The False Premise of the Abortion Debate

There are two vital elements that are missing from the current abortion debate.

The first problem is the lack of any real engagement between the two sides of the issue. The two sides are like train rails, stretching parallel towards infinity, never touching. Those on one side say they are for the sanctity of human life. Those on the other side say they are for a woman’s right to choose. But these two contentions have nothing to do with each other. Neither addresses the other’s point.

It wasn’t always quite like that. Around the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, there would still sometimes be attempts on each side to take the other’s argument into consideration. For example, in response to the “pro-lifers” arguments about the sanctity of human life, the “pro-choicers” would advance the counter-argument that a fetus could not really be counted yet as sentient human life. The Bible, medical texts, and ancient wisdoms were cited for and against this view.

The debate did usually proceed along a predictable trajectory. The “pro-lifers” would contend that if sentience was the criterion, then one would be justified in killing bothersome seniors who were in advanced states of senile dementia. Or we would be justified in killing anyone who was in a vegetative state, terminal or otherwise.

That was a difficult argument to answer, but pro-choicers would sometimes take a stab at it, citing the high rates of spontaneous miscarriages that take place without the prospective mother necessarily feeling that a human life had been lost. In most such instances, the woman probably wouldn’t even have known that she was pregnant. No funeral ceremonies would be held. No one would consider that a human being with a history and an awareness of itself had passed.

Taking the argument in another direction, pro-choicers would often cite pro-lifers’ frequent support of the death penalty. In this case, the pro-lifers would respond by adding an adjective to what had been their abbreviated stand. They would specify that they had meant they were against the taking of innocent life.

And on it would go. There was never any meeting of the minds, never any resolution of the debate. It seemed likely that there could never be any intersection of the two points of view. But at least each side made some attempt to recognize the other’s concerns and to formulate some kind of a response. Ultimately, a concession was made to the pro-life side and a partial, uneasy compromise was reached by specifying that abortions would only be permissible in the first trimester or some other such period of the pregnancy in the bills passed by the various States.

Now, no such recognition of some right on the other side takes place. One side will just flatly state the superiority of valuing all human life – and the other side will just flatly state the need to allow women to have choice. These two sides simply repeat their respective priorities at each other - and never the twain shall meet.

The second problem with the abortion debate lies primarily with the side that emphasizes the right of women to choose. While this side fights for the right of a woman to choose whether or not she will bring a baby to term, it completely ignores the fact that women aren’t being granted an important precedent right of choice. That’s the right to choose whether or not to have intercourse in the first place.

That’s the elephant in the room, the issue that almost everyone in America refuses to even consider. The issue is sometimes raised as it applies to women in developing countries. There it is sometimes openly recognized that women have no choice when it comes to having sex. Many of these cultures virtually dictate that women be married at an early age and that an important part of their role as wife must then be accommodating their husbands’ sexual urges. It’s taken for granted that women must make themselves sexually available to their husbands at all times. In these other cultures, it’s virtually impossible for a woman to deny her husband “his privileges.”

In many cases, it’s also impossible for women to avoid being raped. Wars always have posed a special threat to women as invading groups take the rape of any available women on “the other side” to be their sexual prerogative.

There’s very little that outside agencies can do to liberate women in this regard. The most that United Nations aid groups and the whole gamut of humanitarian aid groups can do when they come into these cultures with the hope of improving the lot of women is to offer means of avoiding pregnancy and disease as the result of having sex. They can’t enable women to choose not to have sex in the first place.  

The most radical kind of aid an agency can attempt is to actively prevent the genital mutilation of women, a practice that continues in some cultures as a means of keeping women’s sexual experience the exclusive property of the men to whom they have been consigned. Educating cultures away from this practice is beyond the scope of most humanitarian aid societies. Agencies are generally limited to providing medical aid in connection with what will be the inevitable sexual experiences of most women in the culture. They can try to avert medical problems by offering papilloma vaccines and some techniques for avoiding the HIV virus and other STDs. After the fact, they can provide antibiotics and some palliatives, but often not any absolute cures.

They can also offer women discreet access to contraceptives. But this kind of assistance indeed often has to be very discreet. The men themselves usually can’t be enlisted into “taking precautions.” Many men in these cultures refuse to even consider the use of condoms. Condoms are seen, not only as interfering with their pleasure, but also as interfering with their masculine right to inseminate. Anything that diminishes their fertility is seen as diminishing their manhood.

So men are also often averse to having women avail themselves of contraceptives. If a man’s wife or wives don’t become pregnant, it reflects badly on his masculinity. But also, having children is positively encouraged in many cases. Having many children means having many helping hands and is also a perpetuation of oneself into the future. So if a woman seeks to put her own interests first and to deny the family unit the benefits of having many children, she often has to be secretive about it. Therefore, agencies can provide her with contraceptives only on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. But that’s about as far as they can go.

They can’t give women the freedom to refuse to have sex. The rare instances in which such liberation is attempted is usually not undertaken on the behalf of women. It’s undertaken on behalf of accomplishing some more important project, of achieving some more important goal – such as peace. Women might be organized or might organize themselves to withhold sex until their men stop fighting. But such Lysistrata-like campaigns usually end up being comically impractical and short-lived. So while it might be acknowledged that women in these developing countries often don’t have the basic choice of whether or to have sex – there’s almost nothing that can be done to give them that choice.

