“Generations for Life” – “The Youth Outreach of the Pro-Life Action League” (a group of mid-twenties bloggers, 2/3 of them men, attempting to provide “outreach to [the] new pro-life generation”), has a lot of growing up to do. More specifically, they’ve got a lot of ill thinking and deep-seated confusion to overcome.

A recent post by GFL Director Annie Casselman proposes a series of “twists” on the theme of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, and asks in each case whether she should be permitted to have the abortion she wants. Casselman imagines that that right is somehow weakened by being pregnant in “unusual” circumstances – she does not even bother to raise the usual anti-choice objections to abortion in general, but somehow seems to think that, even if a “typical” abortion is permissible, there are cases in which third parties can lay claim to a woman’s body simply by asserting one. If nothing else, she demonstrates how absolutely unable anti-choicers of whatever generation are to imagine that a woman’s bodily autonomy actually means anything.

“My Body, My Choice”

I just finished reading a Mary Higgin’s Clark book [possibly I'll Be Seeing You, but I'm not sure - KTK] – a little light reading before bed. Part of the plot involved an embryo mix up at an in vitro clinic which got me thinking about the logic behind, “my body, my choice.”

Let’s say there was a mix up at an in vitro clinic where a woman found out that she was not carrying her own baby. Could she have an abortion if she decided she did not want to carry someone else’s baby? Or should the biological mother have a say in the life or death of her own child?

Similarly, would a surrogate mother have the right to abort the baby in her womb if decided she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore? What if the pregnancy was making her ill? Or what if her life was “at risk” because of the pregnancy? After all it’s her body. Or what if the biological mother of the baby decided she didn’t want her baby anymore. Could she force the surrogate mother to get an abortion?

Planned Parenthood says, “Every Child A Wanted Child.” But wanted by whom?

It gets complicated. But it helps to bring up the ultimate question: Is an embryo a separate human being? If not, who has rights to it? If yes, then should it be protected?

It gets complicated?

What these scenarios have in common is that in each case some other party – accidental embryo donors, surrogacy sperm donors, surrogacy “employers” – claims a right to tell a pregnant woman whether she may, or must, terminate her pregnancy, or, more to the point, dictates to her how her pregnancy will be managed against that woman’s wishes.

For some reason, Casselman seems to think that the existence of these third parties “complicates” the issue of the woman’s right to choose – that, even if she has that right presumptively, some other person may assert a claim against her, based on that other party’s personal interests in the first woman’s pregnancy, that trumps the woman’s control of her own body. This is astounding – or would be if there were any perceivable limit to what the anti-choice wing is willing to do to pregnant women, which it is increasingly clear there is not. It does not, however, seem to be particularly complicated. It’s offensive, yes, but otherwise a perfectly familiar exercise of the anti-choice principle that everyone else’s preferences regarding a pregnant woman enjoy precedence over a her own.

Take just the first question: “Could she have an abortion if she decided she did not want to carry someone else’s baby?”

There’s a question about this? That’s the whole point to abortion rights – that you are not required to carry anyone’s “baby” (whether or not it even makes sense to say that a fetus gestating in one woman’s uterus is someone else’s “baby”). Casselman here seems to be asserting the rapist’s right, so beloved in South Dakota, of forcing a woman to carry a fetus she not only does not want but did not consent to in the first place – as if that right were more palatable in a high-tech guise. Similarly, in asking “should the biological mother have a say in the life or death of her own child?”, she asserts the “Men’s Rights” claim of an abortion veto right – again sugaring the pill with a clever switch of gender (and re-asserting that the fetus lodged in a woman’s body is not “her own” to make decisions about).

Reading her somewhat more charitably, she seems to be asserting that the “DNA parents” of the embryo in question have an interest in its safe gestation – and that by itself is surely a reasonable claim. But the crux of her questions – the reason they are questions for her at all – is that she believes that interest can be strong enough to force a woman to carry someone else’s embryo through a pregnancy that she does not want and did not consent to (in those specifics). What matters most, that is, is that someone wants this embryo born, and therefore the one who happens to be bearing it has no option but to surrender to that alien desire.

