My Response to the Gospel Coalition

(Note: This post originally appeared on another blog of mine in 2012. It has been edited to update my thoughts on some of these issues.)

The Gospel Coalition, a popular Christian ministry, recently posted a blog titled 10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate is Never Asked by the Media. They posted this because The Gospel Coalition believes that the media tends to ask pro-life candidates tough questions relating to their abortion stances, but fails to do the same for pro-choice candidates. In their opinion, pro-life candidates are grilled, so to speak, for being pro-life, but pro-choice candidates are given a "pass" and not challenged in their thought processes. So they posted a list of 10 questions that they'd like to see answered by pro-choice politicians. I'm not a politician, but do have a few things to say in regard to these questions. So let's get started, shall we?

1) You say you support a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices in regards to abortion and contraception. Are there any restrictions you would approve of?

In short, no. I do not support restricting a woman's right to her own body.

The underlying assumption of this question is that everyone out there would want to restrict abortion in some way -- usually, the picture that comes to mind is a woman nine months pregnant with a healthy baby deciding willy-nilly to get an abortion -- and then, the pro-life questioners think, once they can back a pro-choice person into the corner of admitting they'd accept some restrictions, they begin questioning why a baby's life matters at some points throughout pregnancy and not in others. Then things get murky and sticky for the pro-choice person.

That's what this question is all about.

But we need to erase the assumptions and clear up some ill definitions. First of all, abortion isn't about killing babies (as anti-choice rhetoric would have you believe). It's about ending pregnancies. Women have many, many reasons for ending pregnancies. For the record, the image of that woman in her ninth month of pregnancy just deciding to get an abortion doesn't reflect reality -- women who choose abortion when they're that far along (if they even can -- most of the time, state laws prohibit it) do so in a heart-wrenching decision that was made due to her health or the baby's health. So there's that.

So, with the understanding that abortion is about ending a pregnancy, and the death of a fetus being the natural consequence of that (it's not the woman's fault that the fetus can't live without being inside of her), my stance is that if a woman wishes to end a pregnancy after viability (which is what this question targets), for whatever reason, she should always have that option. Perhaps there could be an option to try and save the baby's life after the pregnant state has been terminated. Perhaps not. That really depends on the situation, and why the woman is choosing to terminate (which is none of anyone else's business).

But I would not support a restriction on any woman's right to end the state of being pregnant.

2) In 2010, The Economist featured a cover story on “the war on girls” and the growth of “gendercide” in the world – abortion based solely on the sex of the baby. Does this phenomenon pose a problem for you or do you believe in the absolute right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy because the unborn fetus is female?

I believe that aborting based on the biological sex of the baby is an awful reality that our world faces. But I also believe that it's a woman's right to abort a pregnancy for whatever reason she wants or needs, and we should not be in the business of questioning the motives of women who abort.

That being said, let me point out that sex-selective abortions are not an issue because of abortion being legal. They are an issue because of deep cultural and systemic sexism. In order to address sex-selective abortions, we first need to address the underlying cause, which is cultural sexism that leads potential parents to believe that sons are more valuable than daughters, and that daughters are, therefore, expendable. We fight this not by eliminating the right to abortion, but by working to eliminate sexism, and creating a world in which daughters are valued and loved just as much as sons. That is not currently the world we live in.

Outlawing abortion because of sex-selective abortions would create one of two scenarios: 1) the woman in question would get an illegal and dangerous abortion anyway, or 2) the woman would give birth to a daughter she (and everyone else) did not want, and the girl would grow up likely abused and mistreated. Forcing the birth of an unwanted girl does nothing to eliminate the sexism inherent in sex-selective abortions. Wouldn't it be better if people were relieved of the cultural notions that boys are "better than" girls?

I am very much against the notion of interrogating women as to why they're having abortions. Who gets to decide what's an acceptable reason? And who gets to decide if a woman is lying about her intent? Women deserve trust and respect, and in terms of this particular reason for aborting, women need to live in societies where their value is on par with that of men. That's what will solve this problem.

3) In many states, a teenager can have an abortion without her parents’ consent or knowledge but cannot get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental authorization. Do you support any restrictions or parental notification regarding abortion access for minors?

To begin with, no, I do not support parental notification or a parent's "right" to force a daughter to complete a pregnancy (nor do I support a parent's "right" to force a daughter to have an abortion). The autonomy of teenage girls should be respected, and decisions regarding their bodies and futures should be their decisions.

The reason that teenagers are denied aspirin from schools without parental consent is because the schools themselves must avoid potential lawsuits and monitor drug use on campus. Schools therefore have a right to regulate (and, again, monitor) any kind of drug usage. And that has nothing to do with whether anyone -- schools, doctors, legislators, or even parents -- should be able to commandeer a teenager's body and force her to carry a pregnancy. To suggest that anyone should be able to do so is to suggest that a teenager's body does not belong to her, and that they are not individuals worthy of autonomy.

