarriages). The fetus deserves no moral consideration, no protection and no concern, because its existence is wholly dependent on the goodwill of its host, without which it would never have even the potential to exist.
There will be appeals to emotion, pictures of destroyed fetuses, and mewling entreaties that we “think of the unborn children.” One need only google the many horrific and graphic crime scene photos of the aftermath of a “back-alley” abortion to counter this argument and reduce it to a game of one-upsmanship in which one side attempts to out-distress the other, another process which can have no place in a philosophical discussion among adults. Any kind of medical procedure can be startlingly gory, and in the case of life versus life, only the most hateful and misogynist would choose a potential life over the comfort and happiness of one which has already existed for over a decade at the very least. This is the true heart of the anti-choice demographic: they wish to keep women limited to the status they are accorded in certain developing nations, where they are expected to act essentially as brood mares, wives, and housekeepers for male power-holders. As the birth rate continues to drop despite this flailing attempt to keep it afloat, the racist fear of white replacement, anti-feminism, and other regressive motivators will only accelerate the descent into fascism, and our opposition will have to become more unbending and unflinchingly, possibly coldly, logical. If anti-choice activists can argue from an amoral retributive perspective (“if she didn’t want to suffer, she shouldn’t have allowed herself to get pregnant”), then we can do so as well—the fetus cannot complain, so it should be even less of a concern to them than the mother from such hateful perspective. Only the “sin” of lustful copulation (or in the case of rape, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is a genuine prejudice held by many which explains their inaction on punishing rapists) justifies placing the concern of the fetus over that of the mother. The fetus has not yet sinned, so in their view, it is more worthy than the mother.
The true concerns underpinning the anti-choice movement are revealed in yesterday’s opinion, interests which fall far short of lofty and morally pious. The “domestic supply of infants” phrase which stirred up controversy after the opinion was leaked was still found in the final document, suggesting a fear of plummeting (white) birthrates:
Even more prurient political concerns existed as well, including a swipe at our new hegemonic rival, China:
The hypocrisy and inconsistency of the anti-choice movement is immaterial, because as previously argued on this site, incongruous thought does not invalidate any one of the points raised, only the character of those who raised them. The Supreme Court could be filled with hypocritical imbeciles (several of them certainly are) and their opinions would still need to be considered on their own merits. But in the case of abortion, the lack of any kind of consistent and meaningful concern for the rights of the fetus goes beyond the character of its champions and argues for the complete abandonment of its potential health and happiness in our deliberations; to put it simply, the fetus does not matter in any case, the health and happiness of its carrier do. This is not because anti-choice activists are vile or hateful (they are), but because their arguments are.