So, Debs over at The Burning Times is running Pro-Choice Month at the moment and has set up two new blogs, Abortion Is A Woman’s Right and Pro-Choice Blog Carnival. Reproductive/abortion rights are HUGELY important to me, so I figured I’d write a little something about my views on the matter here, as I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
So here’s the thing I really don’t get about anti-choicers. They want abortion banned for EVERYONE. Isn’t that weird?
I’ll explain a little further. Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a militant vegetarian. No meat, no animal byproducts, no leather, no products tested on animals. I don’t believe people who consume these products are true vegetarians. Vegetarianism is part of my identity; I find it disgusting to even consider eating or using the dead flesh of another living creature. Bear with me here; whether you agree or not is unimportant right now.
So let’s imagine I gather a group of other militant vegetarians, and we all agree that it is morally wrong to consume animal products. We decide that it is so wrong that we want to ban everyone – everyone in the world – from doing so. So we form a group, and we speak to society and our spokesperson says: “We believe that it’s a sin to eat animal flesh and to wear leather! Animals are creatures capable of pain and should not be killed!”
Yeah, you know what would happen. We’d be laughed off the stage. People would refuse to even entertain the idea of eschewing meat just because one group of people believed it was wrong. I would be told “You think it’s wrong, don’t do it. Don’t force your beliefs on everyone else,” So why does society even give anti-choicers a platform to speak? Why is it not saying the same to them?
Don’t even get me started on what would happen if I then brought religion into the equation (I’m Pagan). As soon as I said “But my imaginary friend* tells me it’s wrong, and if you don’t believe me he’ll smite you!” That wouldn’t give my argument any more clout – it would land me in a mental institution! Yet anti-choicers seem to think that telling us “God says it’s wrong!” should mean something when in fact, there are a good chunk of us who believe that he is nothing but their imaginary friend.
* I would like to add I am not trivialising anyone’s beliefs by referring to God/deities as imaginary friends. As I said, I’m religious myself. But it is still true that a person who cannot be seen and of whom there is no proof of existence, but who we believe we are communicating with, is to all intents and purposes an imaginary friend.
Good argumentation.
It’s difficult to write about religion, because religious people most often assume that the system of beliefs they subscribe to is the only viable option. Incidentally, most anti-choicers are extremely religious.
What I hate the most is precisely that impulse to control other people’s lives. And that leads to ludicrous attempts to project this assumption on those who disagree with you — vide the idiotic, blatantly wrong, and insiduous idea spread by anti-choicers that pro-choicers want to “kill all children.” I’ve no words for that, there aren’t strong enough cuss words to express my reaction in any language I know. In their world (that’s where imaginary friends come in), it appears that depriving others of freedom is somehow magically connected to protecting their freedoms. And to some weird condition of disrespect for views different than their own.
Thanks for writing about vegetarianism. I’m pro-choice and a dedicated meat-eater, that is, I believe in meat-eating (let’s not get into the details). I would never force-feed anyone with meat or go out spreading the word about how we “should” all eat meat, even though I’m convinced of its benefits. But that would be idiotic and disrespectful towards people who know as much or sometimes more about nutrition than I do and choose a different approach and can put forward equally relevant arguments for that as anything I could say.
Forcefully curbing someone’s individual freedom is not “convincing” them. It’s disrespectful and offensive. But I usually get the impression that anti-choicers can’t even spell those words.
By: Januaries on Friday 4th January 2008
at 1:38pm
Great post
One of my friends had a pregnancy scare, by the way, recently, and decided (if she were pregnant) she’d keep the baby. Although she was well aware of the difficulties, she still said she couldn’t possibly have an abortion because of the pictures anti-choice campaigners had shown at her school/college.
Damn anti-choicers!
(I refuse to call them pro-life, because that is bolleaux)
By: Amy on Sunday 6th January 2008
at 3:54pm
[...] it comes right down to it, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Just like it would be ridiculous for me to try to make meat-eating illegal based on my personal beliefs, it’s ridiculous for the anti-choice lobby to expect something [...]