Let's look at the implications here -- without her aspirin, a girl might have to experience cramping, or a headache, or some other form of pain (the same goes for teenage boys in high school when they're denied an aspirin). Without an abortion, however, she'd be forced to carry a pregnancy for nearly a year, give birth, and potentially face teen motherhood (all of which have significant effects on physical and mental health). In other words, should adults have the right to monitor a teenager's drug use (or other behaviors)? Yes, within reason. But should they be allowed to deny a teenager bodily autonomy? Absolutely not.

I do think it would be ideal if parents played a supportive role in their children's major life decisions regarding their health and otherwise. But parents do not own their children, and should never have the right to limit a child's personal rights. In an ideal world, a young woman would be able to approach her parents about this issue and have a conversation about it, but we don't live in an ideal world. There are certainly reasons (especially in our culture) why a young woman would want to avoid that conversation with her parents, and I support her right to access reproductive health care without their consent. Again, parents do not own their daughters' bodies.

In short, taking aspirin is not a constitutional right. Aborting a pregnancy is.

4) If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, when do you believe it begins? At what stage of development should an unborn child have human rights?

To begin, human life is a spectrum. There is no point in which life magically begins.

That being said, when life begins -- or, even, when a child should have human rights -- is absolutely beside the point. No one has a right to use another person's body for their own survival against that other person's will. I don't have that right, you don't have that right, and an "unborn child" doesn't have that right. Any "right" to another person's body does not exist, and has never been considered a human right. So why should it be considered one in the case of pregnancy? To grant fetuses such a "right" would be to grant them special rights that no one else possesses.

So, to ask whether fetuses should be granted human rights has nothing to do with abortion, because the use of someone else's body is not a human right.

5) Currently, when genetic testing reveals an unborn child has Down Syndrome, most women choose to abort. How do you answer the charge that this phenomenon resembles the “eugenics” movement a century ago – the slow, but deliberate “weeding out” of those our society would deem “unfit” to live?

In the eugenics movement, adult people were being forced into sterilization -- in other words, their own autonomy and bodily rights were being violated. That is not analogous to a woman choosing to not give birth to a child who she knows will experience hardship throughout life. The situations might be analogous if the government started forcing women to abort Down Syndrome babies, but that isn't currently the case. As always, the choice to abort (and the reasons why) rests with the woman and her own reasons for making decisions that affect her and her future.

6) Do you believe an employer should be forced to violate his or her religious conscience by providing access to abortifacient drugs and contraception to employees?

Let's be clear about one thing -- insurance premiums are part of a comprehensive compensation package that an employee earns. Let me repeat that. Employees earn their compensation. Pay and benefits are not gifts that employers hand out, out of the goodness of their hearts. As such, an employer has no right to say what an employee does with that compensation.

A friend of mine had an employer once who had a religious objection to the Disney company (it had something to do with gay rights, but I don't know the ins and outs of it). Does that mean that this employer had a right to tell my friend that he couldn't use his paycheck, or perhaps paid time off, to visit Disneyland or watch a Disney movie? The money he earned came directly from this employer, so does said employer have a right to say what he does with it?

If your employer believes only in faith healing, should she have a right to dictate that such healings are the only form of "medicine" that can be included in your premium? If your employer is a Jehovah's Witness, can she dictate that blood transfusions not be included in your premium? Should an employer have a right to force you to not use your compensation on something just because they don't want "their" money being used for those purposes?

No, because that money is no longer theirs. It belongs to the employee, who earned it.

Most people understand the basics of this within the context of most situations. What you do with your own compensation is none of your employer's business. Therefore, if you want contraception or abortion included in your insurance premium, that choice is yours alone to make. No one has a right to dictate the lives of others through the guise of "religious freedom."

The point of religious freedom (and you can honestly do research on this subject to see for yourself) is to make sure that nobody is forced to join or leave any one religion -- in other words, a person must always be free to worship (or not) as he or she pleases. If you live in a country where you can be executed or otherwise punished for following the "wrong" religion, you are experiencing religious persecution. This is a far cry from being asked to follow the law while conducting business in a country that embraces religious freedom. Everyone is free to follow whatever religion they'd like to, and to worship however they'd like to, and attend whatever service they'd like to -- but that freedom does not include any right to discriminate against others or control others while you are participating in the open market where not everyone shares your views.

7) Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. has said that “abortion is the white supremacist’s best friend,” pointing to the fact that Black and Latinos represent 25% of our population but account for 59% of all abortions. How do you respond to the charge that the majority of abortion clinics are found in inner-city areas with large numbers of minorities?

My answer to this question is very similar to my answer to the question regarding sex-selective abortions.

The fact that minority communities have more abortions than white communities is indicative of a larger problem -- that is, that there are more minority communities living in poverty and struggling financially, and, as an extension of that, are less likely to have access to comprehensive sex education, birth control, prenatal health services, and resources once a baby is born. This is a result of a long period of oppression against minority communities. But when people have little access to money, food, shelter, and education (you know, about their bodies and how to protect themselves against pregnancy), guess what? Abortion rates will go up.

