Reproductive bondage.

REPRODUCTIVE BONDAGE

In much of the world, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term as patriarchal organizations (often affiliated with patriarchal religious sects) and their followers use concerted action and/or the state power to deprive women (and couples) of their natural rights with respect to pregnancy termination and/or the use of some or all contraceptive devices.

1.  Patriarchal impositions. With its narrow patriarchal view of the place of women in the world and/or in the family, the modern anti-reproductive-rights movement consists of a number of religious and political organizations seeking to deprive women of their natural human right to limit their childbearing (especially when this involves termination or prevention of an unwanted pregnancy).  This movement often even goes to the extreme of acting to deprive couples of their personal-liberty right to use the medically-approved contraceptive devices with which they could avoid creating unwanted pregnancies.  Such organizations typically claim to belong to a so-called “right-to-life” movement; but they usually focus exclusively upon preserving what is growing in a woman’s womb; while manifesting far less, if any, concern for the lives of living breathing human persons.

2.  Roots. This movement to deprive women of their reproductive rights is a carryover from a patriarchal past, wherein the men and women of the laboring classes were ruled and exploited by the lords or capitalists, while women were subjugated under the authority of the men and largely treated like property.   

3.  Present-day religious viewpoints. Although many religious people regard deliberate abortion negatively, most do not embrace the extreme viewpoint of the anti-abortion fanatics who denounce abortion as the killing of an “unborn child” and/or assert that personhood begins at the point of fertilization.  In fact (at least with respect to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), there is no scriptural basis for such extreme contentions concerning personhood.  Moreover, there is no consensus within any of the major religions concerning the point at which, or the conditions under which, abortion is morally impermissible.

• Buddhists hold divergent views with respect to the issue, and the Dalai Lama has asserted that its propriety depends upon the particular circumstances.
• Hindu theologians are divided with respect to the issue; some believe that personhood begins at three months thereby implying that abortion is acceptable during the first 3 months of gestation.
• The Jewish law as presented in the Torah (first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible [Christian Old Testament]), Exodus 21:22, views causing the abortion of a woman’s pregnancy as not a crime against a child or against God ^[⁑]. The Talmud interprets that scripture as holding that the fetus is not a person until delivered.  This interpretation is consistent with Genesis 2:7 wherein the body of the first man became a person (Adam) when God caused it to breathe (an activity which a fetus does not do).
• There is no prohibition of abortion in the Christian Bible (New Testament). Nevertheless, despite the lack of any scriptural basis, some (not all) ancient and medieval Christian theologians (notably Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas with their patriarchal view with respect to the place of women in family and society) condemned abortion as sinful.  Still, Augustine and Aquinas did not consider abortion before quickening (that is at about 4 months of gestation when fetal movement becomes detectible) to be the killing of a person.
• The Qur’an does not speak of abortion; however, in Islamic jurisprudence, it was widely held that the fetus does not acquire a soul until 4 months of gestation. Moreover, all mainsteam Islamic sects permit abortion when necessary to prioritize the life of the mother over that of the fetus.  Further, Islamic jurists have readily accepted abortion as permissible, in some other cases (including rape), during some or all of the first 4 months.

Opinion among present-day adherents of every major religion is divided with those on one side (generally those more patriarchal) condemning abortion as a grave sin in all or nearly all circumstances and those on the opposing side (generally those more supportive of women’s equality) holding that it is morally wrong (certainly prior to fetal viability) to deprive a woman of her natural right to control her own body and its womb.  ^[1]

[⁑] If a woman’s miscarriage was caused by another contrary to her will, then the offender was to pay compensation for the loss.  It was deemed to be a loss: because of the woman’s investment in nurturing her pregnancy, and because the birth of a child was generally welcomed and valued as an addition to the family’s labor force.  Causing an abortion was not deemed a homicide for which the penalty would have been death (life for life).

4.  Reproductive facts. Pregnancy involves several stages.

(1) Requisite preparatory acts: ovulation, copulation, and insemination.

(2) Fertilization: following the monthly release of an ovum from the woman’s ovaries, a sperm cell from the man unites with it thereby creating a zygote (fertilized egg).

(3) Cleavage: cell division transforms the zygote into a morula (cell mass).

(4) Cavitation: the morula divides into 2 connected structures, trophoblast and embryoblast, thereby becoming a blastocyst.

