The abortion ship plans to return to Malta. What a boon to the Gift of Life Movement, which has been running out of steam over recent weeks. Dr Rebecca and her abortion pills have given the organisation fresh opportunities for rhetoric.
I am sure many of you are as heartily sick as I am of the marketing consultant Paul Vincenti forever casting himself in the role of St George, rushing to conquer the dragon of abortion and save the poor defenceless maiden foetus. If a woman were doing this, she would be more credible. There is something profoundly distasteful about a middle-aged man deciding that women should be forced to go through with pregnancies they don’t want, to have babies they don’t want – forcibly held down to give birth, in a manner of speaking. I don’t like the idea or the fact of abortion; I find it profoundly distasteful. But as a woman who has given birth three times, and who is old enough to have seen and learned quite a bit about life and the experiences of others, I know that this is not about black-or-white thinking. There are vast areas of grey. I am not arrogant enough to assume that I have the answers to all the moral issues that abortion throws up. The men who declaim from their self-built pulpits about an issue that directly affects women make me nervous. They seem to veer between exalting the sanctity of motherhood and dismissing pregnant women as no more than the vessel through which babies are born. All their arguments miss the point that in abortion there is a woman involved as well as a foetus.
This issue is one about which we can argue for all of eternity, because the simple fact of the matter is that the assumed rights of the foetus are in direct conflict with the rights of the woman in whom that foetus grows. This is a biological situation about which we can do nothing. As a woman who has had foetuses growing inside her three times – I continue to emphasise this fact because it is not an experience that the several middle-aged men who are at the forefront of the Gift of Life campaign have ever had, nor ever will – I can say that, had I not wanted those babies, I would have found the whole thing deeply disturbing. It is because I know from direct experience what pregnancy and birth are all about that I am upset by the idea of forcing a woman to go through them against her will. While I disagree with the principle of abortion, I can also see that there are moral issues about obliging a woman to have a baby grow inside her, and to give birth to it, when she does not want to.
Taken to their logical extreme, the arguments of the Gift of Life movement would justify forcibly preventing pregnant women from leaving the country to have an abortion elsewhere. The human rights ramifications of doing so are questionable, to say the least. The women who are backing this cause should perhaps think about it a little harder. They should ask themselves why the chief campaigners and letter-writers in this cause are men of a certain age. I find that women who have lived a bit and who have had babies are less prone to rush to black-and-white judgements about abortion. They have the life experience that allows them to walk a mile in another person’s shoes, but above all, they know that pregnancy and motherhood are not the stuff of mystique and sanctity that men and religion have made them out to be.
They are a biological function shared by all mammals, and women in labour and birth are acutely aware of the fact that they have been reduced to the primary level of an animal, not to the exalted status of a Madonna.
What grown-up women have learned along the way allows them to say to themselves and even to others: “Well, I don’t agree with abortion, but in her shoes, I don’t know what I would have done.” They know that nine months with a baby you don’t want growing inside you is a very long time indeed, that birth is a horrendous ordeal that can only be justified by the desire for the child it achieves, and that ultimately, the shared experiences of womanhood should allow for compassion and understanding, rather than the desire to condemn and to force things on people. Put 20 women from all kinds of ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds, who have never seen each other before, in the same room, and as long as they all have children, within a few minutes they will be communicating over that shared experience, together with that other favourite subject – annoying husbands. Introduce a man into this setting, and unless he is gay he will be like a bull in a china shop. Pregnancy and birth are considered “women’s subjects” and men flee from discussions about them – but strangely, the anti-abortion lobby is dominated by men. This is because, ultimately, it is about the control of women.
They are keen to show us horror movies of late abortions, and to tell us how much pain the foetus endures. Yes, but it never occurs to them that head-on footage of a baby forcing itself out of a woman’s body can be read as a horror movie too, and this time it’s the woman enduring the kind of agony that no man will ever know, unless he is subjected to torture or is the victim of some terrible disease in its final and excruciating stages. Whenever a birth scene appears on television, I have to leave the room. I don’t see the beauty of childbirth; I see a woman in agony and I know exactly how she is feeling, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
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The trouble with abortion is that most of us know instinctively that it is wrong, yet many of us are uneasy with the idea of chaining a pregnant woman down, as it were, and preventing her from stopping a pregnancy that fills her with fear and revulsion, or that will derail her life. It is a moral conundrum, and it is shallow thinking that leads to cut-and-dried answers.
