It's Our Choice

Women get to decide whether to have babies. This sounds like a political statement, but it’s not. It is, in fact, a fact. Now, you can argue all day about whether a woman who is pregnant should have to have her baby no matter what, or whether the choice should be up to her, but the fact remains, in the end, that the choice already is hers. The laws can say what they say, but we haven’t yet invented a device capable of inhibiting personal freedom enough to force someone to carry a child to term.

I wonder how many people who speak out against abortion rights realize this. I suspect that, deep down, most do.

And I think it scares them.

Think of it. The power of life and death, in the hands of a bunch of girls. And there’s nothing we can do about it, either. We men do play a role, but it’s all out of our hands pretty early on, in terms of physical control. It’s almost like we have no choice but to trust them.

But sometimes we like to pretend that we have a choice. It is the same with many things in life; we confuse our ability to punish with our ability to control. The control is an illusion, but we like to think that we can get people to do things we want them to do by passing laws telling them to do them. It is true, we can make it very difficult for people who do not behave as we want them to. And we can do our best to convince them to change their ways. But in the end we have only negligible power over the actions of our fellow human beings. This is why we send people who break laws to prison: if we can’t stop the evil behavior of criminals, we’re at least going to not stop it in a secure environment.

Is it possible that we see in a pregnant woman the kind of control that we wish we had over all our fellow human beings? I think, perhaps, that we envy the power a pregnant woman has over life. It’s not that a woman carrying a child owns the child; it’s actually more complete control than ownership could ever give. I don’t know what to call this control, except to say that it’s the control over something that comes from carrying it and protecting it before you even know it’s there. It’s unique, mysterious, and not a little frightening even if you understand what’s going on in there. To our ancient forefathers, confronted with the miracle of life in the form of our ancient foremothers’ expanding bellies, it must have seemed otherworldly. Is it any wonder they feared this power? Is it any wonder they tried to take it away?

I’m not necessarily saying that the whole history of men oppressing women comes down to jealousy, but the idea does have the ring of truth about it. But certainly, people who want to outlaw abortion have more on their minds than just oppression and control. If you think something is wrong, it’s natural to want a law against it. And though the thief has the power to take my wallet no matter what the law says, I still consider the theft a crime.

But because a pregnant woman has the control she has, if abortion is a crime, she is the criminal. By outlawing abortion, we make every woman a murder suspect. Or, we keep the laws the way they are, and hope that every woman does the right thing, whatever we think that is, with the freedom from punishment we as a society have granted her. We cannot decide whether there will be abortions; we can only decide how we respond to the fact. That is our limitation, and that is our choice.