Abortion: an indispensable right or violence against women?
by Lita Cosner
Published: 6 February 2007 (GMT+10)
Images Fetal Fotos
Unborn babies, 4D ultrasound, still shot
Abortion-rights activists, especially among the modern feminist movement, proclaim
abortion to be an important right for women. They often resort to scaremongering,
claiming that if it were revoked, it would send the world back to the (largely
mythical) era of back-alley abortions, and would represent a huge step backwards
for women’s rights.
Early feminists opposed abortion
Of course, abortion activists who proclaim that a woman has a right to do what she
likes with her own body are ignoring the fact that another body is involved. CMI
has received much flak for calling abortion ‘baby-killing’ (see
Offended by the term ‘Baby Killers’ and the other articles therein
for evidence). However, the early feminists used exactly the same terminology! (The
following statements are documented by
Feminists for Life).
For example, The Revolution, the newsletter of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906),
described abortion as ‘child murder’, ‘infanticide’ and
‘foeticide’. Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first female US
presidential candidate, said:
Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child,
nor think of murdering one before its birth.
If it is okay for a mother to abort because she doesn’t want a baby, why is
it wrong for her to abort because she doesn’t want a girl?
These comments were consistent with the strong opposition to abortion from other
feminists. Anthony’s friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), who
organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY (1848),
called abortion a ‘disgusting and degrading crime’, and argued pointedly,
When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women
that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
The mother of the feminist movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) had earlier
written, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, where she condemned those
who would ‘either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born.’
Are their views outdated?
It should be obvious that science has shown even more definitively that the unborn
is really human, so the pro-life case is even stronger now. That is why former leading
abortionist Bernard Nathanson became a pro-lifer (see the
evidence—warning, rather graphic).
4D ultrasound is clearer still (see still shot, top right), and genetics
evidence even forced the pro-abortion magazine New Scientist to admit (189(2543):8–9,
18 March 2006):
The task force finds that the new recombinant DNA technologies indisputably prove
that the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that
all abortions terminate the life of a human being, and that the unborn child is
a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine.
There are some conversions the other way, but they seem to be motivated by political
opportunism rather than science. For example, the pro-life secular writer Nat Henthoff
writes on one passionate black preacher who helped convince him that the pro-life
cause was right:
‘There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order
than the right to life.’
‘That’, he continued, ‘was the premise of
slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the
plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.’
This passionate reverend used to warn: ‘Don’t let the pro-choicers convince
you that a fetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized
us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order
to justify what they wanted to do—and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.’
This preacher was Jesse Jackson, and like a number of his political colleagues who
also used to defend the unborn, he has moved to a pro-abortion stance — and
they never even bothered to refute their own arguments for the
unborn’s humanity.
Aborting baby girls
However, ironically for feminists, widespread abortion has greatly caused extreme
violence against females in particular, that is, the availability of abortion in
countries where sons are preferred to daughters is causing a huge rise in sex-selected
abortions, which universally target females.
In some parts of the world, this has caused the
male-to-female ratio to be skewed from the natural balance of around 105
boys to 100 girls to anywhere from 115 to 150 boys born for every 100 girls. This
trend has
permanently altered the male-to-female ratio in China. [Update 11 April
2009: The Courier Mail (Brisbane), p. 54, cited a study
in the British Medical Journal, and reported:
Selective abortion in favour of males has left China with 32 million more boys than
girls, creating an imbalance that will endure for decades, an investigation warns.]
This imbalance is also large in India. Many countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America,
and Africa also show signs of this trend.
Since 1994, the UN has recognized that
son preference is discriminatory to women and girls, and the
Beijing Platform for action includes sex-selected abortion among incidences
of violence against women. So which is it: is abortion an indispensable right that
makes women more equal to men, or a practice of violence against women? Noticeably,
an October 2006 UN Violence Against Children study
ignores abortion entirely.
The feminist dilemma
If society cannot interfere with a mother’s choice to abort for any reason
she wants (‘abortion is between a woman and her doctor’), how can it
be wrong for her to abort based on the sex of the baby? If it is okay for her to
abort because she doesn’t want a baby, why is it wrong for her to abort because
she doesn’t want a girl? In fact, the ability to choose the sex of a child
is a logical extension of the ‘right to choose’ if that ‘right’
exists. If abortion is not objectionable in and of itself, why should we be troubled
by the growing trend of baby girls being aborted in disproportionate numbers? After
all, it is the woman’s choice!
