Abortion Rights: Bleak Past, Murky Future
Posted by
KTK
Jodi Enda has an excellent historical review of the struggle for abortion rights in the US, and the current state of the law and politics on this issue, at The American Prospect. This story has been told many times, but I urge readers to take a look at her piece. I thought I knew the issue well, but I learned aspects of the history that I had never heard of. She also does a good job reviewing the series of strategies by anti-choicers, and failures to counter them by pro-choicers, that have put women on the defensive and allowed the momentum of early women’s rights gains in reproductive health to slip away.
There’s too much there to summarize or excerpt easily. Read the whole thing - it’s worth it. As for why you should - here’s the answer:
According to NARAL, states enacted 409 anti-abortion laws in the past decade, 29 last year. NARAL reports that 47 states plus the District of Columbia allow individuals or institutions to refuse to provide women with abortions or other reproductive health services and referrals; 44 states require young women to notify or obtain consent from a parent before having an abortion, though 10 of the laws have been ruled unconstitutional; 33 states plus the District of Columbia ban public financing of abortions; 30 states have mandatory waiting periods of up to three days or requirements that abortion providers give women seeking abortions negative literature or lectures; 26 states restrict the performance of abortions to hospitals or specialized facilities; and 17 states prohibit insurance from covering abortions or require women to pay higher premiums for abortion care. . . .
As a result of restrictive laws, violence, and the stigma that has become attached to abortion, fewer doctors and other health-care professionals are providing them. The number of abortion providers declined from a high of 2,908 in 1982 to 1,819 in 2000, a 37-percent drop, according to the [Alan] Guttmacher Institute. Almost no nonmetropolitan area had an abortion provider in 2000, the institute reported, which might explain why the abortion rate among women in small towns and rural areas is half that of women in metropolitan areas.
State restrictions almost certainly have caused some women, perhaps thousands a year, to forgo abortions. Research suggests that Wisconsin’s two-day waiting period might have contributed to a 21-percent decline in abortions there. Shawn Towey, spokeswoman for the National Network of Abortion Funds, a group comprising 102 organizations that provides money and support for low-income women seeking abortions, estimates that 60,000 women a year find the restrictions so onerous that they carry their babies to term. The Guttmacher Institute stated in a 2001 report that between 18 percent and 35 percent of Medicaid-eligible women who want to have abortions continue their pregnancies if public funding isn’t available.
Enda also discusses the growing “reduce abortions by supporting birth control” campaign as a strategy aimed at re-connecting with broadly-held American values and regaining the initiative in the fight over abortion. I am ambivalent about this strategy myself - when it is oversimplified, as it always is in the press, it seems to implicitly (or even explicitly) grant that abortion is somehow wrong in itself, and it is not obvious that “make birth control easily available” entails “make birth control and abortion easily available”. Certainly the anti-choicers will not concede as much, so I am not sure that meeting them halfway gets you anything. But Enda pitches it not as a strategy of compromise but as a way of engaging the pro-sex majority on values they already hold, which makes some kind of sense, I guess.
This isn’t a campaign to win over anti-abortion leaders. It’s a campaign — like the other side’s “partial-birth” strategy — to appeal to middle Americans, the vast majority of whom use contraception and support abortion rights to some degree. As [Hillary] Clinton acknowledged in her speech, the search for common ground needs to go hand in hand with a campaign to demonstrate that women who have abortions are not impulsive monsters but people faced with wrenching decisions. “I believe we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,” Clinton said. “This decision is a profound and complicated one; a difficult one, often the most difficult that a woman will ever make.”
As I say, some good stuff there, both historical and tactical. Give it a read.
KTK:
It would be a worthwhile exercise for you to make a detailed case as to why abortion is not wrong in itself. Even among many who support it, there is a sense that abortion — even very-early-term abortion — is somehow immoral. Their support, it seems, is pragmatic.
Being the philosophy and ethics buff that you are, I thought you might put together a moral and ethical case for abortion.
Comment 4/22/2005
why abortion is not wrong in itself. . . . a moral and ethical case for abortion
These are not the same thing.
Nobody argues that abortion is a good in itself - something everyone should have simply because having it is inherently beneficial. But many argue that abortion is morally neutral and can be a means to a good end, like an appendectomy or the setting of a broken bone - something that no one wants to need, but should have if they need it, and which there is no reason not to have if one needs it.
As for the argument for the latter: in a nutshell, it’s that the fetus has no interests, or no interests that override a full person’s (the pregnant woman’s) interests, and thus the decision whether to abort is a purely pragmatic one the woman may make in respect of her own evaluation of the risks and benefits it entails. That’s a fairly common position (though it rests on claims that themselves are controversial and require more-extensive defense.)
Comment 4/22/2005
Well, write that, then.
Comment 4/22/2005