Unthinkable in Fifty Years

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on a case out of Mississippi that could very well overturn Roe v. Wade and/or Casey v. Planned Parenthood. If that should happen the laws governing abortion abortion would then be left to each state to decide.

The Court's decision will probably not be announced until late June, but the controversy surrounding the possibility that the current abortion regime may be undone brought to mind a post I did a couple of years ago which featured a claim by an English professor and writer named Karen Swallow Prior who argued that fifty years from now abortion will be "unthinkable."

Here's the post:

Vox.com has been running a series in which guests are invited to offer their opinion on something commonly experienced today that they think will be considered unthinkable in fifty years. Some sample selections are "eating meat", "youth tackle football", "self-driving cars", etc.

In her submission, English professor Karen Swallow Prior believes that just as we look back today at chattel slavery and wonder how people could ever have justified the idea of owning other human beings, fifty years from now people will shake their heads as they look back at the practice of abortion on demand.

Here's the lede for her argument:

The list of those who have had few or no legal rights throughout history is staggering: women, children, orphans, widows, Jews, gays and lesbians, slaves, former slaves, descendants of slaves, those with leprosy, undocumented immigrants — to name a few.

Nothing marks the progress of any society more than the expansion of human rights to those who formerly lacked them. I believe that if such progress is to continue, prenatal human beings will be included in this group, and we will consider elective abortion primitive and cruel in the future.

The eradication of abortion may be difficult to imagine. But consider how difficult it would have been for our grandparents to foresee a culture in which nearly one in four women has an abortion by age 45. Certainly, some factors leading to this situation reflect real and substantial progress for women: greater equality, more work options, improved understanding of sexuality, and increased moral agency.

But rights for women that come at the expense of unborn children aren’t true liberation; they merely, as one writer put it, enable the “redistribution of oppression.”

Prior goes on to make the case that a fetus is a human being entitled to the same rights as humans which have been born and that pro-choice advocates tacitly acknowledge this when they declare that they want abortion to be "safe and rare." Why should it be rare if it's just a benign medical procedure like an appendectomy? Who would bother to insist that they want appendectomies to be rare?

It's also ironic that those who declare themselves firmly on the side of science will twist themselves into pretzels denying the science that shows the tiny form in the womb to be a developing child.

Ultrasound technology and prenatal surgical interventions provide dispositive scientific evidence that what's in the mother's womb is not some alien blob of tissue and extravagant gender reveal parties and the insuppressible personality of the child in the womb offer psychological confirmation to an increasing number of mothers that what they're carrying is in fact a baby.

Prior concludes with this:

Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre.

As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.

When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it.

We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.

It will be interesting, for those still around in fifty years, to see whether abortion will be to those alive then what slavery is to us today.

Interested readers can peruse Prior's full column at the link.