I’d like to begin this post with complete transparency. I am pro-choice and within this group I tend to hold the extreme liberal view. I think people too often tip-toe around the topic of abortion. I fully understand that it is an extremely difficult decision for some people to make, making it more difficult to talk about conceptually and objectively. I, personally, have not yet had to make this decision, but I know what I would do. (You can tell me it will be different if I actually went through it; you can tell me I have no frame of reference; you can tell me I’m heartless — but that won’t make me feel ashamed or guilty or change my stance) I firmly believe that it is the mother’s fundamental and unalienable human right to all decisions regarding her body, without needing to justify or defend her decisions to anyone. I think it is really self-centered and inconsiderate for pro-life individuals to shame and guilt women for their decision to abort, especially knowing and acknowledging how difficult of a decision it is. I also think it’s backwards to claim that you don’t/won’t judge a woman for her decision, but in the same breath call her reasoning evil.
Furthermore, it’s as if pro-life individuals feel like they bear the moral guilt and negative weight of other women’s decisions. We bear the weight and accept the consequences of our own decisions, not others’. That is the responsibility we accept for any decisions we have the right to make.
I agree with Hawkins. I briefly skimmed some of my classmates blog posts, curious what their tendencies were and I felt like there were many misinterpretations.
Hawkins is defending abortion from an ecofeminist perspective. While considering population size, poverty, and environmental degradation, she writes:
While the poor may seek to have large families as a way of coping with their immediate economic conditions, providing more hands to work and offering an increased chance that parents will be cared for in their old age, the long term trade-off parallels that of employing ecologically damaging farming practices because of today’s need to eat: tomorrow, the overall needs will be greater, while the resources for meeting them will be proportionately less.
She is not blaming environmental degradation on poor communities, often which are communities of color, but rather just acknowledging the short term and long term effects of the choice to have a large family. It may appear to some as a white and classist perspective, simply because of the example used.
She does not promote abortion as the ideal primary form of birth control, but rather as “backup birth control.” When talking about developing countries she notes “when smaller family sizes are becoming desirable but contraceptive use is unfamiliar or unavailable, that abortion plays a prominent and necessary role in fertility reduction, with abortion rates later declining as contraceptive use increases.”
While I think most people tend to consider abortion with an individualized and personal perspective, this essay considers its use systematically. This may feel inhumane and reductive, but I believe it’s just objective (which is a necessary perspective to consider).
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/abortion-right-to-privacy-women-right-to-equality
“Reproductive Choices: The Ecological Dimension” by Ronnie Zoe Hawkins