The defining issue of modernity is control of women's fertility. It is this question – more than religion, politics, economics or the "clash of civilizations" – that forms the deepest dividing line in the world today. It is a line than cuts through every nation, every people, from the highest level of organized society down to, in many cases, the divided minds and emotions of individual men and women.I don't know if I'd call control of female fertility "the defining issue of modernity" though I suppose it has a strong case. And advances in birth control and abortion technologies have certainly brought much controversy, and much tragedy as power centers seek to control the use of these technologies:
Control of fertility – and its active principle, sexuality – has always been an organizing principle of human society, of course, but modernity has presented the world with a revolutionary concept that overthrows millennia of received wisdom and tradition: namely, that an individual woman should control her own fertility. This notion destabilizes state structures and religious dogmas, and uproots cultural mores whose origins reach back to prehistoric times. It is a profoundly disturbing development in the life of humankind.
Chillingly, as the Lancet paper shows, there is no relationship between the legality and the incidence of abortion. Women with no access to contraceptives will try to terminate unwanted pregnancies. A World Health Organisation report shows that almost half the world's abortions are unauthorised and unsafe. In East Africa and Latin America, where religious conservatives ensure that terminations remain illegal, they account for almost all abortions. Methods include drinking turpentine or bleach, shoving sticks or coathangers into the uterus, and pummelling the abdomen, which often causes the uterus to burst, killing the patient. The WHO estimates that between 65,000 and 70,000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while 5 million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, "are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes".Using state power to ban abortion doesn't save fetuses, it kills women.
Floyd also discusses the role of religion in this whole mess. Suprise: there are more abortions where there's more religion.
3 comments:
When I visited the abortion clinic last fall (not part of our standard Ob/Gyn rotation, but I wanted to know more about it), I was really disturbed to see how state regulations affect women so much. Tennessee stops doing abortions sooner than Kentucky does (in terms of gestational age) (this is hearsay and not confirmed as factual by me) (when I say "Kentucky" performs the abortions, it's actually these two physicians who have two offices that serve the entire state and surrounding states), so women from Tennessee come with their ultrasound pictures showing their fetus's abnormalities and then are subjected to the KY mandatory waiting period. We get women from West Virginia, also. It's insane. If I go into Ob/Gyn, I would be inclined to offer abortions, but it is SO freaking hard to actually do that in reality. ARGH.
I think it should be clear that pro-lifers are not at all interested in "pretending" to save babies, as your title suggests. This may seem like an irrelevant point, but I think it sets back the pro-choice cause when we demonize the other side. Anti-abortion laws are misguided and counter-productive, but that hardly implies that pro-lifers are all homicidal misogynists.
What's up Keith.
First of all, I think we'd agree that the conscious personal motives of individual force-birthers (I'm not going to call them pro-life) are not often based on homicidal misogyny. However, the policies they support kill women. And in most cases, the people who enact these policies certainly know that. So my vitriol and rhetoric is more directed at the policy and policy-makers more than the supporters (if you checked out the article I link to, you'll see that a lot of it covers the Bush administrations humanitarian aid debacles.) Besides, I do think that many people who support these policies do have some conscious and unconscious bigotry towards women, and/or fear of women's sexual liberation.
All that aside, the point you make is a political one, that it isn't going to help us win friends when we speak this way. Fair enough. More flies with honey than vinegar and whatnot. You aren't the first nor will you be the last to chide me on this, and I'll admit it is a lesson I need to at least hear from time to time. However, my motives in writing this aren't to address an audience I'm hoping to convert; I'm expressing my own emotion on the issue. And there is political power in this form of expression - the power of the rhetoric could inspire people already in agreement with the basic issue to take greater action.
Thanks for the comment!
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