It is not surprising that Kevin Williamson, who called for women who had abortions to be hanged (because they are, to his mind, murderers), was recently fired from The Atlantic.

It ought to surprise us that he was hired at all.

That fact that he was, is only one of many signs that the Overton window is shifting dramatically on whether it is acceptable to call abortion murder. The three-term Idaho State Senator Bob Nonini has suggested the death penalty for women who have abortions. Another Idaho state senator, Dan Foreman, shrieked, “abortion is murder” at a bunch of college students. Meanwhile a bill introduced in Ohio would charge women who receive abortions with murder.

Facts, conservatives are fond of saying, do not care about your feelings. That is, unless they are conservative feelings, which we are expected to treat with unerring delicacy, even when they are scientifically unfounded.

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Facts don't care about your feelings. — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 5, 2016

There are a great many facts that conservatives feel comfortable ignoring when it comes to the abortion debate. They can pretend fetuses are indistinguishable from babies, despite the fact that medical evidence tells us , even with a respirator before 21 weeks. They can pretend they feel pain, even though scientific consensus tells us that until at least 24 weeks, a fetus cannot feel anything like pain because they do not yet have the brain connections to do so.

They can pretend that every fertilized egg is a human, ignoring the fact that the majority do not actually make it to birth and this does not seem to upset people overmuch. (Jill Filipovic, lawyer and author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, has quite reasonably pointed out that, “There has been no concerted anti-abortion effort to demand research funding into why all of these fertilized eggs die, or to find a cure. Perhaps that’s because even the most active anti-abortion advocates know the truth is that a fertilized egg is not the same as a three-year-old, and they do not genuinely believe that it has the same right to life.”)

They can pretend that abortions cause women horrible psychological damage, although they do not. Or that women who have them are plagued by regret (results of a 2015 study showed that approximately 95 percent of women who had abortions claimed it was the right decision for them). They can say that women who have abortions are somehow unusually promiscuous (pre-marital sex is "nearly universal" in America, according to a 2007 study, and has been for decades), or that women could easily avoid having them by being on birth control (more than half of women who get abortions are also using contraception).



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Get a grip. Wendy Vitter is an awesome candidate and will help save the lives of thousands of unborn babies. Abortion is murder not birth control. Get a clue and use a condom. — Rover6s (@Hankus12) April 7, 2018

As they do so, they continue to set up “crisis pregnancy centers” with the aim of lying to women and distributing scientifically discredited information about abortion.

But they do not get to pretend that women who have had abortions are murderers who should be hanged.

Abortion is not murder.

Even if we granted the most generous possible terms to the anti-abortion camp, even if we pretended the fetus was fully rational and contemplating Shakespeare in the womb, like an Ian McEwan character, abortion would still not be murder.

In large part, that’s because anti-abortionist’s argument hinges upon the notion that life is always sacred and ought never be taken. That is not the way the world operates.

Some pro-lifers are fond of exclaiming that we should treat fertilized ovum with reverence since “A single cell discovered on Mars [would] be considered life!”

Yes. And if that life posed any threat to us, we’d kill it immediately.

One has a strong sense that people who invoke that argument have never seen a movie about what happens when humans encounter life in outer space.

But even in the case of human life, there are a great many situations where, when one life poses a threat to another, that life can reasonably be taken.

As for the notion that the fetus is non-threatening—it’s impossible to deny that a fetus poses a risk to a woman, purely because she has to use her body to incubate it. And in America, she has to do so in a country with the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world.

"A fetus poses a risk to a woman, purely because she has to use her body to incubate it. And in America, she has to do so in a country with the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world."



If you think “okay, but that only happens to poor women” well, no, but low income women do face greater risks. That is one reason that denying women the right to abortion is a kind of class warfare. Seventy-three percent of women seeking abortions do so because they’re financially unready to have a child. Legal abortions are considerably safer than childbirth. So, if you believe in abortion only in cases where it endangers the life of the mother, well, welcome to America, one of the few countries where the maternal death rate is on the rise. Pregnancy always endangers the life of a mother.



Even if a pregnancy is healthy and relatively free of complications, it’s a grueling process.

