My earlier entry about the above issue prompted a response from one of the writers at Shrillblog, which I’ll link at the bottom, as well as the original, since I’m not sure how to embed links. Here is my response to the response.

I hope this isn’t too long for people. I do sum it up succinctly in the last couple of paragraphs if you get bogged down. I just felt the need to confront a couple of things before I explained the conclusion.

It begins with the well-worn and depressing suggestion that “there is a significant problem with men offering opinions on the specific issue of another person’s bodily autonomy”. The idea that there should be a problem with somebody offering an opinion upon the way somebody else uses their body is ridiculous. Is our societal condemnation of murder not offering an opinion upon another person’s bodily autonomy? By all accounts, it seems we should allow them to murder as they please, for fear of crossing the boundary into expressing a view as to the limits upon their actions.

We do not, alas, live in a libertarian utopia. We must draw judgements upon the way that others exercise their liberty. We have laws. We have police. A lack of uterine empathy does not disqualify me from an opinion, nor does it in any way reduce the validity of it.

I hope I can be forgiven for what will be a blunt and shocking example. The vast proportion of rapists are men. Most if not all women will never empathise with a rapist. It is not possible. Partly for practical reasons that I hope can be avoided, but partly because it is an action driven by a wholly male, testosterone fuelled, violent power complex. It is an act that is created and enacted as a brutal and disgusting expression of male sexuality. Every woman would, however, feel completely within their rights to totally and passionately disagree with the way in which a rapist uses his personal autonomy to damage the autonomy of others.

Now let me be very clear. I am not saying that aborting an embryo is ethically comparable to a rape. I am saying that it is comparable in the way in which we may have opinions upon something that our gender could not possibly allow us to empathise with or understand. For the sake of clarity: abortion is similar to rape only in the sense that it is something done by one gender that the other cannot  understand, and yet may (and should) still have opinions upon.

I must stress this. I am not comparing rape to abortion on an ethical level, and I would utterly reject any insinuations as such. I do not want to be criticised on the grounds that I have made a comparison that is somehow abhorrent and unfair. Please bear completely in mind the context and content of the comparison. I hope that it is understood that the example illustrates only that the train of logic that follows from “men may not comment upon female autonomy” eventually arrives at the station of women being unable to disapprove of rape, which is a horrific destination.

Finally, the body and crux of the debate. The response suggests a number of ways in which abortion *does* infringe upon the right of the individual, and indeed causes many individuals no small amount of harm. The anti-abortion campaigner knows this. Of course they do. If they don’t, then the fault is their own ignorance, not the view they subscribe to. The key point, however, of the whole thing, is not that anti-abortion people don’t infringe upon the rights of the individual, necessarily, it is that the rights of the individual are superseded by the perceived greater right of the unborn person.  Nobody denies that preventing abortion is an infringement upon the rights of the woman, the claim is only that it is a lesser infringement than that of the woman on the embryo.

“But”, I hear you cry, “it isn’t a lesser infringement! The woman’s rights are far greater than the embryo! After all, it’s only potential life!”. Now, an important point, and one that needs to be shouted loudly and clearly. When we talk about potential life, and the ending thereof, it is not a simple matter. An acorn has the potential to be an oak tree. It also has the potential to be a park bench. The former is a potential that, in the natural, uninterrupted order of things, will be fulfilled. The latter requires some kind of causal intervention. This is the crucial difference between the loss of an egg or sperm, and between the loss of a fertilised embryo.

A fertilised embryo has active potential. It will, barring abortion, accident or illness, reach it’s human destination, as surely as that acorn will become an oak tree. A gamete has passive potential. It is not on the path to humanity. It is waiting; inactive. It is for this reason that the response’s comment “Yes, it’s a potential person, but I’ve got a whole army of potential people in my egg-laden loins, and no-one sheds a tear when I get my period” is false. There is a vital, incontestable difference between the potential life of a fertilised embryo, and the potential life of a gamete, and one that it would do the abortion debate good to realise. The glib dismissal of the value of potential life is too often wrongly accepted.

And so while the response is incorrect in denying the significance of potential life, it is also incorrect in suggesting that it is physical constraints that give something the right to life. As has been notoriously suggested, both by Peter Singer and more recently, a newborn can no more survive on its own then a 13 week foetus. It does not have a sense of identity. It does not have abstract thought. If we are drawing lines based on physical and developmental grounds as to whether something should be awarded a right to life, then organ development and physical size is an incredibly arbitrary place to start. Does a growing body only deserve to live once it has formed fingernails? Once it has opened its eyes? Once it first recognises itself in the mirror?

My dismissal of the response’s rejection of an embryo’s right to life is not a fully-formed counterargument as such. It is merely casting doubt upon the certainty with which people approach an incredibly complicated and possibly unsolvable issue. The criticism of anti-abortion is based on a flawed notion that a woman’s rights definitely supersede an embryo’s. There is no definite here. There is no definite on the other side either, of course. An anti-abortion person can say with no greater certainty that an embryo’s rights are more important. My point, then, in the light of this, was not that an embryo has greater rights, but that those who think it does are not intending to deprive a woman of hers. We cannot know for certain if the balance is more weighted on the rights of one side or the other, and so all we are left with is motivation and intention.

It is the criticism of this motivation and intention that I confronted. I argued that based on their beliefs, anti-abortion people are not depriving women of their rights. In making it into an actual debate about the balance of rights, the response wholly missed my point. It was a rebuttal of the rhetoric often employed by pro-abortion people. I wasn’t interested in arguing the answer, only in defending the intention of anti-abortioners, something which I believe I successfully did. Everything after that is misunderstanding.

http://shrillblog.co.uk/2012/abortion-response-jantacular/

http://jantacular.tumblr.com/post/19274342025/opposing-abortion-means-denying-a-womans-right-over