Last week, as people prepared to glorify the second worst Supreme Court decision in U.S. history (outdone only by the Dred Scott case), Americans who call themselves “pro-choice” spoke the special language that defines their ideology. With occasional variation, most people celebrating Roe v. Wade made sure to remind America that they advocated or would continue to fight for “a woman’s right to choose.” This phrase, along with its sister-term “reproductive freedom,” are the euphemisms which pro-choice people want the public to use. “Having an abortion” or “killing a fetus” is a touch too frank. A touch too real. The last thing they want is to shock people into the reality of what they are doing.
The recourse to euphemism serves more than semantic gentility. By referring to abortion as a “woman’s right to choose,” the pro-choice movement does two things–one intentional, the other not.
Their most important goal in using that phrase is to imply that to lose the right to legal abortion is to be forced to have a child. To lose the right to an abortion is to be unfairly coerced by an impersonal patriarchal government. And unfairness and force and coercion are surely not democratic. Surely not American.
But since the pro-choice movement is so concerned with choice, they might study whose choice it was to engage in the sexual activity that produced the unwanted child. Most pregnancies occur from sex that is consensual. If a woman is not forced to have sex–if she is not raped–then she retains the choice not to become pregnant. All she has to do is not have sex.
But when a woman freely consents to engage in sexual activity, she no longer has the luxury of choice. Of course, in America, Roe v. Wade ensured she legally does. But in the world of metaphysics, in the realm of principle on which pro-lifers base their opinions, a woman cannot undo the consequence of her decision. She cannot undo the consequence because such undoing is the killing of a new life.
A second result of the constant use of the term “a woman’s right to choose” is unintentional and indirect, but it signals something important. It signals the extent to which Americans, in matters of sexuality and bioethics, are unwilling to face the consequences of, or limitations on, their behavior. One of the clearest, and yet least noticed, manifestations of this unwillingness arrived in a Newsweek column by Anna Quindlen.
Writing last October, Quindlen said: “Every private health-care plan should be obliged to cover contraceptives … every public program should make them available at discount rates or, when necessary, free.” So, in addition to enemies foreign and domestic, it is now proposed that the federal government of the United States should protect people from behavior in the bedroom. Consider what one lady wrote in response to Quindlen’s column:
“When I recently went to pick up my prescription for birth control, I was told it was $35 for one month’s supply, but that my medical insurance wouldn’t cover it … The fact that [my husband and I] can’t afford $35 more a month is one of the reasons we’re being responsible and putting off having a second child. Without birth-control pills, what is our other choice–abstinence? Get real.”
She says get real. We are supposed to get real? Are Newsweek readers really supposed to believe that she and her husband are incapable of finding $35 extra dollars a month? And even if that’s true, should it really be the role of government and business to make sure all married couples can have unlimited sex without having kids? Is there not some moral responsibility on the part of the parents to take this responsibility upon themselves?
Of course there is; but in America, the recognition of such responsibility restricts the range of possible behaviors, a serious sin against the revered dogma of the “right to choose.”
Matt Emerson is a junior studying philosophy and political science.
