In the the aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health U.S. Supreme Court case, which ruled that, contrary to decades of precedent, states do not have to respect a person's right to terminate a pregnancy, a lot of public arguments have sprung up about the right to access abortion.
To be clear, this is an unambiguously pro-choice space. Bodily autonomy is a human right. No exceptions. I do not ever host discourses in support of government infringements on the bodily autonomy of any people, ever, including pregnant people.
However, many arguments in favor of abortion rights are actually covertly (or overtly) eugenicist. So, presented here, the Hypatia Guide to Problematic Abortion Rights Arguments, Why They're Harmful, and What To Say Instead.
*CLAIM:
Without abortion, poor people will have children they can't afford.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
The eugenicist message is obvious here. Everyone who wants to have children should be able to. In a just society, there would be no such thing as poverty or inability to afford children, because everyone would have the resources they need to survive and thrive. The solution to "poor people having children they can't afford" isn't abortion; it's universal living wages, universal housing and healthcare, universal access to resources.
I wrote about this also in this post.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
Everyone deserves equal access to the resources they need for themselves and their families. Everyone deserves equal access to the resources to make the family planning choices that are right for them.
*CLAIM:
People need abortion for fetal anomalies, because it would be horrible to give birth to a child with no quality of life.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Being born disabled or having a disabled child is not a bad thing. There's no such thing as "no quality of life." Disabled children should be welcomed and celebrated. The pervasive cultural narrative that a pregnant person who is expecting a disabled child "has to" have an abortion is extremely harmful to disabled people and their parents.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
All disabled people deserve acceptance, support, and equality. Everyone has quality of life. Since anyone could become disabled at any time, anyone who chooses to have a child should know that their child may be disabled, either from birth or later in life.
*CLAIM:
People need abortion to prevent the births of children who will have expensive medical needs, because the children will only live until the parents' money runs out, and then the parents will be bankrupt when the children die.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Where to start... this is an argument for universal healthcare, not an argument for abortion. The fact that lifesaving medical care would be withheld from a child because their parents run out of money to pay for it is horrifying. The fact that parents can go bankrupt because of their children's medical bills is horrifying. The fact that anyone would feel the need to choose abortion because they can't afford lifesaving medical care is horrifying -- this is not a "choice", this is being held hostage by a cruel system built on profiting from human suffering.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
Every child born should be entitled to necessary lifesaving healthcare over their entire lifespan regardless of their or their parents' financial situation.
*CLAIM:
Young people need abortions, because they're not mature enough to be mothers.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Plenty of young people choose to have children. Young parents deserve the same rights, acceptance, and resources that older parents do. There is nothing wrong with being a younger-than-average parent or with being an older-than-average parent. The assumption that young parents are bad parents is based on the overlap of ageism, neurobigotry, and classism that I wrote about in this previous post.
WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
Young people deserve access to the full spectrum of reproductive choices, from birth control and abortion to the resources they need to raise children if they choose to.
*CLAIM:
Students need abortions, because if they have children, they'll have to leave school and never get to graduate.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Stigma and lack of support for student parents is pervasive, but solvable. It's entirely possible for someone to raise a child while going to school, if they choose to, so long as they have access to resources like housing, childcare, and student aid. Furthermore, the idea that parents can't go to school relies on a very narrow, elitist understanding of what "school" means. 22% of college students in the U.S. have children, and a majority of college students are over age 25. The assumption that only single, childless people below age 23 can pursue education is not only rooted in oppression, it's also not rooted in reality.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
We need more resources and support for student parents. We also need more family planning resources for students. People need the resources and freedoms to make the educational and family planning choices that are right for them.
*CLAIM:
If your daughter got pregnant, you'd want her to have an abortion.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
This may very well be true -- but it should not be up to you. Parents and other family members do often pressure or coerce their relatives into abortions. They also coerce their relatives into giving birth. This is absolutely a human rights violation. We should oppose it.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
If your daughter got pregnant, she should have the choice whether or not to have an abortion. You shouldn't get a say, and neither should anyone else.
*CLAIM:
If men could get pregnant, no one would object to abortion.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Some men can get pregnant. Some women can't. Some people who are neither men nor women can get pregnant, and some can't.
Furthermore, it's no coincidence that there's such overlap between the anti-reproductive-rights movement and the anti-transgender-rights movement. Both are rooted in the same oppressive worldview that biology should be destiny, that people should be forced to live within the social roles of their birth-assigned genders, including reproducing and having families in socially-prescribed ways. The agenda is centered on forcing anyone with a uterus or potential uterus to be a woman, to heterosexually marry a man, and to bear children for her heterosexual husband. The agenda also involves forcing anyone with capacity or presumed capacity to impregnate someone else to be a man, heterosexually marry a woman, and bear children with his heterosexual wife. Cis-hetero-normativity and reproductive control are a package deal, and we need to put the entire package in the trash.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
No one's rights or freedoms should be abridged based on their reproductive anatomy.
