Will Saletan recently had a useful roundup of reader responses to the question American anti-choicers can't seem to answer: How can one justify criminalizing abortion without punishing the women who obtain them? In general, conservatives' "principled" answers -- as opposed to those that take into account the practicality of passing legislation to punish women -- fall into two categories.
The first is that women are not competent moral agents who should be held responsible for their actions:
- Women are innocent because doctors deceive them.
- Women who get abortions are coerced and remorseful.
- Women who get abortions are in denial.
- The abortion industry prevents women from realizing that abortion is killing.
Ultimately, these arguments are nothing but appalling sexism couched as a means of "protecting women."
The second type of argument takes pity on the "suffering" of women:
- Women who get abortions are desperate.
- For women, abortion is punishment enough.
Setting aside the question of whether women who have abortions suffer on account of them, if as a rule we're going to exempt people who are arguably "desperate" from punishment, we could come close to emptying the entire state and federal prison system. And since almost nobody making these arguments would apply them to any other case, they're ultimately just as sexist as the other justifications.
So this leaves us with the pragmatic justifications -- essentially, "we would like to punish women, but we can't because it's impolitic." Aside from undermining the case for anti-abortion laws, the problem with this pragmatism is that we need to go further. How effective are laws banning abortion in conditions where most people think women shouldn't be subject to any punishment for obtaining an abortion? The answer is, "not very." As Sunday's episode of Mad Men usefully reminded us, plenty of safe, elective abortions were preformed in hospitals even when it was illegal for doctors to perform them. The effect of criminalizing abortion is not to stop women from obtaining abortions so much as to force those without the right social connections into the black market. So bans on abortion aren't very good ways of lowering abortion rates, although they do make abortion much less safe for less affluent women. How this can be a good thing is, to put it mildly, unclear.
Ultimately, then, the "pragmatic" case for abortion bans that target only doctors also collapses on itself. Criminalizing abortion is a largely ineffective and grossly inequitable way of attempting to protect fetal life. Legal abortion is not only better for the freedom and equality of women; it's a much more workable (and defensible) policy in practice as well.
-- Scott Lemieux
