–Yes, a lot of Catholics are Democrats except abortion. But a lot more Catholics are Catholic except for the anti-abortion part. And most Catholics, like most everythings, are more complex than either of those options.

–There is a lot of hand-wringing here about the other side caricaturing pro-choice people as abortion-all-the-time, “pro-death” and so forth. But at the same time there is a lot of stereotyping the “pro-life” or, as most on this thread (and I) would say, anti-abortion or anti-choice side. My experience is that they are not for the most part motivated by hating women and wanting to control them, for example. It would be more productive to give them the benefit of the doubt, I think.

–A related point pertains to the initial blog post itself. I happen to agree that abortion should be legal, and I don’t dispute that making it illegal harms many women. But it is a bit lazy of argument to say that opposition to the legality of abortion can’t possibly be feminist. For one thing, if fetuses are people–which is not what I believe, but again, I think the opposition should be given the benefit of the doubt as to their sincerity–then half of abortions kill girls. Surely there is some room in feminism for worrying about them, too. You may think doing so is misguided, but that doesn’t make it not feminist–in fact to some people in the opposition, it is explicitly feminist–think for example of people who work against selective abortion in China.

Again, I am pro-abortion rights myself, and I am familiar with the arguments against the anti-abortion side’s positions. But I am troubled when our side fails to see the humanity in the other side, or to try to imagine what the issue looks like inside their heads. The vast majority of people opposed to the legality of abortion, although they may be misguided in many ways, are not Joe Scheidler maniacs but sincere people of conscience.

-I’m pro-life in every aspect of my life. I’m against the death penalty, I’m vegetarian, I’m anti-abortion. I firmly believe that life begins at conception. And no, it has nothing to do with religion (I’m an atheist).

-I am more concerned about preventing unwanted pregnancies through education and contraception availability than immediately overturning Roe V. Wade. Pro-lifers need to realize that contraception and sex education is a friend of the movement. Abstinence-based comprehensive sex education is the best way to reduce unwanted pregnancies.

-Reproductive concerns aren’t the only issues women face.. I don’t understand how abortion and choice has taken over the feminist movement. Pro-life feminism isn’t an oxymoron.

It’s not always that feminists “fall over themselves”, I feel; rather, it’s pointing out that pro-choice does not mean forcing abortion on every pregnant woman, just as pro-life shouldn’t mean forcing women to carry to term. Whether someone says “I’m going to get my tubes tied” or “I think I’d give birth and not abort”, it’s essentially about choice.

Is it a valid analogy to compare this to saying “I’m against suffering, but I don’t think I could bring myself to euthanise my cancer-stricken cat”? Sometimes stuff is very personal and people can’t bear to get involved (even when they should), I suppose.

But your perception of what’s there doesn’t change the reality of what’s there. Attempting to equivocate a 3-week embryo with a 3-week infant is ludicrous, and we all know it. You may perceive it as a baby, or a human life, but that doesn’t mean that it will become a baby–become a human. It has the potential to, that’s all. The whole point of pregnancy is the development of the human organism from a divided cell to an individual who can eat and breath on its own. It can go off the rails pretty easily, some place the rate of spontaneous miscarriage due to a developmental snafu as high as 90% (most of those happening without the woman even knowing).

Precisely! To argue that a blastocyst is sentient life, as opposed to cellular life, makes no sense. You don’t see protesters at third-grade bio practicals when kids scrape cheek cells out their mouths and stick them under the microscope, not even when you could make the case that your cheek cells aren’t viable outside your body. For me, there’s no guarantee that the potential will become concrete until the birth itself; there’s higher certainty in the last trimester, yeah, but even then there’s a medical exception for late-term abortions, as there rightly should be. Definitely no one who has the option to would wait so long, the blastocyst/early stage is a lot more clear-cut: that’s not sentient life, that’s not yet human life.

We don’t allow someone to claim self defense if they contract out someone to kill someone else who has threatened them, even if it’s quite clear that the person is going to kill them.

The logical problem with the argument you’re making about self defense and abortions is that it only holds up if you consider a pregnancy to be a transient threat. The thing about pregnancy is that it is essentially 9 months of active threat. There are things that can go wrong at pretty much any stage of gestation that can cause serious physical harm or death, and there is a biological guarantee of at least some physical harm during delivery.