*CLAIM:
Men will change their minds about abortion when they have to pay child support/ if they have to take care of the children.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
As I touched on in the previous post about adoption, the entire premise that people "should have to" take care of their children is fundamentally dehumanizing to the children involved. Children deserve to be loved and wanted. Forcing children to be cared for by someone who has to be forced to care for them is cruel to the children.
A common anti-choice argument is that pregnant people should be forced to give birth and raise the resulting child because the pregnancy is "their fault" for which they should be "held accountable" and "learn a lesson." This argument accepts that same harmful premise, but applies it to the biological father instead. This is not progressive; it still views children as property and forced parenthood as punishment.
This is something that I used to believe until fairly recently, despite being nominally a youth rights advocate. I would openly say that if men were required to perform half the child-care tasks, they would take their role in family planning more seriously by, e.g., using condoms. Why did I think that? Well, because I was an adult, thinking from an adult's perspective. I wasn't thinking from the perspective of a child being resented, getting bare minimal care from a parent being "forced" to provide it. Like most adults in our society, I wasn't thinking of children as whole people. All adults, even those of us who profess to be pro-youth, have unexamined ageism to unpack. I know I have a lot more to go.
Furthermore, as I also touched on in the previous post, the cultural assumption that women raise children while men pay child support is limiting, sexist, reductive, and inaccurate. There are plenty of custodial fathers and fathers who are their children's primary caregivers. There are plenty of loving families in which children are primarily cared for by grandparents, other relatives, foster or adoptive parents, or some family structure other than a present biological mother and an absent biological father.
State-mandated child support, however, is primarily focused on penalizing or discouraging custodial parents from seeking social services to which they should be entitled. There are much better ways out there to structure family support policy.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
Children deserve to be cared for by families who love and want them. Forcing someone to care for a child against their will is cruel to the child who will grow up unloved and resented. Children are people, not burdens or punishments.
*CLAIM:
What if we mandated vasectomies, and men could only have them reversed when they were financially and emotionally ready to be fathers.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
First, see this previous post about the construction of "financially and emotionally." Poor people are just as good at parenting as rich people. Neurodivergent people are just as good at parenting as neurotypical people. Younger people are just as good at parenting as older people.
But also, this hypothetical situation is the reality for many disabled people. Forced sterilization of disabled people is legal and common. Buck v Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed forced sterilization of disabled people, is still in effect. Disabled people under adult guardianship can be forcibly sterilized under the orders of their guardians.
While the original goals of forced sterilization of disabled people were to prevent the births of disabled children, today it is more often justified using the logic of this claim, that certain disabled people cannot be good parents. Having a neurodivergent parent is classified as an "Adverse Childhood Experience" alongside traumas like poverty and abuse. I wrote in this post about this idea as applied to neurodivergent mothers. Applying it to neurodivergent or disabled fathers is less common, but not unheard of. The bestselling 2016 book "To Siri With Love" features the author's described plan to force her autistic son into adult guardianship and a forced vasectomy using this rationale.
This article gives a brief overview of how disability rights and reproductive rights are inextricably linked.
*CLAIM:
In other first world countries... / The U.S. is becoming like a third world country.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Some background -- during the Cold War (the time between the end of World War II and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were involved in various proxy wars with each other), analysts divided the world into the U.S-aligned countries called the "First World," Soviet-aligned countries called the "Second World," and unaligned countries called the "Third World." Unaligned countries generally had lower gross domestic products than countries aligned with a world power, which is why Americans started using "Third World country" to mean "poor or under-served country." The U.S. and American-aligned countries, meanwhile, tried to prevent their own workers from demanding socialist governments. One way they did this was by implementing social welfare policies, such as the New Deal and Great Society programs in the U.S. and similar programs in much of Europe. Meanwhile, moves toward austerity led to reductions in these programs, and the U.S.S.R. dissolved rendering the entire "three worlds" classification meaningless.
And that is the shortest, most oversimplified summary of the Cold War you will ever read.
But that's just background.
Right now we're talking about the argument that the U.S. should allow its citizens to have rights and resources because it is a "First World country," and that denying its citizens rights and resources is the behavior of a "Third World country."
