Pro-Life, My Ass!

Anti-abortion folks are gaslighting you

I've been meaning to comment on the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade for a while, but life keeps getting in the way. Anyway, as most of you reading this know, what the Supreme Court did on June 24 was abrogate a 1973 federal ruling (the Roe v. Wade decision) making abortion legal nationwide. In other words, abortion rights is now where the right of Black people not to be enslaved was prior to the Civil War: States could decide whether Black people could be enslaved or not. And now states can decide to force women to bear children that they had no intention of having.

Except in cases of a threat to the life of the mother, and in some states in cases of rape or incest, abortion is now already illegal in some states, or will be within days, due to so-called “trigger laws.” They include South Dakota, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Utah, and Alabama.

Wisconsin’s status is in dispute, but as of the moment, an abortion ban is in effect; Kentucky’s, Louisiana’s, and Utah’s bans have been temporarily rescinded due to judicial orders. The states in red are poised to ban most or all abortions before the end of July. (The status of abortion rights in all of the states in maroon, red, or orange may very well change in one direction or another in coming weeks or months.) It's striking that in a century where more and more countries have expanded abortion rights, the US has suddenly set the clock back 50 years.

What really galls me about the rhetoric surrounding the abortion issue in this country is the claim by its opponents that they are "pro-life." What exactly do they mean by that? They obviously don't mean it literally. They probably had steak recently, and that cow was definitely dead when they had a piece of him or her. Even in the unlikely event that they eat a plant-based diet, they probably kill most of the plants they eat. But they’re not even pro-human life. Since most opponents of abortion are right-wing Republicans and/or Christian fundamentalists, they typically support capital

punishment and every damn war or covert military action our government engages in. In the past few decades, there have been over 200 bombings or arsons of abortion clinics, and 11 doctors or other staff at clinics that perform abortions have been murdered. And partly because of already existing abortion rights restrictions and largely because the US is the only industrialized country in the world where tens of millions of people are denied health insurance coverage, the US already has several times the rate of maternal mortality of any other wealthy country in the world. A picture is worth 1000 words, as they say, so might as well show you another one.

Making abortion illegal would make maternal mortality worse.

Further undermining the “pro-life” claims of abortion opponents, 21% of white Christian fundamentalists (“evangelical Christians”) oppose abortion under any circumstances, including when carrying the pregnancy to term threatens the life or health of the mother, or when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Fortunately, at the moment, there are no US states where abortion is prohibited under all circumstances, but Alabama and Oklahoma are valiantly trying to join the “club” of 10 countries that ban abortion under any circumstances, including a threat to the life or health of the mother.

The ultimate irony of “pro-life” (anti-abortion) advocacy is that there are actually more abortions in countries where abortion is illegal than in countries where it is legal. If “saving lives” is genuinely the aim of the “pro-life” movement, it is failing miserably at doing so in the very places where it has successfully banned (or never allowed) abortion. And more often than not, “pro-life” politicians and their supporters have generally reactionary political views wherein they oppose almost anything that makes or would make the lives of people who live outside their mother’s womb better—a living wage, universal health care, money for jobs and social welfare programs rather than bombs and bullets—and are, to put it bluntly, far more likely to be racist, sexist, homophobic bigots than those who are pro-choice. As the satirical song puts it, they are ”friends of the fetus”—right up til the moment of birth. In short, “pro-life” is nothing more than a feel-good slogan or label; it does not reflect a coherent moral philosophy nor does it achieve the aim it supposedly has of saving lives, let alone making lives better. Rather, it represents an effort by a small minority of mostly religious zealots to impose their incoherent morality on the rest of us.

There is, however, a more philosophically coherent possible objection to later-term abortions that warrants consideration: What if fetuses are capable of suffering? I must admit that if it were known for a fact that fetuses suffered horribly during abortion, and I were a pregnant woman considering one, that would certainly give me pause. But there is no evidence that this is the case.

It's indisputable that newborn babies are fully capable of experiencing pain as well as various negative emotions. Take it from me, a psychologist: They are. It stands to reason, then, that such capacities must exist some time before that. The question is, how long before that? It certainly doesn't come as a big shocker that antiabortion extremists exaggerate how early this is, either explicitly or by implication. "Abortion stops a beating heart,” they tell us, clearly trying to imply that if a fetus has a heartbeat, then it must feel something. But people in comas have heartbeats, too; sentience is not required in order to have a heartbeat.

A common talking point among abortion opponents is that fetuses are fully capable of feeling pain by 20 weeks after the beginning of gestation. A few years ago, the US House of Representatives passed a bill prohibiting most abortions after 20 weeks, based on a claim by medical researcher Kanwaljeet Anand that fetuses become capable of feeling pain by then. The bill did not pass the Senate, and accordingly has never become law in the United States, but this assumption that fetuses become capable of feeling pain by approximately halfway through pregnancy if not before is widely accepted, evidently in other countries as well as the United States, since only a handful of countries permit abortion on demand past that point. But is it true?

In fact, there is little evidence that this is the case. The notion that it occurs this early appears to be an inference from the fact that fetuses at approximately 20 weeks exhibit withdrawal reflexes from noxious stimuli. But a withdrawal reflex does not necessarily indicate conscious experience of pain, and can occur even if a stimulus is not painful. Research indicates that brain pathways necessary for conscious perception of pain to occur are not developed until 24 weeks. Moreover, waking brain activity, a prerequisite for consciousness (and thus for pain perception), does not appear to occur until 29-30 weeks—more than 75% of the way through a full-term pregnancy. Fewer than 1% of abortions take place after 20 weeks (whereas over 91%—the majority through the “abortion pill” mifepristone) take place at 13 weeks or less), according to CDC statistics, so presumably vastly fewer than that take place after the point at which conscious perception of pain becomes possible.

And the few women who get late-term abortions don’t do it just for the hell of it. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason magazine put it,

To believe there are women routinely putting their bodies through months of unwanted pregnancy, shelling out thousands of dollars, and undergoing serious surgery rather than use condoms or get an IUD or get an earlier abortion or whatever requires believing not just that most women are immoral or irresponsible but also, and simultaneously, wealthy, stupid, and masochistic.

Getting an abortion late in pregnancy is expensive, highly-invasive surgery. Women who get late-term abortions typically have a life- or health-threatening pregnancy, or a fetus with severe abnormalities (some of which cannot be detected early in pregnancy) that threaten its life or health—for instance, some fetuses have a condition called anencephaly, meaning that their brain never develops. Sometimes women cannot afford an abortion earlier in the pregnancy, but manage to raise the money later. Or, the prospective medical expenses of having a child with severe abnormalities far outweigh those of even the most expensive of late-term abortions. Or they are in or have recently left an abusive relationship, and fear that having a child will result in their partner having visitation and further abusing them (or the child). There are a million and one possible reasons why women have abortions, whether early or late in their pregnancy. It’s not an easy decision to make, or one that is made lightly. And it should be women’s decision to make.