To use your analogy, lets say Joe calls Bob on Monday and says “I”m either going to kill you or beat you up”. On Tuesday Bob comes home to find Joe sitting in his living room with a gun. Bob has no way of knowing if the gun is loaded, and Joe doesn’t do anything actively threatening other than sit on the couch and say “I’m thinking about maybe killing you” while waving the gun around. If Bob had a gun do you think it would be a crime for him to shoot Joe? What if Bob had hired a body guard who, upon seeing this scene, shot Joe. Would that be a crime? If Bob called the police, what do you think would happen to Joe? Lets say no one shoots Joe, they just threw him out the door and he broke his neck falling down the stairs? Would that be a crime? Maybe there are no stairs but its February in rural Minnesota under white-out conditions and Joe was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Would it be a crime to throw him out (to his almost certain death)?

I find it hard to believe that any of these actions would be seen as murder, even though Bob has the ability to simply leave his house (which obviously isn’t an option for a pregnant woman). Still, very few people expect Bob to leave his home. In some states you aren’t even expected to leave a public space with a clear escape route if you’re threatened. In order to attack the self defense claim for abortion you have to manage to argue that either a woman’s own body is somehow less worthy of security than property she owns or that there is something special about the fetus that grants it rights and protections which are not only otherwise unheard of in the law but also supersede several of the woman’s constitutional rights.

All of that said, if abortion were ever illegal and if the fetus were accorded full rights as a person, it would be mighty hard to argue that women shouldn’t be tried for murder for all the reasons Mighty Ponygirl said. Which is why we need laws reflecting the fact that pregnancy is not the same as parenthood, and abortion is simply not the same as willfully killing your child.

And this really speaks to the point I was trying to make.

Pregnancy is a state of perception. If someone “perceives” that it is a baby, then the killing of it is abhorrent. A woman could be very excited about her pregnancy and “perceive” that the fetus is a baby. She could have the name all picked out and start working on the nursery and send out photos of her ultrasound and no one would batt an eye at it. The last thing on her mind would be “killing the baby.”

A woman could have an unwanted pregnancy and see the baby as little more than a glorified tumor–a ticking timebomb in her uterus that will destroy her life.

But the woman with the wanted pregnancy could have her pregnancy go molar. At that point, she will stop perceiving that the pregnancy is “a baby” and start seeing the pregnancy as a cancer that will kill her and seek to terminate. Hell, she may find out that the child will be born with severe physical and developmental disabililties, and come to understand that she simply does not have the resources in her life to care for a special-needs child.

And the woman with the unwanted pregnancy may go to a Pregnancy Crisis Center and see an ultrasound and have someone tell her that the fetus has fingernails and decide “wow, it’s really a baby” and decide to carry the pregnancy to term.

Declaring that you’re “pro-choice but would never have an abortion” is admitting that your perception of pregnancy is that there is something there that is “human enough” that killing it would be monstrous, but that women should be legally allowed to kill that same entity. You’re lending credence to anti-choice rhetoric. They love when feminists fall over themselves to declare “they would never have one” because it’s a glaring moral hole they can exploit, not to mention, it plays so well into their favorite virgin/whore dichotomies.

But your perception of what’s there doesn’t change the reality of what’s there. Attempting to equivocate a 3-week embryo with a 3-week infant is ludicrous, and we all know it. You may perceive it as a baby, or a human life, but that doesn’t mean that it will become a baby–become a human. It has the potential to, that’s all. The whole point of pregnancy is the development of the human organism from a divided cell to an individual who can eat and breath on its own. It can go off the rails pretty easily, some place the rate of spontaneous miscarriage due to a developmental snafu as high as 90% (most of those happening without the woman even knowing).

true, depending on how/when one says “i’d never have an abortion,” it can be taken as bashing those who have abortions (and as so many women have pointed out it’s probably only true until one is proven wrong) – so i think it’s definitely something to be weary of.

but i also agree with the person above who said that if you don’t think it’s ever ok for people to declare “i personally wouldn’t” then to be consistent you also shouldn’t declare “i don’t believe people who say they wouldn’t”: if the former is not relevant to the issue, then neither is the latter.

Yes, this is when Aquinas said life began and the soul entered… what is interesting is that this was entirely subjective; EACH WOMAN, after all, defined “quickening” (movement of fetus) for herself.

