Whose womb is it anyway?

Much, much internet furore has erupted over Mehdi Hasan’s regrettable recent article in the New Statesman, ostensibly about why being pro-choice doesn’t make him any less left wing (as an aside, I don’t actually recall anyone saying this out loud recently on any public forum, but anyway). In reality the article is an (over) familiar diatribe against abortion itself. There have been many, many rebuttals to this and y’all should go read them too, because they are excellent, but in the spirit of my two cents’ worth, here is...er...my two cents’ worth.

 

Hasan doesn’t kick off to a brilliant rhetorical start by quoting the late Christopher Hitchens, that well-known ally of women’s rights (can you smell sarcasm through an IP browser? I do hope so). He then goes on to use some unfortunate language, suggesting that pro-choice left-wingers “fetishise choice” – for this phrase he has issued something of an apology, but it isn’t actually this choice of words that sticks in my birth canal, sorry, craw, it’s “unbridled individualism”. Hmmm, let’s have a think about that, shall we? Now, I’m an English graduate and I’m pernickety as fuck about language (see how articulate I was there, for example), and I’m not going to lie to you dear readers, but I think that the word “unbridled” is, to use a popular academic term, ‘problematic’. I am reminded of the great Ross and Rachel scene where a perplexed Ross asked Rachel, “you’re over me? When were you under me?”. Yeah. Remind me again, what kind of bit should I be using? But hey, maybe this is just another example of kerrazee feminists being all shrill and hysterical over the use of language. So let’s leave that one, and move on to the rest of his argument.

 

He says that at 24 weeks, a baby is not part of a woman’s body. Whoa there, sparky! Let’s back up a bit. Firstly, where did that 24 weeks come from? As far as I knew, the recent resurgence of abortion as a political hot potato in the UK centred on known medical expert Jeremy Hunt’s publicly proclaimed wish to see the abortion limit lowered to 12 weeks. Why is Hasan bandying about 24 weeks? Could it possibly be because around 24 weeks is widely accepted as the cusp of viability for babies born prematurely? I think even he would have to admit therefore that any foetus born alive below 24 weeks is extremely unlikely to survive. Secondly, the idea that a baby is not part of a woman’s body: below 24 weeks this is just demonstrably untrue, as without the mother’s body the foetus would not survive. To quote a famous historical left-wing activist, where’s the foetus gonna gestate, you gonna keep it in a box?

 

Then he presses on with the three main tranches of his argument. As he has handily packaged these in neat bite-size chunks, I am going to leave my toothmarks in them in the same order. Firstly, he asks us to remember that the UK is the “exception, not the rule” when it comes to time limits. Kelly Hills has a brilliant take-down of this and I quote her here:

 

“France: Abortion on demand is legal up to 12 weeks (14 weeks last menstrual period). After this, France reverts to something akin to what the UK has by default: two physicians must attest to the need for abortion due to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, the woman's life is in danger, or the foetus has deformities that are incompatible with life.

Germany: Much like France, in Germany abortion is legal and available largely on demand for the first trimester. After this point, the very broadly defined "medical necessity" may be invoked.

Belgium: As far as I can piece together from Anglophile websites and translated pages, Belgium allows abortion without stringent prohibitions until the 12th week, and – say it with me – in case of medical emergency or duress after that point.

Italy: While you might assume Italy would have the most restrictive laws, it allows abortion for the first 90 days of pregnancy, which is a bit closer to abortion until the 13th week. However, like everyone else, it merely takes a doctor's confirmation of severe injury to a woman's physical or mental health, or serious birth defects incompatible with life, in order to access an abortion after this cut-off point.

So, in other words, Hasan either does not understand the laws in the countries that he cites, or he is obfuscating in the hope that no one will notice.”

Secondly, he argues that because more women than men support a reduction in the abortion time limit (citing stats from YouGov), this axiomatically means that an anti-abortion stance cannot be sexist. Um, what? Does he really think that women can’t be anti-women? Has he ever read a Jan Moir article? I can’t even go there because this argument is just...beyond. But it gets even better! He goes on to cite that us pro-choice feminists are glossing over our own history because...wait for it...Mary Wollstonecraft was anti-abortion! You remember Wollstonecraft, right? You, know, the pioneer of women’s rights from the eighteenth century?! Well fuckadoodledo, looks like we’ll have to renounce her membership of the sisterhood now won’t we, given that you wouldn’t want to go about actually historically contextualising isms within their developmental timeframe. No sir! Mind you, it’s interesting to speculate whether Wollstonecraft would ever have changed those views over the course of her lifetime, but unfortunately we can’t given that she died as a result of childbirth. IRONY: UR DOIN IT RITE.

 

Thirdly! Ah, thirdly. Thirdly is about the one point where I agree with him. Arguing that Hasan and others like him take an anti-abortion stance wholly due to religious beliefs is at best wrong-headed and at worst, when the religion isn’t a global north religion, simply racist. I’ll have none of that, so I cordially agree with him here, although he does somewhat gloss over the fact that there are plenty of people from all faiths who are pro-choice.

 

But for me the real meat of this debate lies in an earlier paragraph of his article. Hasan states that the rhetoric of ‘my body, my choice’ has always left him “perplexed”. This, THIS, to me is the crux of the argument, because really, of course it should leave him perplexed. I’ll explain why by using a crude analogy, but an analogy which I think will be effective. I am a cisgendered female human, self-identifying as female in a female body. Despite my extensive (ahem) experience in matters of the...human undercarriage, I do not therefore know what it is like to actually possess a pair of testicles (though admittedly it depends what you mean by ‘possess’, haw haw). My point is that I will never know what it feels like to get kicked in the balls. I’ve had it described to me, so I can imagine the overwhelming, nauseating pain of your goolies being unceremoniously shunted up into your pelvic cavity, but, and this is pretty crucial, I will never actually know. Do you see what I am getting at here? Although men* can indeed imagine what it is like to possess a womb and bear children, wanted or otherwise, they do not and will not ever actually know what that truly means. They can gaze in wonder and awe at their daughters sleeping in their mother’s womb (what, an anti-abortioneer using emotive language? Never!) but they will not know what it is like to carry those daughters, or sons, inside their bodies with all of the associated implications of that.

 

Hasan says that he doesn’t need God or a Holy book to tell him what is and what isn’t a person. Then what does he need? Who would he believe? What I am asking men like Hasan to do is to believe us when we say that this is our body. This is our choice, because really, how could it be anyone else’s choice? Believe what we tell you. And trust us to make the right decisions. Overwhelmingly they will be the right decisions. That does not mean they won’t be hard sometimes, or challenging to our moral ideologies: abortion is, rightly, a difficult and highly charged issue. But it’s not an asymmetric issue as he argues. The debate doesn’t simply boil down to right-to-life vs. right-to-choose. What about women’s lives **? What about the lives of babies who were not wanted and were born anyway? Saying that you think abortion is “wrong” is about as politically sophisticated an argument as ‘I know I’m not but what are you’. From the political director of Huffington Post UK quite frankly I fucking expect better. And I really, really hope he actually listens to the many voices debating with him on this.




* In this context I am excluding of course men who do have wombs, as in those who are differently gendered.
** Similarly, I am not including in this discussion those women who are not able to experience pregnancy, though my suspicion would be that they are subject to the same kind of body-policing as those who can.