By: Blog For Choice 2010 – Trust Women « Shut Up, Sit Down on Friday 22nd January 2010
at 4:13pm
Some points:
1. …er…well, funnily enough, my vegetarianism made me more “anti-choice”. I can’t bear the idea of a living creature being killed for someone’s convenience.
2. Abortion seems to me to be a complex ethical issue that often doesn’t have a good answer, so it annoys me when “pro choice” people or “pro-abortionists” try to silence any debate by wielding a “right” as a trump card, claiming it is offensive to women to restrict their choices. This precludes any discussion about how the unborn child has a “right” to survive…no doubt because it may seem a harder task to claim that the right to survive is lower in the hierarchy than the mother’s right not to be so inconvenienced. In cases where the mother’s life is not at risk, I think there should indeed be far much more thinking and debate over the balance here.
Some of the (rather insulting) comments on this page reveal the consequences of this lack of ethical debate. You seem as fascist as the religious anti-abortionists you so much despise. They want to stop the debate by using God as a trump card, you wield ” a woman’s right to choose”. And both sides seem to loathe each other like fans of rival football clubs. This shows an oversimplification or lack of appreciation for how difficult the ethical issue is, and it makes your position and argument suspect. I rather think both “sides” lean on their debate-stopping trump cards as intellectual crutches for they are too afraid to deal with the ethical drawbacks of their positions. There is a lot of selfishness here – you and the religious campaigners both value the safety of your beliefs over being intellectually honest and confronting how your beliefs may harm other people’s rights.
3. And on that note, I think it’s kind of intellectually dishonest of you to imply all “anti-choicers” are religious nutjobs. I’m an atheist, a leftish-liberal (in case you believe all anti abortionists are conservatives), and a girl (in case you think only a man would say this sort of thing).
4. And another disingenuous argument: your idea that society shouldn’t tolerate people trying to put morals into the law…well, the law has arisen from basic morals being codified. Take murder, for example…we believe it is wrong for people to kill other people! And we do indeed go around trying to restrict people’s choices
Somehow I don’t think you want “choice” to be extended by giving people the freedom to murder and rob and rape. Nor I imagine would you see those who fought for laws against such things as forcing their own beliefs on others…so I think you need to rethink this.
What is behind your argument is probably nothing more than “People have the right to try to outlaw behaviour that I don’t like, but they don’t have the right to try to outlaw behaviour I’m fine with.” I imagine you see the former as universal moral law and the second as private moral beliefs. What you need to do to make your argument is make a good case for anti-abortionism being simply “private moral beliefs” of individuals undemocratically trying to make them law. I don’t think you can do this, but it would be nice to see you try rather than see you fudge the issue here.
And on a similar note, you also don’t seem to realize that your example group of militant veggies are NOT FORCING THEIR BELIEFS on everyone. If they got into power via a coup or wielded undemocratic influence as a pressure group over government, then yes, they would be forcing their beliefs upon people. But in your example all they are doing is calling for a law to ban the killing of animals. In this, they are simply exercising their right to have an opinion, and indeed rather worryingly I find it is you who wants to force your idea on people by saying they should not even be allowed a platform for their free speech.
By: augustine on Thursday 7th July 2011
at 9:38pm
Wow, I wrote this over three and a half years ago and today I get a massive comment on it. Would you mind if I asked how you got here? Have I been linked or something, or did you just stumble upon me while browsing?
Anyway, on to the debate.
1. …er…well, funnily enough, my vegetarianism made me more “anti-choice”. I can’t bear the idea of a living creature being killed for someone’s convenience.
Well that makes you a lot less hypocritical than 99% of the anti-choicers I’ve met.
This precludes any discussion about how the unborn child has a “right” to survive…no doubt because it may seem a harder task to claim that the right to survive is lower in the hierarchy than the mother’s right not to be so inconvenienced.