We rarely talk about how difficult pregnancy can be. Socially, we often opt to talk about how “pregnancy is a beautiful experience”. But the notion that pregnancy is just this carefree experience doesn’t take into account the vomiting, the gestational diabetes, hemorrhoids, bowel problems, incontinence, or any of the common complications that follow pregnancy and birth. Even if you are blessed with an easy pregnancy, some reports say as many as 95 percent of first-time mothers experience vaginal tearing. You’d think that the likelihood of lacerations that require stitches around your genitals alone would discount the rhetoric that a woman can easily just have a baby and put it up for adoption.

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Btw, I don't oppose what some call 'abortion' for bonkers religious reasons. I oppose it because innocent babies are just that - innocent. A solution already exists and it's called adoption. Lots of couples who can't have kids for many reasons that would love to adopt. #ProLife — Grant Stanley (@GrantStanleyUK) April 12, 2018

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If you don't want to parent the child, there are other options aside from abortion. There are SO many families who can't have a child and choose to adopt. Put the baby up for adoption, but don't be so selfish to take a innocent child's life. — Kaitlyn Artman (@artmankaitlyn) April 11, 2018

There is a reason those pro-birth ads show a fetus magically suspended in darkness, as though it just appears painlessly and does not necessitate the bodily sacrifice of another human.

Because that’s not true.

Happily carrying a fetus to term is an act of the most profound, generous love precisely because it does entail pain and sacrifice. That should never be forced on anyone.

People do have a right to life, but they do not have a right to live inside someone else’s body especially when doing so poses a threat to that person’s body. Hell, to paraphrase famous penis exposer and former comedian, Louis C.K., people aren’t even allowed to live inside your house without your consent. That’s based on the Castle Doctrine, which allows individuals to use force—up to and including deadly force—to remove individuals trespassing in their homes who they have reason to think pose a threat to them. In the case of pregnancy, keep in mind there’s a 95 percent chance that intruder will be tearing up your genitals.

This notion that a man’s home is his castle and a woman’s body is somehow a vacant space to be used by men as they wish—whether they wish to grab it by the pussy or use it as a “host” for a fetus—is one area where Trump’s more licentious followers can find common ground with Mike Pence’s devoutly religious ones.

Most people’s bodies are, correctly, assumed to belong to the soul inhabiting them. They—and all their parts—belong to them in perpetuity, even after they have ceased to live. Doctors in the U.S. can’t even use a deceased person’s organs to save other lives unless the prior inhabitant of that body has agreed in writing, despite the fact that an estimated 20 people a day die in the U.S. waiting for transplants. (And presumably, the removal of those organs would not endanger the wellbeing of the person, who is already brain dead.)

The government using pregnant women’s bodies would require no such consent from the women.

“Consent” of course, is a word that seems to carry greater weight when applied to men than women. It is not mysterious that the same party who cannot understand why women might feel great tenderness and love towards a deeply desired fetus, yet none towards an unwanted fetus, can’t seem to figure out why women might consider sex joyful in circumstances when it is desired, and violating when it is not.

But then, a “good” woman is basically supposed to be a giving tree who consents to whatever men ask. A woman who doesn’t consent to just about anything asked of her, whether it’s entering a “caring career” or carrying a baby to term, is very quickly labeled selfish.

We might do better to consider whether what is being asked of women is grossly unreasonable.

And frankly, if, rather than the government, any individual were to force a woman to have a baby against her will, it would be clear how unreasonable that request was.

My husband and I are trying to have a child. If we can’t conceive naturally, would we be happy to adopt? Of course. That would be a wonderful blessing. Would we threaten a pregnant woman who didn’t want to give birth with terrible consequences (up to and including death) if she refused to bear a child for us, simply because we wanted one? No, because we are not sociopaths who think other people exist solely for our benefit. If that’s obvious to us (people who would really love to have a child), it should be very obvious to a party that has absolutely no interest in providing happy, healthy life for that child once they’re born. As The Daily Intelligencer reports, "the GOP believes that it’s more urgent to deliver tax cuts to corporate America than to guarantee health care to working-class children."

But this was never really about babies.

Criminalization of abortion doesn’t lead to fewer abortions. It leads to more women dying in unsafe procedures. I’m going to say that again, because a lot—a lot—of people will tell you that their objection to abortion is all about saving babies.

Criminalization of abortion doesn’t lead to fewer abortions. It leads to more women dying in unsafe procedures.

Studies from The Lancet have shown that the abortion rate is higher in countries where the procedure is banned than in countries where it’s allowed.

That may be because women in those countries also have less access to birth control. But then, Planned Parenthood is a place that also helps women get birth control. So shutting those clinics down, as anti-abortion advocates claim to wish to do, puts us in a position closer to those countries.

