Abortion Is Murder, But It Is Worth It

The abortion debate is often framed in terms of life. Anti-abortionists will say that life begins at conception while the pro-choicers counter that it doesn’t.

The science behind their assertions is slippery and constantly shifting.

But what if the debate were framed differently?

In an article entitled Yes, abortion is killing. But it’s the lesser evil Antonia Senior makes the argument that where life begins is irrelevant to the abortion debate.

Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable.

She connects the increased rights of women with the increased control we have over our fertility. If abortion were to be criminalized, then we would lose that control and the new-found equality we have fought so hard for.

But you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology. Abortion would have been legal for millennia had it been men whose prospects and careers were put on sudden hold by an unexpected pregnancy. The mystery pondered on many a girls’ night out is how on earth men, bless them, managed to hang on to political and cultural hegemony for so long. The only answer is that they are not in hock to their biology as much as we are. Look at a map of the world and the right to abortion on request correlates pretty exactly with the expectation of a life unburdened by misogyny.

By framing the argument this way, no one is absolved of guilt. Either you are willing to kill babies, or willing to dominate half the people in the world — there is no middle ground.

As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.

Would you kill for equal rights?