The queasy prochoicer

HT: Jill Stanek

I knew where I stood on abortion. But I had to rethink.

I'll have to beg to differ with a lot of what she says, but kudos for having the courage to re-examine her beliefs! A staunchly prochoice broadcaster, Miranda Sawyer, did some soul searching.

A few snippets:

I spent some time thinking about the precise point when our baby came into existence. Was he there before I did the test? Something was, or the test couldn't have come up positive. But what? A person? A potential person? Life? What was life exactly?

I wonder how many prochoicers even ponder the issue. Many that I've met are simply reflexively prochoice, because everybody they know is. Others discount that the ZEF has any relevance whatsoever, beyond being unwelcome. It could be fully sentient, composing symphonies in there or coming up with a Grand Unified Theory, and it wouldn't matter. And it sounds as if this woman was at one point on of those prochoicers who had simply never given it any thought. Until reality struck in the form of two lines on a pregnancy test.

Sawyer reflects on her grandmother's final days, and on how that raised new thoughts:

At one point, when my mum and I were sitting with her, Granny suddenly began moaning, clawing at the tubes going in and out of her body. I looked into her face. She gazed back, distraught, still grabbing and waving, imploring. I suddenly became convinced that she wanted me to pull out the drips. She needed me to help her to die. And I thought about doing it, but I just couldn't. No matter how much I loved my Granny - and I did - and no matter how horrible the situation she was in - and it was - I couldn't end her life. I told her so. I watched her flail in frustration for a while. Then she stopped. She died two days later.

Skip forward two years - during which I got pregnant and gave birth to a son, Patrick - and I am making a television documentary about abortion rights in the United States for More4. But what I'm really doing is trying to answer the questions that my Granny's death threw up for me. Is it ever morally right to kill? What if you love the person you're killing? Does it make any difference if you don't want them to die? What if they're a long way from being a full person - independent, full-facultied, vital - should that affect your decision?

Again, did she ponder those questions during all the previous years she'd been prochoice?

Like most women - at least most British women - I have always been firmly in the pro-choice camp because I've spent nearly all of my sexually active life trying not to get pregnant.

Here I'll beg to differ. Polls show women more polarized on abortion than men, but equally likely to find it abhorent as to want it available.

I personally consider it slander to say that being female makes me "prochoice." To me, you might as well note my German ancestry and assume in all earnestness that I'm a Nazi sympathizer who laments that the ovens at Auschwitz were shut down. Imagine for a moment people honestly believing, say, that being white automatically meant that you were a member of the KKK and that you kept a rope for lynchings in the trunk of your car. How would you feel? That's how I feel when people assume I'm prochoice. I consider abortion to be the most loathsome, heinous crime against humanity a person can commit, and it's an insult to everything I am and everything I believe in to presume I would in any way condone it for myself or anybody else. Spit in my face if you will, kick me, kill me, but never put the label "pro-choice" on me. It's an assault on my basic human dignity.

When I got pregnant so soon after my Granny's death, it felt weird. My mind kept returning to the pregnancy test. If my reaction to those fateful double lines that said 'baby ahead' had been horror instead of hurrah ... then I would have had little hesitation in having an abortion. But it was that very fact that was confusing me. I was calling the life inside me a baby because I wanted it. Yet if I hadn't, I would think of it just as a group of cells that it was OK to kill. It was the same entity. It was merely my response to it that determined whether it would live or die. That seemed irrational to me. Maybe even immoral.

To prolifers, that's a big, DUH!

A civilised society should allow us to have children if and when we desire them.

Which I would not argue with. It's the killing ones that already exist that I have a problem with. The very fact that a fetus is so small and dependent cries out for protection, not for aggression.

They include Roy McMillan. I hung out with Roy outside the clinic as he confronted young, mostly black, women coming in for a termination and tried to persuade them to turn back. It wasn't a comfortable morning. 'Shame on you, coming in here with a cross around your neck!' Roy shouted at one poor girl. 'Are you going to nail your baby to the cross?'

I do have to say I find Roy's behavior appalling and counter-productive.

If I'm honest, it seemed that everyone - philosopher, politician, crank - just takes a stance and then justifies it.

If Sawyer only recently started asking herself the questions, she, too, spent most of her life having simply taken a stance and then justifying it.

Lord, this was confusing. If an embryo can survive being artificially created, being frozen, being FedExed hundreds of miles and then implanted into someone else's womb, then surely the anti-abortionists were right? Life does begin at conception. So, I agreed with two conflicting arguments. Life begins when a sperm hits an egg, but women should have the right to abortions. I appeared to believe that women should be allowed to kill.

Well, I'd say that it's not what you apprear to believe, Ms. Sawyer. I'd say it's what you actually do believe. As you've articulated it yourself.

Unlike Norma, I don't want to be the kind of person who changes her beliefs according to her circumstances: like people changing from Labour to Conservative as they become richer.

Actually, Norma's circumstances changed after she changed her beliefs. Her beliefs changed while she was still working in an abortion clinic. After they changed, she left and the rest of her life had to be changed to fit her beliefs. I marvel that Ms. Sawyer didn't learn this while conversing with her. And if Ms. Sawyer changes her beliefs on abortion, it won't be due to a change in circumstances. It'll be due to having taken into consideration questions and information she'd never taken into consideration before. That's called "being open minded." Which I'd hate to think she'd balk at.

And I don't want to tell other people - other women - what to do.

Opposing abortion isn't telling other people what to do any more than opposing arson is telling other people what to do. It's standing with a society that says that certain acts are unacceptable because they hurt other people.

But when you see women's abortion rights whittled away as they have been in the US, you can't help but get angry.

Oh, can't you? A lot of us -- including a lot of women -- are delighted to see "whittling away" of "abortion rights". We find it hard to see anything that women don't want to do as a "right" to be protected and embraced.

In the end, I have to agree that life begins at conception. So yes, abortion is ending that life. But perhaps the fact of life isn't what is important. It's whether that life has grown enough to take on human characteristics, to start becoming a person.

Remember when she said "If I'm honest, it seemed that everyone - philosopher, politician, crank - just takes a stance and then justifies it."? This is exactly what she did. Ms. Sawyer desperately wanted to remain "prochoice" on abortion, and she hunted around for a way to be able to do so.

How intellectually and morally honest is that, really?

All in all, kudos for at least articulating so much. But to simply fall back onto, "I don't want to be a person who opposes abortion, so I've come up with a new way of making myself comfortable with endorsing the practice" is a cop out.