(5) Implantation (the event most reasonably defined as “conception”): the blastocyst implants into the wall of the woman’s uterus (7^th day after fertilization) thereby creating a pregnancy.

(6) Structural formation: several additional processes bring the formation, from the cells of the blastocyst, of several structures (notably: placenta, chorion, amnion, umbilical cord, and embryo).

(7) Fetal inception: one of those structures, namely the embryo, evolves (by 9^th week) into a primal fetus (weighing about 8 grams, less than one 400^th as much as a newborn baby).

(8) Fetal development: the organs of the fetus then develop until it becomes a fully-formed potential infant (at about 39 weeks) weighing about 3,300 grams (7.2 pounds).

(9) Lastly, childbirth.

The process can, and often does, terminate naturally without resulting in a live birth.  Only a tiny fraction of ova will be fertilized; and only an infinitesimal fraction of sperm cells will ever encounter an ovum.  More than 50% of the time the blastocyst will not implant, and no pregnancy will occur.  Moreover, in many pregnancies there will be a spontaneous abortion (a.k.a. miscarriage) at some point after implantation.  Given the large numbers of failures to implant and of spontaneous abortions, the notion, that pregnancy and personhood begin with fertilization, leads necessarily to the conclusion that Nature, or God as Creator of Nature, is responsible for many more abortions than live births; and Nature or God must therefore be the Great Abortionist.  In addition, even in a completed pregnancy, much human cellular material which develops from the fertilized ovum will become tissue to be sluffed off as afterbirth; and this tissue possesses the same chromosomes and genetic content as does the newborn infant.  ^[2]

5.  Personhood. The fetus does not eat, drink, defecate, urinate, breath, think, or perform other functions which are characteristic of actual persons.  Except for reflex motions, the fetus is a purely passive organism within the prospective mother’s womb and wholly dependent upon her body for all of its needs and for its continued functional existence.  Naturally, a fetus in the womb, in contradistinction to a baby in the world, cannot be a social person.

Historically, from ancient times until modern times, influential moralists (invariably men) held widely divergent views with respect to abortion.  Those, who opposed women being permitted freely to terminate their pregnancies, used ensoulment doctrine to classify the “fetus” as a person and thereby justify their opposition.  Actually, authorities differed in their opinions as to the time of “ensoulment”, proposed times varying over the entire range from conception (when pregnancy begins) to childbirth (when thinking and deliberative action can begin).  Moreover, most proponents of pre-birth ensoulment, recognizing the absurdity of attributing personhood to a zygote or undeveloped mass of cells, chose a time later than conception, that time being either: at an arbitrary fixed number of days, or at quickening when fetal movement begins to be felt in the womb.  Beliefs about the time of pre-birth ensoulment then affected doctrine: as to when abortion should be deemed unacceptable, or as to when it should be deemed a greater evil.  Nevertheless, even when abortion (most always performed by the woman and/or her female family members and/or with the assistance of a midwife) was outlawed, the law often went unenforced as affected women ignored it.  ^[3]

Contemporary anti-abortion groups often evade the actual history of ensoulment doctrine in order to falsely portray abortion rights as an immoral 20^th century invention.  The Catholic Church, although admitting that the Christian Church has not always held that personhood begins at conception, asserts (falsely) that the Church always regarded abortion as sinful.  In fact, for many centuries, abortion before quickening was generally accepted within the Church and often not counted as abortion.  It was only since 1869 that the Catholic Church definitively decided that abortion was sinful from the time of conception.  Despite the Church’s inconvenient history of doctrinal inconsistency, conservative Catholic and other anti-abortion groups push for laws redefining legal personhood as beginning at fertilization.  ^[4]

Anti-abortion groups also argue that the presence of a “fetal heartbeat” after about 6 weeks of gestation qualifies the “fetus” as a functioning person (“child”, “baby”).  Actually, at six weeks, the embryo has not yet formed the primal fetus, and said “heartbeat’ is only an electro-chemical flutter in tissue which has yet to develop into a functional heart ^[5].  Even setting aside the anatomical misrepresentations, the personhood claim is clearly a logical non sequitur: there is a huge difference between a fetus (in the womb) and a baby or child (as an actor in the world); actual childhood begins at birth, not before.

! These absurd personhood laws (based upon: false history, invented religious dogma, and imaginary embryology) are obviously concocted for the purpose of criminalizing abortion as well as to prohibit the use of certain medically-approved contraceptive devices.   