The proposition that abortion is murder at whatever stage in the pregnancy it takes place is another one that causes me moral unease. The pro-life lobby undermines its own credibility, in my view though perhaps not in the view of others, by making no distinction between the so-called morning-after pill, which is taken in the immediate aftermath of sexual intercourse, or the so-called abortion pill, which is taken in the early stages of pregnancy, and the revolting butchering of a viable baby – one that would survive outside the womb with support – towards the end of pregnancy. If you support the notion that life begins at conception and that murder is the ending of human life even if that life does not have a personality (and a fertilised ovum does not), then so be it. But there are others, like myself, who remain to be convinced that that popping a pill after sex to dislodge a fertilised egg is as morally reprehensible as a late-stage abortion. I even remain to be convinced the first action is wrong, while I have no doubt at all that the latter certainly is. But that is because I do not believe that a fertilised egg is a person, but a potential person, and if we are going to get into that mire of vesting fertilised eggs with a legal personality, then quite frankly, I don’t want to be part of it.
Again, taken to its logical extreme, this means funerals and death notices for every “missed period”. That’s what we used to call them, before the days when women began trying for a first baby in their 30s, and getting pregnant became an obsessive project rather than a natural process sometimes involving miscarriages. I’ve noticed that the harder people find it to have a baby, the more hard-line their stance becomes against abortion. This is natural, because it must be terrible to see people ending their pregnancies when they cannot even begin to get pregnant themselves, or to carry the pregnancy through to term.
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The philosopher Kenneth Wain wrote an excellent article about why the law that criminalises abortion should not be entrenched in the Constitution. I might be accused of saying that because his views concur precisely with my own, but what the heck. Better to be of one mind with a respected philosopher than with the grating sound of the Gift of Life campaign.
It’s not about the right or wrong of abortion, he wrote. It’s about democracy. You cannot use an action in the present to confound democracy in the future.
This is an argument that Gift of Life cannot countenance. Anyone who uses it – and yes, it is the only real, solid argument against their plans – is disparaged as a baby-killer. Yet the fact remains that we have no right to control the actions of our descendants from beyond the grave. If future generations not yet born wish to vote for legislation that allows abortion, then it is their business, and not ours, dead as we will be in our coffins. Maltese parents exert huge control over their children – even their adult offspring – while they are alive. They have no right to continue trying to control them when they are dead. Those who are against abortion have a vote they can use while they are alive, and that’s it. That’s democracy.
Even though I am against abortion in principle, I will never sign any petition or lobby any MPs to do something that will frustrate democracy in the future. Those who argue “Oh, what if future generations decide to vote to allow murder?” are being disingenuous, to be kind about it. A cruel person might call them ignorant and ill-informed. There can be no such vote. Fertilised eggs, foetuses and unborn babies are not covered by the same ‘right to life’ provisions as you or I are, for the stark reason that they do not have the same legal personality or status. If you wish to argue that you and a fertilised egg should have precisely the same status at law and in the natural order of things, then it’s up to you. There are millions out there who beg to differ, and I am one of them.
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Paul Vincenti has warned us of the mental scarring suffered by women who have had abortions. He would benefit from a couple of classes taught by his nemesis Professor Wain. Mental scarring is by the by. If abortion is a crime because it is the ending of human life, then whether or not it causes mental scarring is irrelevant. This is like somebody campaigning against smoking because it kills, and then adding that it also gives women vertical wrinkles around their lips. Yes, women who have abortions do regret it and some suffer from guilt, but most do not, or only fleetingly. Nobody lives life without guilt or regret about one thing or another. That’s the way it is. And the mental scarring suffered by some of those who have abortions is as nothing compared to the mental scarring suffered by of those who are forced to go through with a pregnancy against their will. Guilt and scarring are no argument, either way.
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Paul Vincenti would have Dr Rebecca’s ship, which flies under the flag of a fellow member State of the European Union, barred from Maltese waters, and Dr Rebecca herself, who has an EU passport, prevented from setting foot on Maltese soil. He does not seem to understand that this is not legally permissible or diplomatically possible. The only thing that Dr Rebecca can be prevented from doing is breaking the law by carrying out abortions on Maltese territory, which includes Malta’s territorial waters. Dr Rebecca and her ship are free to come here, and Paul Vincenti is free to go down to the docks and to stand there with a No To Abortion placard. And that’s about it. That’s why I love democracy.