A representative from the World Health Organization put it like this: “The law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal…. Generally, where abortion is legal it will be provided in a safe manner.... And the opposite is also true: where it is illegal, it is likely to be unsafe, performed under unsafe conditions by poorly trained providers.”

When conservatives are bewildered that liberals can think gun control will work while criminalizing abortion will just drive the procedure underground—

—well, that is because in other countries, gun control has been proven to work. And other countries offer us consistent proof that criminalizing abortion just kills women, and doesn’t stop the procedure. Or, I suppose, we think this because facts don’t care about your feelings.

But, alas, conservative feelings seem to be influencing more and more policy.

We are already going back to the bad old days of the back alley abortions that killed women like Gerri Santoro. As much as conservatives try to dismiss grotesque acts like coat-hanger abortions as mythological, they’re happening right now. We’re seeing multiple cases in the U.S. of women trying to induce abortions with coat hangers in the past decade. Secret networks are already forming of women who provide at-home abortions for women who can’t access legal ones. They shouldn’t have to form. As they do, it’s only a matter of time until we see more back-alley abortionists like Pennsylvania doctor Kermit Gosnell, who provided illegal abortions to low-income women, killing a woman in the process, spring up. If we valued women’s lives even a little, if we did not think that endorsing killing women was merely a “controversial view”, as in the case of Kevin Williamson, they wouldn’t need to spring up.

A fetus’s right to life is debatable. A woman’s is not.

"A fetus’s right to life is debatable. A woman’s is not."



Legislators who could criminalize abortion can find information about this with tremendous ease. If they don’t, they are either too poorly informed to be legislating on this issue, or they are aware women will end up dead and they don’t care. They know it won’t save babies, because, again, comparable numbers of women have sought the procedure whether it is legal or illegal. They don’t care about that either.

If they don’t care about that, what do they care about? All that seems left is punishing women who don’t desire motherhood.

But then, abortion panic was borne out of hatred of women taking on new roles in the world. In the mid 19th century, when one estimate reportedly suggested there was one abortion for every five or six live births, the politician Augustus Gardner claimed, “We can forgive the poor, deluded girl… But for the married shirk, who disregards her divinely ordained duty, we have nothing but contempt.” This rhetoric and the criminalization of abortion occurred just as women were beginning to campaign for the vote. Women, if Gardner’s view is something to go by, were becoming unruly shirkers, and they needed to be put back in their place.

That rhetoric doesn’t sound so different than the men who claim that women getting abortions are “selfish” today. There are people who think: “I believed that it was women’s role, as laid down by God, to have children….child bearing was what women were made for, after all." And if they don’t want to bear children, there are people, sometimes in their own family, who think they should be punished. Statistically, it’s likely that being forced to give birth will have some punishing impact on women’s lives.

Restricting rights to abortion does limit women. A 2017 study found that women who are denied abortions are significantly more likely to experience extreme poverty. While studies indicate that women who have had abortions experience little psychological distress afterwards (well, except when people are calling for them to be hanged) women who are denied abortions do have worse psychological outcomes.

It is a popular argument that an aborted fetus might have grown up to be the doctor who cured cancer, or the President of the United States. Well, so too might those women who were forced against their will to function as breeding chattel. But pursuing those dreams, which might have necessitated an abortion, well, that would have been selfish.

Margaret Atwood remarked in a recent interview: "Of those promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits by it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.”

Today, it’s beneficial to the legislators who want to appeal to certain factions of the right. Being anti-abortion is a stance that appeals to the Breitbart-reading right who believe, “We need the kids if we’re to breed enough to keep the Muslim invaders at bay.” Or the evangelicals who seem generally upset about the outcomes of the sexual revolution. Or those who believe that, “Motherhood is the most sacred duty of White woman, duty towards our ancestors and descendants alike." Or, of course, the poorly informed, of whom there are many.

Ask yourself if those are the people you want determining the legal policies surrounding your body. They might be.

But if they’re not, in general, the answer to Atwood’s “cui bono” is not "women." It’s not even "babies."

If you are a woman, never forget that your body is yours. No one has any right to any part of it without your consent. Your breasts are yours, your vagina is yours, your womb is yours. The body that houses your soul is already occupied. It is occupied by you. You live there. And you do not have to let anyone use it without your permission.

Jennifer Wright Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large.

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