6.  Hypocrisy & the morality police.  While the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic and of various evangelical Protestant Churches demanded laws criminalizing abortion from the time of fertilization; they, for many generations, abetted child molestation by many of their clergy and lay-leaders.  Specifically, they concealed the crimes and shielded the perpetrators from exposure and prosecution despite the severe harm inflicted upon huge numbers of actual child victims ^[12].  While they demand absolute religious freedom for themselves ^[⁑], patriarchal Church leaderships and their supportive bigots seek to impose their controversial sectarian moral strictures upon the entire population, much or most of which does share said moral strictures.  If they succeed in outlawing abortion; they will move on to target another alleged sins: same-sex relationships, erotica, sex education, blasphemy, et cetera.  These would-be theocrats mimic the medievalist Islamist regimes in countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan) where morality police are used to enforce the subjugation of their women.

[⁑] Example.  The Roman Catholic Church (as well as Orthodox Churches, which also condemn abortion) displays crucifixes and statues of the Virgin in its places of worship despite the Biblical Commandment prohibiting the use of any “graven image” as aid in worship [Exodus 20:4].  Yet, Church leaders would certainly claim persecution if that practice (condemned as idolatry in Judaism, in Islam, and by many Protestant churches) were criminalized.

7.  Using wombs. Prior to the abolition of slavery, because slaves were a very valuable property; slave owners routinely used pressure and/or coercion in order to induce their female slaves to become pregnant and produce slave offspring.  Sometimes a master would compel his female slave against her will to submit to unwanted sexual intercourse with a male slave designated by him, the objective being to produce such offspring as would be expected either: to bring a good price in the slave market, or to provide useful labor to his own business.  In the Upper South of the US, many slave-owners made a business of thusly breeding slaves for sale to planters in the Deep South, where the slaves were often worked to death on cotton and sugar plantations.  There were certainly instances of rebellious slave women resisting such compulsory motherhood by attempting to abort such pregnancies.  Nowadays, anti-abortion fanatics, like the slave-masters of the past, act to deprive women of their human right to control their own wombs and reproduction; but, instead of the whip, they use: guilt-tripping indoctrination, direct harassment, legislated impediments, and outright criminalization.  ^[6]

8.  Involuntary servitude. Relevant articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United Nations in 1948) include: “Article 1 – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”; “Article 3 – Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”; “Article 4 – No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”.  In addition, most countries have laws prohibiting involuntary servitude; for example, the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution states “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude […] shall exist within the United States”.  Moreover, said Constitution’s 14^th Amendment states “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor shall any state deprive any person of […] liberty, […] without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Further, its 9^th Amendment (which was ratified in 1791: when anti-abortion laws did not exist in the US, and pre-quickening abortions were common and generally allowed) states “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”.  It is true that the foregoing Amendments were not contemporaneously intended (by the exclusively male enactors) to protect the reproductive rights of women, who were then generally subject to the patriarchal authority of their husbands or other male guardians as well as subject to forced sexual intercourse (now criminalized as marital rape) at the whims of their husbands.  However, the enactment (in 1920) of the 19^th Amendment (which prohibits denial of voting rights on account of sex) provided equal citizenship rights to women and extended to them, at least in principle, the equal protection of the aforementioned Constitutional rights ^[7].  Despite the general acceptance of the foregoing human rights in the abstract; in actual practice, many governments have imposed, by law and/or other means, involuntary servitude upon their women with respect to the reproductive functions of the women’s bodies.

9.  Deceitful pretexts. In order to “justify” legislation which obstructs access to family-planning medications and/or procedures, some anti-reproductive-rights groups deceitfully use false assertions that such obstructions are for the purpose of protecting the women who would use them.

In the US, these obstructionists sometimes obtain legislation imposing such onerous restrictions and burdens upon abortion providers that they are forced to cease operation thereby depriving many women of access.  Although the proponents of such measures often assert that the purpose and effect of such restrictions is to prevent risk to the life and health of the pregnant woman; in fact, childbirth presents a much greater risk to a woman’s life and health than does abortion performed by a qualified healthcare provider.  Statistically, the maternal death rate from childbirth in the US (1998—2005) was 14 times greater than the rate from abortion ^[8].

