Personhood

The other day, Maxi posted an image of a button bearing the slogan "If the fetus you save is gay, will you still fight for its rights?"

For a long time, I thought those sorts of retorts were pointless ad hominems (arguments that attack the person rather than the substance of their claims).

And then I started looking looking more closely at "pro-life" policy, and at numbers.

Here's what we know. And by "know", I don't mean "here's what pro-choice feminists believe", I mean "here are some facts that you can't argue with and still maintain that your arguments have any kind of relationship with reality":

From a study done by the Guttmacher Institute, covered by the BBC:

• Abortion bans do not reduce the prevalence of abortion.


• Abortion bans do reduce the prevalence of safe abortions.


• "Every year, an estimated 70,000 women die as a result of unsafe abortions - leaving nearly a quarter of a million children without a mother - and 5m develop complications." (From the BBC story)
  
• Access to contraception does decrease prevalence of abortion.

Here end the facts, and commence the opinions.

I understand why people might want to attribute personhood to a foetus. I really do. Many people just can't think of their pregnancies as being about "a foetus" -- they're pregnant with a baby. They're anticipating a baby, and it's exciting and terrifying, and they love their baby. Or they miscarry a baby, and it's confusing and hurts like the blazes. Or maybe not. Maybe the foetus isn't a baby until it's born, even for people who desperately want a baby. Maybe the miscarriage doesn't feel like the death of a born child.

I think strict feminist insistence on calling anything unborn "a foetus" (or for that matter, "a baby") actually lets us down hard. I don't get to define other people's experiences of wanting a baby, having a baby, having a pregnancy, losing a baby/foetus. It's up to individual people if they want to define their experiences this way. For some people, saying "you're pregnant with a foetus" will feel horribly trivialising of their worry, their happiness, their pain, and anything else they go through. For others, saying "you're pregnant with a baby" sets up unrealistic standard of what they should feel about what they're experiencing.

So when someone talks about the personhood of a foetus, I get it. Call me a bad feminist if you want, I don't mind. Because I don't really think that personhood is the ballgame when it comes to reproductive freedom. It's not the foetus not being a person that makes abortion ok. It's the fact that whether I am pregnant or not, it's my body, and whether the foetus growing inside me is a sonnet-writing jazz artist or an appendage, it's still inside my body. So if a pregnancy starts to threatening my wellbeing in any way at all, I am justified in acting to protect my wellbeing, and there is no positive duty on me to sustain life at the cost of my own wellbeing.

What I don't get, what I just can't can't can't understand is the move to give more rights to foetuses than born children have, or than born adult women have. (For the interested, I've been blogging this issue at some length over at my place, although in a rather US-centric way, which is largely due to my US citizenship).

Recently, a nun was excommunicated after she approved a legal emergency abortion in a Catholic hospital in Arizona (see also the coverage at Ms. Magazine). The patient had pulmonary hypertension which can be fatal. As the abortion was performed at 11 weeks, long before foetal viability, the options were: terminate the pregnancy and save the mother, or allow both to die.

It's shocking that we allocate more rights to foetuses than to born people. I'm willing to concede that foetuses may have personhood. I'm not willing to concede that women do not.

--IP