That's not what those terms have ever meant, but, more fundamentally, human rights should be for all humans. No country on earth has a perfect human rights record, but we cannot advocate human rights for all by starting from the premise that there are inherently good countries and inherently bad countries, and our own citizens inherently deserve better than the rest of the world. Rights are not pie. Advocating for pregnant Americans' rights does not mean opposing the rights of people of other nationalities. No matter how nominally progressive this argument is spun as, it still comes down to "Those other people deserve to be oppressed, but we don't." The specific fetishism the U.S. has with "Europe" as a concept, as either a pinnacle to emulate or a scare story of "falling civilization," is rooted purely in racism. Europe is not the world.
Various articles have been written both asserting, and debunking, the claim that "Europe" has stricter abortion laws than the U.S. This is flawed framing both because Europe is not a monolith, and because we are not required to emulate Europe. We can advocate reproductive rights in the U.S. and also be allies to people advocating reproductive rights in the rest of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and everywhere else in the world, because human rights are for all humans. (Next time, we'll talk about how continental divisions are also more socially constructed than you think!)
*CLAIM:
There are too many children in foster care waiting to be adopted -- adopt those before requiring more children to be born.
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
This is simply a gross oversimplification. As I mentioned in my previous post, U.S. family law, is fundamentally broken and harmful at every level, especially within the foster care system. Most foster children are not available for adoption. Many have been removed from their families of origin only because their families of origin were poor, disabled, or non-citizens. They may desperately want to return to their families of origin, who desperately want them back. Others may have families of origin who abused them, abandoned them, or simply died. Meanwhile, there are many roadblocks in place for people wanting to become foster parents. There are many children who need families, and many people who would love to provide families for children, but do not meet the qualifications to become foster or adoptive parents.
It is not nearly as simple as "There are too many children who need homes, so more shouldn't be born."
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
We need to dismantle and radically restructure family law throughout the U.S., and rebuild a family law system to ensure that all families, biological and nonbiological, have the spaces and resources they need to survive and support their children, and to ensure that all children have loving, supportive, safe families.
*CLAIM:
Bodily autonomy/ "my body, my choice" (if you don't mean it).
*WHY IT'S HARMFUL:
Because most of y'all don't mean it.
Anyone who follows this page knows that I am all about bodily autonomy and medical freedom in all contexts. But most people who profess to believe in bodily autonomy... don't. Until fairly recently, I avoided most organized abortion rights activism, despite deeply supporting the cause, because I was sickened by hearing people go on and on about bodily autonomy as pertaining to this one issue, while being silent on all other bodily autonomy issues. I wrote about this a bit in this post.
The right to choose abortion IS a bodily autonomy issue, a human rights issue. Absolutely it is! But it is not the only one. It's not even the only one currently under threat in the U.S.
If you feel so strongly that the government shouldn't tell people what to do with their bodies (A sentiment I could not possibly agree with more strongly! Bodily autonomy is the most fundamental of human rights!), then why aren't you standing with us on transgender rights? On abolishing involuntary commitment and forced drugging? On abolishing conservatorship/ adult guardianship? On drug legalization? On systemic racism? On opposition to forced medical treatment in all forms? On youth rights? On medical experimentation on people of color?
Even if you are narrowly focused on the issue of reproductive rights specifically, where are you on forced sterilization and forced abortions for disabled people? On medical violations of pregnant people, like forced caesarian sections? On youth rights to reproductive bodily autonomy?
If you're for bodily autonomy only for abled, cisgender women seeking abortions, you're not really for bodily autonomy. If you're for reproductive rights, but only the right not to have children, you're not for reproductive rights. You're just a eugenicist who has coopted "choice" and "bodily autonomy" as slogans.
*WHAT TO SAY INSTEAD:
Bodily autonomy is a human right for all humans (and actually mean it). We have to stand up against any infringement by governments or other authorities against the bodily autonomy of any human, from abortion bans to involuntary commitment to guardianship to the war on drugs. Tear down the system and rebuild a free, egalitarian society with bodily autonomy, cognitive liberty, and equal resources for all.
*BONUS ROUND:
"Okay, maybe in a perfect world, you would have a point, but as it is, shouldn't we prevent children from being born into poverty/ disability/ young parents with no support?"
*ANSWER:
NO! We do not combat oppression by reifying it. And if you truly believed that oppression of poor people, disabled people, young parents, etc. was unjust, you wouldn't advocate eugenics as a solution to it. People who truly believe that sexism is wrong don't advocate sex selection. People who truly believe that racism is wrong don't advocate eugenics against people of color. People who truly believe that queerphobia is wrong don't advocate eugenics against queer people. If you truly believe that classism, ableism, and ageism are wrong, you won't advocate eugenics against poor, disabled, and youth populations. We do not combat oppression by demanding that fewer members of the oppressed classes be born.
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