In response to pressure from anti-reproductive-rights politicians, the US government’s Food and Drug Administration [FDA] disregarded (in 2006) its own medical science experts’ recommendation to make the emergency contraceptive pill (which prevents pregnancy when taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse) available to women under age 18 without prescription.  The pretext for this denial of access was a pretended concern for the safety of the young women who would use said emergency contraception.  The actual result was 7 years of unnecessary extra costs, burdens, delays, and health risks for affected young women, as well as otherwise avoidable unwanted pregnancies.  ^[9]

10.  “conscience rights”. Reproductive rights have also been attacked with laws purporting to recognize a so-called “conscience right” whereby employers and service-providers (licensed pharmacies, religiously-affiliated hospitals and clinics, private universities, and government-funded contract providers of social services) are allowed to opt out of civic mandates to provide access to those reproductive health services which they purport to disapprove upon moral grounds.  Case in point, some “state” governments in the US have gone to the extreme of permitting licensed pharmacists to abuse the public trust inherent in their licenses by refusing to provide prescription and non-prescription contraceptives and/or other FDA-approved family planning devices to patients ^[10].  Provision of healthcare services by employers and service providers is, in fact, a component of the social contract between the parties and is (or certainly should be) to satisfy the healthcare needs of the employee or patient or service recipient, not to indulge the sectarian religious strictures of the employer or service provider.  Under such laws, the rights of affected employees and patients are effectively voided by the contracting entities which are supposed to serve them.  Of course, from a rights perspective, those individuals, who believe that it is immoral to use artificial contraception or to abort a pregnancy, have the right to decide for themselves to refrain from personally engaging in those practices.  However, when they arrogate to themselves the prerogative to make that decision for others (whether employees, or patients, or fellow humans); they certainly perpetrate an abusive intrusion into the private lives of those who are thereby deprived of control over their own bodies.

11.  Disparate impact. Obstructive measures do not generally prevent affluent women (those with the requisite funds and/or the means to travel to jurisdictions with more liberal policies) from accessing safe and effective abortion services and/or medically-approved contraceptive devices.  It is poor women who are either: prevented from obtaining needed abortions and/or contraceptives; or driven to resort to do-it-yourself or other dangerous procedures.

Noted sources.

[1] Wikipedia: Religion and abortion (2018 Apr 26) and related articles; Abortion and Christianity (2020 Aug 23) ~ § 9.2 Later Christian thought on abortion.

[2] Wikipedia: Human Embryogenesis (2018 Apr 02).

[3] Wikipedia: Beginning of human personhood (2018 Apr 13); History of abortion (2022 May 07).

[4] Wikipedia: Catholic Church and abortion (2022 May 06).

[5] Rachael Rettner: Is a ‘fetal heartbeat’ really a heartbeat at 6 weeks? (Live Science, 2021 Sep 01) @ https://www.livescience.com/65501-fetal-heartbeat-at-6-weeks-explained.html .

[6] Marie Jenkins Schwartz: Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Harvard University Press, © 2006) ~ “Good Breeders” (excerpt in Slate, 2015 Aug 24) @ http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/08/how_enslaved_women_s_sexual_health_was_contested_in_the_antebellum_south.html .

[7] Wikipedia: Timeline of women’s legal rights in the United States (other than voting) (2019 Sep 29) ~ Bradwell v. State of Illinois (1873), Minor v. Happersett (1875), Wyoming Constitution (1890), 19^th Amendment (1920), Civil Rights Act (1964), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), model abortion law (1967), Roe v. Wade (1973).

[8] E G Raymond & D A Grimes: The comparative safety of legal induced abortion and childbirth in the United States (NCBI – part of NIH, 2012 Feb) @ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271 .

[9] New York Times: F.D.A. Easing Access to Morning After Pill (2009 Apr 22) @ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/health/23fda.html?_r=1 ; U.S. Drops Bid to Limit Sales of Morning-After Pill (2013 Jun 10) @ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/in-reversal-obama-to-end-effort-to-restrict-morning-after-pill.html?emc=na&_r=0 .

[10] Pharmacy Times: Pharmacists Refusing to Fill Spark National Controversy (2015 Aug 11) @ http://www.pharmacytimes.com/contributor/alex-barker-pharmd/2015/08/pharmacists-refusing-to-fill-spark-national-controversy .

 

Author: Charles Pierce.     Date: 2019 Jul 13, last updated 2022 Aug 01.

Charles Pierce is: a social-justice activist (anti-racist and anti-imperialist since his youth in the early 1960s), a former labor activist (union steward & local officer), and currently a researcher and writer on history and politics.  He can be contacted at cpbolshi@gmail.com .