Not true. Many of us talk about this. There are two answers to this argument:
a) The mother is a living, breathing human being with real life experience. The foetus is a potential human being with no life experience. Therefore yes, the mother’s right to life trumps the foetus’s right to life.
b) Are you saying that if, say, my sister was dying and the only way she could survive would be to physically inhabit my body, I should be legally obliged to give up my bodily autonomy and let her do that? How about if my son needed a kidney? Should I be legally obliged to allow him to take part of my body in order to survive?
value the safety of your beliefs over being intellectually honest and confronting how your beliefs may harm other people’s rights.
Whose rights are we talking about? Human rights. People’s rights. A woman is a human and a person. A foetus is biologically human but not yet a person.
And on that note, I think it’s kind of intellectually dishonest of you to imply all “anti-choicers” are religious nutjobs. I’m an atheist, a leftish-liberal (in case you believe all anti abortionists are conservatives), and a girl (in case you think only a man would say this sort of thing).
Show me where I did this? I talked about anti-choicers. Then I mentioned bringing religion into it, as the vast majority do.
4. And another disingenuous argument: your idea that society shouldn’t tolerate people trying to put morals into the law…well, the law has arisen from basic morals being codified. Take murder, for example…we believe it is wrong for people to kill other people!
99.99999etc% of the human population believe murder is wrong. Therefore it is right that it should be codified into law. In the UK, 75% of people believe in a woman’s right to choose. Yet the remaining 25% believe their beliefs are the ones which the law should take into account, even though they are in the minority.
And we do indeed go around trying to restrict people’s choices
Somehow I don’t think you want “choice” to be extended by giving people the freedom to murder and rob and rape. Nor I imagine would you see those who fought for laws against such things as forcing their own beliefs on others…so I think you need to rethink this.
See my point above.
What is behind your argument is probably nothing more than “People have the right to try to outlaw behaviour that I don’t like, but they don’t have the right to try to outlaw behaviour I’m fine with.” I imagine you see the former as universal moral law and the second as private moral beliefs. What you need to do to make your argument is make a good case for anti-abortionism being simply “private moral beliefs” of individuals undemocratically trying to make them law. I don’t think you can do this, but it would be nice to see you try rather than see you fudge the issue here.
No, my argument is that people have the right to try to outlaw behaviour which nearly all of the population don’t like, but they don’t have the right to try to outlaw behaviour that only a minority don’t like.
And on a similar note, you also don’t seem to realize that your example group of militant veggies are NOT FORCING THEIR BELIEFS on everyone. If they got into power via a coup or wielded undemocratic influence as a pressure group over government, then yes, they would be forcing their beliefs upon people. But in your example all they are doing is calling for a law to ban the killing of animals.
My example group of militant veggies are calling for all people to be forced to obey a law with which only a minority of the population agree. That is my argument. If the overwhelming majority agreed with them, then they wouldn’t be forcing their beliefs upon the general populace, would they?
In this, they are simply exercising their right to have an opinion, and indeed rather worryingly I find it is you who wants to force your idea on people by saying they should not even be allowed a platform for their free speech.
Everybody has the right to have an opinion. Believe it or not, I really respect the opinions of people personally opposed to abortion. I have a friend who is a Jehovah’s witness. She believes, deep in her heart, that abortion is always morally wrong, and she would never, ever consider it. However, she recognises that her opinion is exactly that – her opinion only, and the opinion of a minority, and that her opinion and the minority’s opinion should not impinge upon the human rights of other women.
Of course anti-choicers have the right to free speech. So do I. I’m not trying to stop anti-choicers from believing abortion is wrong, or from talking about their belief that abortion is wrong. I’m saying that that’s where it should stop; that they have no right to demand the law is changed based on their minority belief. And seeing as free speech is so important to you, I also have the right to make blog posts talking about how ridiculous I think their demands for law changes are.
By: Anji on Thursday 7th July 2011
at 10:26pm