Abortion summary

Pro-choice Americans, and pro-choice politicians especially, have a bad habit. They speak about abortion tentatively and apologetically, acknowledging nuance and gray areas. They frame abortion as a fraught individual choice rather than an essential right and freedom. Sticking to this tepid messaging didn’t help them protect the Roe ruling. Worse, it cedes the moral high ground.

In this debate, the moral high ground has been loudly and repeatedly claimed by anti-abortionists. Let’s be very clear: forcing someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant to stay pregnant is both dangerous and cruel. Forcing rape victims to “prove” they have been raped before allowing them to access reproductive care is dehumanizing and humiliating. Making devastated people carry dead or dying fetuses to term is utterly wrong, as is forcing children to give birth. Any group that can support these policies definitely does not have the moral high ground. 

Forcing people to give birth against their will is wrong and bad. But there’s more to it than that. We also need to acknowledge that abortion is good. 

Abortion recognizes the humanity of people, especially women. Some pro-lifers are opposed to abortion on the grounds of “fetal personhood,” which defines fertilized eggs and zygotes as “persons” in the constitutional sense. When the well-being of a group of cells is placed above the well-being of a person, that person’s humanity is eradicated. The right to abortion recognizes the humanity of women.

Abortion is safe and common. One in four American women will have an abortion. Ninety-nine percent of people who have an abortion will say they don’t regret the procedure. As for the procedure itself? It’s extremely safe and, generally, straightforward. You’re more likely to experience complications from a wisdom-tooth removal than from an abortion. Thanks to innovations in reproductive health care, abortions are becoming even safer and easier to access, through technology like abortion pills.

Abortion does not rob potential. Anti-abortionists often like to pose hypotheticals like: “A terminated fetus might have grown up to cure cancer.” Do you know who else might cure cancer? A woman who’s had an abortion, and is able to pursue her scientific career in a way that she might not have, had she had to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. That same hypothetical woman might, thanks to her abortion, contribute to society in a myriad of other ways including, if she chose to, through having a family on her own terms.

Abortion has both economic and health benefits. In the Turnaway Study, a group of one thousand women were monitored over five years. Some women with unwanted pregnancies had abortions. Some women with unwanted pregnancies were not able to access abortions. The study showed that women denied abortions were more likely to stay with an abusive partner, have serious pregnancy complications, suffer from anxiety and poor physical health, and live in poverty. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term actually quadruples her chances of ending up below the poverty line.

So. Abortion is not a controversial or ethically complex topic. Abortion – morally, socially, economically, practically – is good.