In the U.S. and other Western cultures, it’s usually not even acknowledged that women are lacking the right to make this basic choice. Barring obvious instances of rape, it’s now generally assumed that any pregnancy has been the result of both the man’s and the woman’s choice to have sex. In western cultures, it’s now assumed that women ultimately want to have sex as much as men do and that the only elements of choice that need to be given, the only choices that count - are after-the-fact choices. Women can be granted free access to contraceptives (after the obvious choice to have sex has been made). Or they can be granted the right to have abortions (again, very much after the fact). So debate starts from the assumption that both men and women equally opted to have sex and that the only issue that remains is how to deal with resultant pregnancies.

Neither side considers that abortion would rarely even become an issue if women’s true instincts were honored. The fact is that very few women feel such an urge to have sex that they MUST have it even if it might lead to disease, dishonor, or an unwanted pregnancy. Very few women have an urge that screams, “I want it! I must have it!” regardless of the consequences. Only men generally feel that sort of imperative. If left to their own devices, most women would be content to have sex only if and when they were positively ready to accept pregnancy as the result.

A woman’s silent scream is “I want love!” But the only way for her to have any hope of being with a man long enough for that more difficult feeling to grow, is to accede to having sex with him. Yes, in spite of all our self-congratulation about how far we’ve come from the presumed oppressions of Victorian times, the fact is that those times actually defined women’s desires more accurately when it came to sex. It was assumed women weren’t going to be as desirous as men, that it was only her affection for a man that would lead her into any sort of contented accession to his desires. As we look back on that period from our new set of presumptions, we say that Victorian women were forced to fake reluctance. In actuality, it’s modern women who are forced – in this case to fake enthusiasm.

Many current male authors of books about evolution now advance the hypothesis that women really are biologically geared to enjoy sex as much as or even more than men do. Matt Ridley, the author of The Red Queen, cited as proof of this contention the wild shrieks of ecstasy that women emit during intercourse. When I wrote to him, suggesting that women may not be experiencing the level of enjoyment he is attributing to them, he wrote back, with perhaps some excess of typical male presumption, that all the women he’d been with had been notable for their exultant vocalizations in bed.

I could just feel female readers chuckling knowingly at this response. I felt it might be too deflating of me, or more likely, too useless, to try to advance any further contrary views on the point. However, I privately was reminded of the Seinfeld episode in which the extent of women’s deception is revealed to Jerry. As the gang is sitting around in the diner, Jerry expresses shock at hearing that a lot of women fake orgasm in such a way that their partners can't tell. He states that he's sure the women he's been with weren't faking. He's sure he would know. At which point Elaine neatly steps in with a corrective regarding their own time together. She says, “Well, you didn't know.” Aghast in disbelief, Jerry asks, “What about the breathing, the panting, the moaning, the screaming?” To which Elaine triumphantly ticks off “Fake, fake, fake, fake.”

And so modern women are committed to a life of faking it, in bed, and on a deeper level. They have to pretend to the men in their lives, and more devastatingly, even to themselves, that they are desirous of having sex on a regular basis. They can’t even readily admit to themselves that they’d rather eat a chocolate bar, watch TV, or just cuddle. To openly admit that they are generally not enthusiastic about having sex, isn’t a possibility for them. That would be to significantly unravel all the presumed advances that women have won over the last century or so. It would be to deny that they have been significantly liberated. For most women to admit that they don’t really crave sex or even particularly relish it, would be for them to admit that they are acceding to men’s wishes, that they are shaping a large part of their lives around accommodating men’s desires, even to the point of submerging their own longings. That would blatantly cast them back in their old role as the givers, and men as the triumphant takers. That would be once again to admit inequality.

So women have had to convince, not only the men in their lives, but themselves as well, that they eagerly seek, or that they can at least be readily triggered into seeking, sex throughout their lives. If pregnancy is the result of this presumed overriding urge, of this mantle of desire they have felt it necessary to wear – then they enter the arena of debate about how it would be best and most liberating to deal with such consequences.

The point is that, in some sense, women have less reproductive choice now than they ever had. This will be true even if Roe v Wade is allowed to stand, or even if it is extended to make abortions more readily available for longer periods of time and in more cases. As evidence of this, one might cite the myriads of women who are struggling to raise a number of children, on their own, with their transient partners long gone. These women might have had the right to have abortions, if they so chose. But in some essential way, they were denied the precedent choice of whether or not to have sex.

There are classroom seminars held, aimed mostly at girls, telling them how to diplomatically say “No.” But it’s always understood that these taught tactics will at best serve as postponements, never as real allowances for the girls’ longings to be satisfied and assume primacy long-term in their adult lives. In reality, these lessons don’t generally even serve as delaying tactics. When faced with the boy’s urgency in the car after the date, the girl knows she has to say “Yes.” What’s more, she has to evince eagerness as part and parcel of her “Yes.” If she doesn’t, the boy will move on to the next girl, and she’ll be left without any hope at all of growing a “relationship” with him.

So most often now, acting against what she truly desires, the girl will accede and, all education about sex and contraceptives notwithstanding, she will evince that requisite eagerness and spontaneity, and will accept becoming pregnant as a result. Then all that remains to her will be the spare scraps of feminist “choice” - the choice of whether or not to have an abortion. She will have been granted nothing in the way of achieving her first choice, which was to love.