Friday 26 July 2013

My body's nobody's body but mine (but perhaps also my unborn child's)


The abortion debate in Canada is making headlines again. Maisonneuve magazine, a great (and surprisingly anglo, given the name) publication out of Montreal, published a piece in their last issue about the recent surge in pro-life support in the Great North. Some bits of that article are extremely helpful, I think, in exploring a more nuanced understanding of the terms of this debate. So let me recap the article with a bit of running commentary.

There's a vocal group (I'll go out on a limb and say a vocal minority) of Canadians who are making waves about illegalising abortion, and some Conservative backbenchers take them very seriously. Though the Conservatives presently have a majority government (a fact that I never tire of lamenting), these backbenchers aren't being given the leash needed to make a serious issue of abortion in Parliament, so the legality of abortion hasn't taken the national spotlight. But given the current power of the party, and the intensifying crescendo from the pro-life campaigns outside of political circles, abortion is an issue that we can less and less easily ignore in Canada.

Doctor Morgentaler was of course the pioneering figure/principal villain in the original move to decriminalize abortions up north. Since then, the government has remained pretty silent about the whole affair, though while there are not laws that strictly regulate abortion, the nation's physicians have set themselves some pretty strict guidelines. Pro-lifers make a lot of hay about the deregulated nature of abortions, sometimes claiming that Canada's abortion laws are as lax as those of North Korea (and does anyone here know very much about North Korean abortion laws anyway?), but that seems out of place because of the physicians' own guidelines. Self-regulation seems fine when it actually works.

The financial crisis of 2008 didn't show us that leaving sectors legally deregulated is asking for trouble; it showed us that banks in particular can't be trusted to regulate themselves. Banks need legal watchdogs, but Canadian doctors seem to be doing pretty well regulating themselves, so the issue of legal deregulation seems a non-starter. Apparently 72% of Canadians want "some protection for the unborn", but having that protection meted out by doctors rather than politicians seems a preferable option. (And this seems to be completely in line with Conservative ideology: Harpers's party ran on a platform of paring down big government and letting industries monitor and regulate themselves, as they've been doing by cutting back the environmental monitoring that the government uses to keep economic ambitions in check. Maybe that's why Harper doesn't want to reopen the issue: abortion is the poster-child issue for self-regulating industry.)

The pro-life movement, however, has been anything but silent. They've got protests and marches and demonstrations and conferences and conventions. And they've got religious affiliations, as the movement is strongly tied to Christian ideals. Their "crisis pregnancy centres", which are basically their response to the abortion clinic, have strong Christian overtones, including formally recognizing the divine nature of Christian scripture. Jenn Giroux, one of the spokespeople for the movement, decries the "desecration of motherhood" since the invention of the birth control pill, and urges young women to give their best years to having children.

And this is where the real problems lie. The pro-life movement, espousing fundamental Christian values, opposes itself not only to abortions, but also to birth control, despite the fact that birth control is one of the most effective and safest ways to reduce the number of abortions. The pro-life group runs an ad campaign that a foetus is a baby, not a choice. But therein lies some troubling ambiguity. One might conceivably oppose abortion, that is, get on board with the idea that once you're pregnant you shouldn't have the choice to terminate the pregnancy. But that need not entail that one oppose birth control. Pro-lifers lump together the decision to conceive with the decision to carry that conception to term, but we need not lump the two together. And when we separate those issues, and give people the option to make decisions about getting pregnant, they tend to choose less often to get abortions.

(Simlarly, the founder of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, ended up leaving the organization because they started to oppose drinking wholesale, instead of drunk driving specifically. That story may be apocryphal, though.)

What actually drives a woman to get an abortion? Fear? Desperation? Those in the pro-life campaign who paint it as a frivolous decision that one makes on a whim, if there are any such people, are deluding themselves. My anticipation is that women worry about what will happen to them if they have the child, about whether they will have the support necessary to raise a child and have a life of their own (which I take to be an integral part of raising a happy and healthy kid). Women want to flourish, and they want a situation where their offspring can flourish too. And if their situation is desperate enough, can we really blame them for believing that it might be best for everyone involved if the child were never born? Worries about support from their partner, from their family, from their community, or from their economy are all serious issues for women to consider in regards to having children, and it makes sense to reflect seriously on these issues when planning to begin/expand a family.

If we all agree on that point (and I know that some won't), then we get the ball rolling in terms of taking safe sex seriously. But if condoms and other methods of birth control are unavailable or socially unacceptable in one's circles (as the pro-lifers advocate), then unplanned pregnancy will be an issue that needs addressing. How can we justify jacking up the odds of unplanned pregnancy while at the same time banning abortions? Of course, total sexual abstinence is the best method of birth control, but only if by "best" we mean most reliable. Abstinence stems an important process of sexual self-discovery, one that is playing more and more of a prominent role in our society as the media grows more sexualized and one's identity is increasingly determined by one's sexuality (by which I don't mean sexual orientation), now more in the spotlight than ever before.

There are four interwoven issues here: sexual discovery, safe sex, abortions, and the risks of unplanned parenthood. The pro-lifers take safe sex and abortions off the table immediately, making sexual discovery come with the very real risk of unplanned parenthood. If the pro-lifers really want to stop abortions, they have to provide an environment where women, their children, and their partners can all flourish. We need greater social support for mothers and a greater push for gender equality in the workplace, specifically as it pertains to the issue of parenthood. What we don't need is any more finger-wagging from a group of religious folks telling us that the modern world is full of sin and corruption, and should consequently be abandoned. Even if sin and corruption are rampant, abandoning the modern world just isn't an option for most people. People need the support to live a healthy lifestyle where an unplanned pregnancy isn't likely to doom a woman and her child to the cycle of poverty, or where having a child doesn't keep women and their children trapped in abusive relationships. Cause real people live that situation every day, and I'm not sure that it's so clearly preferable to abortion as the pro-lifers make it out to be.

What the pro-lifers are advocating is not just putting an end to abortion. It's a whole cluster of values: women being nurturing mothers, starting families younger, generally putting their own goals aside (when those don't align with motherhood), etc. That lifestyle may be suitable for some, and to those I say that you should pursue your goals as fervently and passionately as any of us pursue what is important to us. But it isn't anyone's place to push that life on an unwilling woman. And that's exactly what pro-lifers seem to be doing through their attempts to illegalise abortion, suppress birth control, and misinform women about their own health issues, thereby making informed decision-making more difficult. It's not just about abortion.