That position becomes equally obvious in the series of questions about surrogacy. Casselman casually entertains the proposition that a gestational surrogate could be forced to carry a fetus to term because her “employer” wants her to – indeed, could be forced to do so even if she could not do so safely, or would die in the attempt. The employer’s desire for a baby trumps not only the woman’s control of her body, but even her interest in her own health and safety. What matters, again, is only that someone wants the fetus carried to term, and it then immediately follows that the pregnant woman has no interests at stake, not even her life itself, that give her a definitive position of authority over her own body. (After specifying a scenario in which the woman’s actual life is at risk, Casselman dutifully notes that, “after all, it’s her body” – but asks the question anyway. Apparently that scenario is still an open question for her.)

The question whether a surrogate egg donor can force the gestational mother to get an unwanted abortion if she – the donor – no longer wants to raise a child is an odd one. Who ever suggested such a thing? And why would a “pro-lifer” do so? What it betrays is an underlying sense that a pregnant woman has no bodily autonomy whatsoever – not to choose an abortion, and not even to refuse one – if someone else asserts authority over her. The scenario is difficult to make sense of from either a “pro-life” point of view or, as in the previous cases, that of an assertion of interest in the fetus (in this case by the gestational mother); it is purely and simply a negation of the pregnant woman’s autonomy in all respects. (It’s tempting to read this scenario through the lens of class: the “employer” demands biological fealty from the subordinate, and by god the subordinate had better comply. Whether by filling her womb, or emptying it, on command, she is a vessel for another’s exercise of will. Whether it’s money, social status, race, or something else that’s driving this scenario, it’s extremely nasty.) The resolution to it ought to be perfectly obvious, however: no one can be forced to have an abortion, which is one thing at least that both pro-choicers and anti-choicers agree on.

Again I note that all of these scenarios hinge on someone else’s assumption of authority over a pregnant woman – usually by asserting an interest in the life of the fetus (but in the last case simply by asserting privilege). Of course, if abortion were impermissible in any circumstances, these would not be questions at all – and if women’s autonomy were in any way an operative principle for the questioner, the answers to the questions would be equally obvious. We must analyze these scenarios, then, as examples of cases the questioner thinks present a real conflict – as examples of interests or authority that might plausibly stand against a woman’s prima facie right to an abortion as an exercise of autonomy. What is Casselman telling us, then? That a claim by virtually anyone, or especially by those with genetic ties to a fetus, to having a desire to see that fetus brought to term calls the pregnant woman’s autonomy into question. Once they assert that desire, her desires no longer control her body. And more than this: that being a “genetic parent” is not only more important that being a gestational parent, but it grants greater authority over the body and gestational progress of the pregnant woman than that woman holds herself. Pregnant women are here just vehicles for the fulfillment of other people’s wills (as we saw most starkly in the final scenario, requiring abortion from a woman who does want to complete the pregnancy, because the “true authority” has decided for her). In every scenario above, it is the “genetic mother” who decides how the pregnancy will proceed, and dictates that decision to the pregnant woman, who must turn her bodily integrity over to the other woman’s control in order to comply. This is not merely offensive, it’s an unbelievable example of the ways the right wing fetishizes motherhood but despises pregnant women.

Aside from the extremism and offensiveness of these scenarios, they betray a lot of confusion. Obviously, every question Casselman asks is a no-brainer for anyone with pro-choice convictions, or even a basic sense of empathy for pregnant women. But most of them should have been obvious (in a different way) for anti-choicers, too. Casselman doesn’t seem to hit on the issues most people in either camp think are really central. She says this all “helps to bring up the ultimate question” about the moral status of the embryo – but in fact it does no such thing. Most anti-choicers would have said that the woman in question is not allowed to have an abortion in any of the scenarios above, precisely because of their view of the moral status of the embryo. If Casselman holds the same view – as presumably she does, judging from her organization’s Web site – she should have seen that, and would then not have regarded these scenarios as crucial tests of principle. That she does regard these scenarios as significant suggests that she thinks the central issue in abortion is the desires of the genetic (not gestational) mother, which virtually nobody else believes, and that it has nothing to do with the moral status of the embryo, which almost everyone else emphasizes. That’s weird enough, but answering the questions she poses will not shed any light on the moral status of the embryo even if she does think it’s relevant, and as she claims she’s attempting to do.

I have no idea what she’s really trying to do here, and I suspect she doesn’t either. But at the heart of it all are some very contemptuous, very ugly views of the (negligible) moral status of a woman, once she’s got that ambiguous fetus inside of her. Like so much of anti-choice rhetoric, there’s very little rationality here, but more than enough misogyny.