Frank wrote on Jul 3
rd, 2022 at 1:53pm:
This link is unsecured and is blocked by my malware tracker.
Here's the guts of the report:
There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we
scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part. It sentimentalizes pregnant
or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that
we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes
abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than
(also) extinguishing a future child. In my view, recognizing that gestating manufactures
a proto-person requires acknowledging that abortion kills a proto-person. A baby is
completely dependent on human care in order to stay alive, but its needs could be
filled by any person—whereas a fetus, a proto-person, is ineluctably dependent on
specific person…
As long as people are performing pregnancy on this earth, they must be free to change
their minds about seeing it through. The adoption industry could be revolutionized and
child welfare lavishly subsidized; regardless of the available supports,
no one should
be pregnant involuntarily. The science of medicine dictates that when foreign organisms
inhabit the human body unwelcomely, we tend to eject them…
What would it mean to acknowledge that a death is involved in an abortion? Above
all, it would allow for a fairer fight against the proponents of forced gestating. When
“pro-life” forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion
feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is.
When we withdraw from gestating, we stop the life of the product of our gestational
labor. And it’s a good thing we do, too, for otherwise the world would sag under the
weight of forced life. It is a hard pill to swallow for a misogynist society, sentimentally
attached to its ideology of patriarchal motherhood, but the truth is that gestators
should get to decide which bodies to give form to. This choosing is our prerogative.
A desire not to be pregnant is sufficient reason in and of itself to terminate a gestatee.
—Sophie Lewis, “Abortion Involves Killing–and That’s OK!” at The Nation (June 22, 2022)