It's a bizarre, confused and ultimately sinister column that Antonia Senior has written for The Times (London), one in which she coolly defends the humanity of an unborn child, admits that having a baby has awakened her understanding of the selfishness of abortion, but then concludes that women must be ready to fight for abortion ("the lesser evil") in order to live "a life unburdened by misogyny."Indeed, Senior declares that fertility control is the one cause she is willing to die for.
It's a chilling read but an important one. For in Senior's attitude one can see the emerging defense of abortion -- not the dismissal of the preborn child's humanity as earlier pro-choice advocates had attempted to emphasize but the more forthright (if certainly cold-hearted) recognition that my body and my rights and my comfort and my checkbook weigh more in the balance than the unwanted demands of this child I've mistakenly conceived.
The advances in fetology (surgical techniques, medical developments which result in babies being born at earlier ages and, most of all, those incredible ultrasound pictures of unborn kids) have destroyed those earlier protests of the abortion lobby that the fetus was just a mass of cells or a clump of tissue. No, those slogans have been exposed as self-centered and dishonest because we have all seen into the window of the womb. And what we have seen is a beautiful, intricate and miraculous creation.
So what else is left for the pro-choice zealot but to embrace the selfishness? To accept the scientific reality and instead switch the argument to one which stresses the aching needs of self-realization, self-determination and self-defense?
As a veteran pro-life activist, I know all too well that is, in fact, not a new argument at all. I've spoken to too many hundreds of women going into abortion clinics over the years, women who openly admit that my arguments about the unborn child's humanity are correct -- but they're determined to abort anyway. They know the baby's heart is beating. They know the child has arms and legs, fingers and toes. They even know of the various alternatives I'm offering them.
But they go into the abortion clinic anyway and pay their money in order to have that baby's life ended and removed. They do so with eyes wide open -- perhaps not to the moral issues, not to the health risks, not to the long term guilt and remorse -- but certainly with eyes wide open to the humanity of their preborn child.
What is different about Senior's column is the public admission it represents by pro-choice leaders that the old justifications just won't work anymore. Abortion, everyone knows very well now, is a selfish act. So, accept that. Defend that. And get on with it. It's really the only argument with any force.
So expect more of it. As ugly and cruel as it seems (and it is), expect more defenses of abortion rights like these I quote below from Senior's column:
I’ve been wavering. But a woman’s right to choose her own way of life is paramount.
In the Cradle Tower at the Tower of London is an interactive display that asks visitors to vote on whether they would die for a cause. Hmm, let’s see. I like dolphins, but if it came down to a straight choice, goodbye Flipper. I’ll shout abuse at a Uruguayan linesman when my country calls, but I wouldn’t take a paper cut for England, let alone a bullet.
Standing where religious martyrs were held and tortured in Britain’s turbulent reformation, I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman’s right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility. Yet something strange is happening to this belief that has, for so long, shaped my core; my moral certainty about abortion is wavering, my absolutist position is under siege...
Then came a baby, and everything changed. I think of it as the Anna Karenina conundrum. If you read the book as a teenager, you back her choices with all the passion of youth. Love over convention, go Anna! Then you have children and realise that Anna abandons her son to shack up with a pretty soldier, and then her daughter when she jumps under a train. She becomes a selfish witch. Having a baby paints the world an entirely different hue. Black and white no longer quite cut it...
What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person — forged in my womb, not by my mothering.
Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable.
So we are left with a problem. A growing movement in America, spearheaded by Sarah Palin, is pro-life feminism, This attempts to decouple feminism from abortion rights, arguing that you can believe in a woman’s right to be empowered without believing in her right to abort. Its proponents report a groundswell of support among young women looking to reinvent their mothers’ ideology.
But you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology. Abortion would have been legal for millennia had it been men whose prospects and careers were put on sudden hold by an unexpected pregnancy. The mystery pondered on many a girls’ night out is how on earth men, bless them, managed to hang on to political and cultural hegemony for so long. The only answer is that they are not in hock to their biology as much as we are. Look at a map of the world and the right to abortion on request correlates pretty exactly with the expectation of a life unburdened by misogyny.
As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.
For other commentary on Antonia Senior's column, check out Kathleen Gilbert at LifeSite News and Michael Merrick at Outside In.
