As a woman who has been so ill through my pregnancies that I really wanted to not be alive, I feel deep in my being that no one should have to continue with a pregnancy if it is not right for them. You can have conflicted and complex feelings and leave the judgments about the moral rightness of abortion to the people most affected
Opinion: Abortion. It's a big word. A word with so much depth of feeling and history. So many things held within it that matter to many people. It's an issue often presented by people in the media as reflecting two deeply opposed positions with nobody with mixed or unsure feelings occupying the middle ground.
However, my experience is that for many people who hold quite different beliefs and roles in our community, there is a great deal of nuance in how they think about abortion and why it matters. And for people who are unsure about the issue there needs to be more ways to help connect them with the importance of abortion care.
When the constitutional right to abortion for people in the US was removed by people sitting on the US Supreme Court, it naturally led to concerns and conversations about our own ongoing access to abortion care. Our improved rights to abortion were only recently confirmed in 2020.
Previously abortion was illegal and people were granted an exception on the basis that two doctors judged it to be necessary. It is now decriminalised and slightly easier to access up to 20 weeks' gestation. In the many of those conversations that have occurred since the US decision, there is a deep care expressed for those people who get pregnant and need an abortion. This expressed care is something we can reflect on to help people who are unsure about abortion better connect to the issue.
As a layperson with some skin in the game I have engaged with some of the many legal, ethical and medical positions on abortion. It started with my form 1 (year 7) social studies project and has gone on from there.
Care is something we don't talk about enough in relation to abortion. While it’s there in the words we use to describe it - abortion is healthcare - we don’t often reflect on the motivations behind that word.
Yet the provision of legal, free and easy to access abortion is for many of us about the love we have for the people we know, and the compassion for those we don't know. For the women and people who get pregnant and need to not be pregnant for many different reasons, for their families, their existing children, and our wider communities. We should talk about that care, love and compassion more.
Many arguments about abortion matter but don't always help people connect with what is at stake if it is not legal, free and easy to access.
I've listened to and read a good amount about abortion over the years. As a layperson with some skin in the game I have engaged with some of the many legal, ethical and medical positions on abortion. It started with my form 1 (year 7) social studies project and has gone on from there.
I found this interview with the moral philosopher Kate Greasley on the difference between a human and a person particularly helpful to considering how a foetus and a child are different.
I have grappled with the obvious challenges that drawing a gestational line based on survivability outside of a uterus present in a world in which our technology advances so quickly but inequitably. Many of the ethical, legal and medical arguments are critical, but they rarely connect ordinary people who are unsure, and hearing (or feeling) that abortion is wrong, with a “why”. That is they can’t see in these arguments a clear set of values underlying the provision of legal, free and easy to access abortion for all people.
As a woman who has been pregnant and been so ill throughout my pregnancies that I really wanted to not be alive at certain points, I feel deep in my being that no one should have to continue with a pregnancy if it is not right for them – that should be an individual and their family’s decision.
I am not religious, and so am not bound by any particular rules set down by people in such a religion. I know there are people from across different religious communities and within the same religions who reason very differently about the rightness or otherwise of abortion in terms of the potential life of the foetus.
For those who may believe abortion to be wrong on religious grounds, telling them the right of a foetus is not preeminent to the rights of the person gestating it, rarely connects them to why abortion needs to be legal, free and easy to access.
As a woman who has been pregnant and been so ill throughout my pregnancies that I really wanted to not be alive at certain points, I feel deep in my being that no one should have to continue with a pregnancy if it is not right for them – that should be an individual and their family’s decision.
I worked in an organisation reviewing perinatal deaths in the UK. I have seen just how necessary, important and painful the induced deaths of terminal babies in the late stages of pregnancy are.
I see and experience the deep misogyny and desire to control women that informs the thinking of some people on the extreme of the anti-abortion position.
These are critical truths, but they are sometimes not enough to really connect people who are unsure about abortion with the need for legal, free and easy to access abortion. Not when what people are grappling with is the idea that it is wrong to end a potential life.
Talking about abortion as care for the people we love is true. It allows space for people to be unsure about the moral issues of abortion.
Making abortion illegal causes significant downstream health and social harms. It leads to increases in pregnancy and birth-related harms (including increases in perinatal and maternal mortality and morbidity), in child and family poverty, and rates of violence against women and children, the exclusion of women especially from the workforce, and the removal of critical healthcare workers from the health system.
The list goes on. All of us are impacted by these downstream effects of making abortion illegal. It's the opposite of care. So we should name that.
As advocates for legal abortion, when we emphasise the need to provide love and care to the women in our lives facing pregnancies that need to end it means we can focus on our truest motivations.
A focus on this love and care can also help those who are unsure to express their own love and care for people in difficult situations and support legal abortion, while avoiding “picking a side” in what is depicted as a polarised issue (it's not that polarised by the way).
Instead they can have conflicted and complex feelings and leave the judgments about the moral rightness of abortion to the people most affected – those who need the abortion and the people who provide them with one. That is caring for people indeed.
