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Home > My Essays > Why Abortion Is Not about Women's Rights

In both pro-life and pro-choice groups, abortion and women's rights are wrongly connected. Pro-choice groups claim that a woman's right to as much control over her own body as possible - which they contend to be part of the constitutional right to liberty -, mandates that abortions should be legal. Pro-life groups are not as eager to connect their views on abortion to their ideas on women's rights, for these views are often more negative and will be despised by virtually any woman. Abortion, namely, is often falsely connected with sexually or otherwise irresponsible behavior on the part of the woman - for example, sex out-of-wedlock. Making this statement, people are wishing to return to times we've fortunately long left behind - the times when women's only option was to be a wife and a mother, obeying her husband in every way and not doing much beyond caring for her children.

This is ridiculously old-fashioned, and policies pro-life people of this sort support, beyond prohibiting abortion, are most likely not working in our modern society. These policies include forbidding contraceptives or decreasing child support, especially for out-of-wedlock children. Laws of this sort may force a woman into sexually responsible behavior, but it is quite unlikely that it'll work, since just because abortions are illegal doesn't mean they don't happen. In fact, contraceptive failure is the most commonly mentioned reason for a woman to have an abortion, so outlawing both abortion and (non-abortifient) contraception is likely going to lead to more illegal abortions than just outlawing abortion would, even though obviously the number would still be lower than now that abortions are completely legal.

The huge abortion organization, Planned Parenthood, released a publications entitled "Five Ways to Prevent Abortion (And One Way That Won't)". While the organization uses the fact that prohibiting abortion won't cause it to disappear, as an argument to build their idea that abortions should be legal upon, they don't seem to realize that all the other ways of preventing abortions which they recommend, didn't occur when abortions were illegal. And that's why it's important to take into account that abortion isn't about a woman's right to control over her body or the right to behave sexually as she pleases: it's about saving the lives of unborn babies - which should include supporting them once they are born, since what do you save a baby for only to condemn her to an unfriendly society afterward? -, and that's nothing to do with a woman's freedom to mess around as she likes. A woman should have the opportunity to have sex where and when she wants, either in or outside of a marital relationship and to be sure that she can support the resulting children or that an adoptive parent can if she decides against raising her own children - because many women have abortions because they cannot, either financially or emotionally, support a child. If she doesn't want to gestate, a woman should also be able to use contraceptives that won't get her pregnant in the first place, rather than "having to" terminate her unborn baby's life once it is there. Of course, outlawing abortion would mean women should think more carefully before they have sex, but it does not (and should not) take away their right to mess around. Most women don't see their abortion as a right they choose for, but as a moral or social obligation. This has nothing to do with civil liberties.