The eugenic idea of aborting babies with defects also
logically contributes. This teaches that it is acceptable, or even right, to abort
children for birth defects such as Down’s syndrome, blindness, deafness, sickle-cell
anemia, spina bifida, although many with such conditions live worthwhile lives.
If a genetic defect is a valid reason to abort a child, why is it not acceptable
to abort babies for what many in these countries consider the genetic ‘defect’
of being female?
The underlying problem
In reality, the horrific problem of sex selected abortions, and abortions in general,
is due to the rejection of absolute moral laws, in turn due to the rejection
of the absolute moral Lawgiver (see Bomb-building
vs. the biblical foundation). The teaching of evolution from ‘goo
to you via the zoo’ has undermined this foundation in the eyes of many.
There is no reason, under their own belief system, for evolutionists to see males
and females as equals. Males and females faced different selection pressures, so
natural selection is unlikely to produce sexes of equal worth.
There is no reason, under their own belief system, for evolutionists to
see males and females as equals. Males and females faced different selection pressures,
so natural selection is unlikely to produce sexes of equal worth (if a term like
‘worth’ can even have meaning in this belief system). In fact, many
animals show huge differences between the sexes. Indeed, historically, evolutionists
have seen females as the inferior sex (see The history of the
teaching of human female inferiority in Darwinism).
And corollaries of evolution pose another problem for women. Nowadays,
it’s fashionable in the educational and media system to teach moral relativism,
where there is no absolute right or wrong (except that it’s
wrong to claim there is right and wrong!). This is a logical deduction from
evolution, as admitted by Richard Dawkins, a
leading atheistic evolutionist and a eugenicist.
But if all moral viewpoints are equal, then how can it be morally wrong to devalue
women?
A related fashion among the secular intelligentsia is cultural relativism,
which teaches that we should not judge other cultures (except the absolutist culture
of Christianity of course!). Following this worldview, it would be wrong to judge
the many societies throughout history that have tended to prefer sons over daughters,
and have endorsed infanticide or abortion to eliminate unwanted baby girls. The
modern feminist-pushed abortion industry has merely made this easier.
The solution
Conversely, the Bible affirms the value of women, despite the claims to
the contrary (see one CMI refutation, ‘Female inferiority’
raises questions). The fact that men and women are both created in God’s
image (Gen. 1:26–7) disproves a common radical feminist claim that
the Bible is anti-women. Jesus’ chosen Apostle, Paul, (maligned by many feminists
as being anti-women), affirms that spiritual privileges in the body of Christ come
equally to both sexes (Gal. 3:26–29).
Indeed, the Bible honours many women. E.g. the Old Testament honours Ruth, Esther,
prophetesses Deborah, Huldah and Hannah; Miriam who celebrated the Exodus in song;
and the splendid woman in Prov. 31, inspired advice King Lemuel’s mother gave
him. In the New Testament, even higher honour is given to women. Mary bears the
God-man in her womb, while other women were the first witnesses to His resurrection.
Paul praises many women, such as Dorcas, Eunice, Lois, Priscilla, Phoebe and Julia,
as ‘servants of the Church’.
Photo: Heather Airy; sticker from bumpertalk.com
Pro-life bumper sticker
This is even more astonishing considering that many ancient texts reflect a misogynistic
view of females, but this is noticeably absent in the Bible. In fact, the Mosaic
Law in the Old Testament had protections built in for females, and many of the provisions
in the Law that are commonly seen as misogynistic to the modern eye were actually
beneficial to women when looked at in its cultural context. See
Does Christianity Squash Women? and
Women in the Heart of God for in-depth discussions. [Update 11 April 2009:
see also my subsequent articles Bible Society reports that the
Bible is not anti-female: is this news? and What’s
in a pronoun? The divine gender controversy.]
Thus simply passing laws to prohibit sex-selected abortions won’t fix the
problem in cultures where females are seen as intrinsically less valuable. And as
shown, it is illogical to claim both that abortion is an unconditional
right for the mother for any reason she chooses and that abortion
should be forbidden if the reason is that the baby is female! There must be a fundamental
change in how people perceive women and the sanctity of life. And historically,
this change has been effected by the Gospel.
I’ll leave the final word to the famous anti-slavery activist Harriet Beecher
Stowe (1811–1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In another
book, Woman in Sacred History (1873), she stated in the Introduction (p.
11):
The object of the following pages will be to show, in a series of biographical sketches,
a history of WOMANHOOD UNDER DIVINE CULTURE, tending toward the development of that
high ideal of woman which we find in modern Christian countries.
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