Making abortion illegal and forcing minority women to carry pregnancies they don't want and/or can't afford (and will likely further perpetuate the cycle of poverty) isn't going to solve this problem. What will help solve this problem is making sure that women have access to education and contraception, and that our society is taking proactive steps to lift people out of poverty and create a more equitable society.

I want to point out that the countries with the lowest abortion rates are in western Europe, where contraception and sex education are abundant. In these countries, abortion is legal, but the numbers are low. Countries such as ours, which make concerted efforts to shame sex and keep people uneducated about any method of contraception other than abstinence, tend to have very high abortion rates (and this is true in countries where abortion is illegal, too). Criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce -- or end -- abortion. But progressive social policies do. So if the end-goal is really about reducing or ending abortion (among minorities and elsewhere), why do so many in the pro-life crowd consistently oppose the measures that have been shown to actually achieve that end?

The fact that minority communities seek abortion more than affluent, white communities is not evidence that abortion is a tool used by racists to further perpetuate racism. Many minority women choose abortion for themselves, which makes it a rather empowering thing. In all honesty, further perpetuating racism and poverty among minorities would be easier done by blocking women from accessing abortion and other reproductive rights.

8) You describe abortion as a “tragic choice.” If abortion is not morally objectionable, then why is it tragic? Does this mean there is something about abortion that is different than other standard surgical procedures?

Not everyone considers abortion to be a "tragic choice." Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
On the surface, the idea of abortion can be considered tragic because women seek abortions when they are faced with an unwanted pregnancy. No one gets pregnant on purpose just so they can dish out hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to undergo a medical procedure. This is tragic in the same way that a transplant surgery is tragic, in that nobody wants to undergo that procedure or deal with the lifetime consequences of that, but sometimes they need to and so they do. And, along with the tragedy of having to go through that, there is also usually great thankfulness and relief that they were able to. The same is true of abortion.

But let's dig deeper. Abortion can be a tragic choice when it's a choice that a woman must make, but doesn't want to. There are times when a woman might want a baby, or be connected to the idea of having a baby, or has become quite attached to her developing pregnancy, but must make the decision to abort anyway (for whatever reason). That is tragic. There are times when a woman is joyfully carrying a pregnancy, but discovers that she must abort due to an abnormality in the fetus or for the sake of her own health. That is tragic, and it's tragic because it involves a medical procedure that the woman doesn't want. The same would be the case for any necessary medical procedure that the person doesn't want to, but must, have. Such procedures cause grief, and that is tragic.

In short, there are many medical procedures that encompass both tragic and non-tragic elements. Framing abortion as entirely tragic while other procedures are entirely non-tragic is disingenuous, and not looking at the bigger picture of what medical procedures can and do entail.

9) Do you believe abortion should be legal once the unborn fetus is viable – able to survive outside the womb?

Yes. Abortion should be legal even when the fetus is viable. Again, as I already pointed out above, this is because abortion should not be defined as "killing babies," but rather as terminating a pregnancy. Just because embryos and early fetuses cannot survive outside of a woman's body does not mean that abortion is about killing babies. It's still about ending the state of being pregnant. If this is done before a fetus is viable, then it will die; if it's done after a fetus is viable, then there's a chance it will live.

My position is that a woman should never be forced by law to serve as life support to someone else. So if she decides she doesn't want to be pregnant, or realizes she cannot, then she should always be able to request the other person be removed from her body. Again, as I've also mentioned before, what that means for a viable fetus is another question. If we weren't talking about termination, but a woman inducing labor and then walking away from the born fetus, does that change things for the anti-choice crowd? Because, really, that's how this question needs to be framed.

10) If a pregnant woman and her unborn child are murdered, do you believe the criminal should face two counts of murder and serve a harsher sentence?

No.

But let's flip this around. Do you believe that if a pregnant woman is raped, and the fetus she's carrying dies but she does not, the perpetrator should face murder charges? What if this rape happens when she's still in the first trimester, not showing, and she miscarries right after being raped? Should the rapist be charged with rape, murder, or both?

Should a pregnant women be able to claim an unborn child on her taxes? If I'm pregnant, can I drive in the carpool lane? There are plenty of instances in which an unborn child is not considered a sentient being apart from the woman.

But here's the point, once again: this is about women making decisions for themselves. A woman has a right to make decisions about her body, including who can and cannot use it for survival, but that doesn't give anyone else the right to murder or harm either she or the fetus she's carrying. A woman's right to abort doesn't extend to others' "rights" to abort for her. This is about her choice, since it is her body in question.

Anti-choice rhetoric tends to make abortion an issue about babies or the men involved and, in the meantime, completely erase the pregnant women from the picture. But the natural state of pregnancy leaves women with tremendous power over life and death that doesn't extend to others. As we continually see, though, people having tremendous power in this world -- especially when it's a woman -- is at the root of the abortion issue. There are too many people afraid of this power that women hold over life and death, and are determined to take it away and claim that power as their own.

Those associated with the Gospel Coalition ... there you have it: Answers to your questions which, quite honestly, did not strike me as the "tough" questions you apparently hoped they'd be. As always, I welcome feedback and reply.