She could always say she didn’t feel anything, even when she did. OR: she might not recognize this physical sensation for what it was. In any event, the definition of her pregnancy was mostly “women’s business” and was not spoken about among men or in polite company–allowing a lot of leeway.

Daisy: Thanks for your comment! I knew that there used to be ideas about the foetus coming alive at its “quickening”, but hadn’t a clue how canon law evolved. To be fair, I’ve long made up my mind that whether or not I get squicked out by the thought of abortion personally (due more to the fact that it’s a blobby, goopy, bloody thingy that oozes out from inside one’s body!), I can be a pro-choice Catholic (and fairly lapsed on many other social teachings, anyhoo). But thanks for the entire spiel, it was really very informative and I’d love to know how to argue the pro-choice stance to Christians; usually I collapse into a fit of “But… but… can’t a woman choose? Why do you keep going on about ‘sanctity of life’??”

If it’s kinda off-topic, though, can I ask, does anyone know how many Catholics/Protestants/Eastern Christians are actively anti-choice? Because the painting of the entire right-ish portion of the Christian faith as anti-abortion (which is what my geography teacher does when she describes fertility transition in countries like the Philippines) seems rather general, I’m sure there are many people (like my mum) who think, “I’m Catholic, but I have no problem with BC, abortion, whatever…”

(Sorry if this seems digressy and long-winded, I’m not a very concise person and tend to ramble on a lot!)

The midwife “inducing miscarriage”.

Note: This wasn’t invasive, or considered particularly odd or immoral. It was usually accomplished using strong doses of pennyroyal tea.

OMG, Cara… I feel like I am Stanley Kubrick, going back to those monkeys fighting over the watering hole. Seriously, I went back to the Dawn of Man, or at least (haha) the Dawn of the Catholic Church.

I’ll try to remember it!

Muddled version of my post that dissolved into the ether:

Pro-life theology is recent. Judaic law and St Thomas Aquinas did not believe “life begins at conception”–patriarchy meant that “women’s stuff” was handled by women, midwives, nurses, maids, etc. The guys all went “yuck” and didn’t even go there.

At some point (reference here), probably during the middle ages, patriarchy was “consolidated” and males invaded this traditionally female territory, as they increasingly saw children as THEIR property/heirs that had to be protected. And pregnancy/childbirth became part of regular “medicine”–whereas it hadn’t been previously.

Canon laws reflected this–there was virtually no anti-abortion rule in the Church until this time. Abortion was first outlawed as it was believed to be primarily connected to prostitution, not because they worried wives and mothers were getting abortions. The midwife “inducing abortion” was still privately acceptable.

It was only when microscopes were invented that anyone had a clue about “when life begins”–and after that point, a bevy of laws was passed, in accordance with Church law, which became about the question of “ensoulment.”

Why, you ask, is she telling us all this.

Because the way I argue with “pro life” women, who tend to be religious/Catholic (as I am)–in a specifically feminist way–is to explain how Church law evolved. (For Protestant women, I argue from the Bible directly.) And when they seem to get it, that anti-abortion is a relatively NEW invention by men to control the means of production, I hammer the point home: Men made the laws to suit themselves, these laws do not come from God.

I consider myself a pro-life (don’t like the term, for reasons others have explained) feminist, but this is a personal view and I do not want abortion outlawed for any reason. This is the same position I try to bring other pro-life women to, and they will usually listen to me because I use their language and argue from their point of view, that human life is sacred. However, in saying that, I explain that the definition of “human life” has DRIFTED CONSIDERABLY throughout the centuries. I have discovered that many women are very attentive and WANT A REASON to discard the rightwing bullshit. But you have to use the morality and theology they already live by to make these points.

Also, I have discovered that women who are prolife have abortions anyway. In some cases, prolife rabble-rousing is a form of penance for what they feel is a sin. I was shocked to discover one of the most gung-ho pro-life women I know (note: this is South Carolina, and they are everywhere) had an abortion herself.

If we can get them to stop seeing it as a sin, they might stop the rabble-rousing.

The Palins, the Quiverfulls, et al, too far gone… although admittedly, I will argue with them too. It’s a dirty job, etc. etc.

Hope all this made sense, my first comment was far better! (And if this looks like a derail, it’s because it originally was comment #10, or something!)