A day will come when I will speak in more detail about my viewpoints on the abortion subject, but I will not be as comprehensive today. However, I notice often enough that those who profess to be pro- female agency are preoccupied with the subject of abortion in particular, and as such would voice their support in granting access to it. In response to this strange preoccupation, I will be, in this capacity, speaking about the subject of abortion for the first time, and will attempt to dissect this and determine whether female agency actually has anything to do with this.
There has been much speculation and wondering about why abortion, of all things, is the primary right that feminists and the left have pushed at the expense of almost all other rights, even if they do affect women’s liberties and agency anyway (e.g. the COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates and lack of support for female right to bear arms for self-defense, to name but a small amount.) You then have to stop and wonder whether these pro-abortion feminists, in their sense of aggrieved gynocentric entitlement, care about liberties at all for women as opposed to entitlements and benefits at the expense of societal (read: male) service. If abortion is in fact an entitlement (a “positive right”) as opposed to a liberty (a “negative right”), in other words if abortion is a phenomenon based on societal obligations to cater to feminine mistakes as opposed to an exercise in female liberty and agency, then the female agency argument for abortion collapses.
If negative rights are the only proper rights we should care about, then we should perhaps completely dispose of the idea of abortion rights, as they are entitlements. “Abortion entitlements” is perhaps the descriptor we should start using instead of “abortion rights”. If we can honestly say “Male genital mutilation” instead of the euphemism “circumcision”, then this can be the abortion equivalent. Even if we entertain, just for a moment, the idea that an abortion is a medical procedure of no moral question, abortion rights would not (or should not) exist any more than any other medical procedure. Nobody has a right to a medical procedure. Anything that grants a right positively is an entitlement, and is in contradiction to the very idea of liberty. You’re not wrong when you say, “Well, feminists don’t care about liberty then.” They don’t, and that’s their big problem.
Let’s take a look at what female agency would actually look like in practice, if those squawking lip service about the subject actually mean it. Better yet, let’s look at it in a pro-sex context and not an anti-sex/abstinence-centered context. Access to contraceptives is, for all intents and purposes, easy attained in today’s society. Women have every liberty and agency to earn these goods at the very least. Any sort of given contraception can be assumed as less invasive and strenuous than the actual procedure of abortion (on a sidenote, is it not ironic that feminists cry rape about something as subtle as a man winking at them, but welcome with open arms [er, legs] this invasive procedure?) For the woman who sees no qualms with sexual activity outside of the context of marital childbearing, her demonstration of agency would be a conscientious adherence to the steps that prevent conception from happening both before and during the act, and a vigilant self-reminder that sex can result in conception if she fails to control these details.
It is worth noting that I do not see eye to eye with those that primarily promote sexual abstinence for the sake of sexual abstinence. Attempts at abstinence-only education has, in my opinion, been no more effective in teaching the realities of sex than any attempts at sex-education which doesn’t prioritize accountability. Whether contraceptives exist or not, the drive for sex is unstoppable as far as I am concerned, and neither do I consider it an evil act but instead a life-affirming act for both men and women. Those obsessed with abstinence as a solution to the abortion problem are no less contrite and misguided as those who think the right to abortion is a morally legitimate bypass to the consequences of sex. I would go as far as to say that abstinence-only mindsets stifle a sense of discipline during otherwise unabashed sexual activity for both men and women; it is either perfect lack of sexual activity (impractical) or undisciplined and irresponsible sexual activity (not commendable) that one ultimately has to choose from without a generally sex-positive mindset that entails every precaution. Though, this is a subject for perhaps another time to go into detail.
Anyway, back to the main point. If female agency was advocated in earnest, the priorities would entail precautionary steps to mitigate, possibly eliminate, the risk of conception, and also the complete willingness to face and accept the consequences if conception happens despite everything. To the chagrin of feminists, another detail to be entailed in female agency is that in a society consistent with actual agency, she will receive no entitlements in the form of tax- (again read: male) funded assistance.
The funny thing is, the mitigation of conception does not take excessive effort for the sexual-but-conscientious. Female sexual agency for those that do not want a child has frankly never been easier to exercise. In the vast majority of circumstances there is no good excuse for getting into a situation where you have to have or abort a child.
And that is what the abortion advocates want to ultimately attain – the abnegation of accountability of women from doing simple due diligence for sexual acts. No abnegation of accountability exists in a vacuum; somebody, some group, always picks up the slack. I am of course talking about the forcible extraction of funds in the form of taxation to fund groups like Planned Parenthood to avail abortion services. The very fact that this setup exists indicates that the people generally have to be forced to fund such things, and that actual demand of it aside from the loud aggrieved feminists in the higher-ups is lesser than one may realize. Those that support this have no business talking about female rights or agency. It is an entitlement, especially considering that men’s money is forcibly siphoned into this system.
To complain that contraceptive measures are “too hard” is a sign of assuming the role of a non-accountable child whose mistakes must be tended to by others. In any case, it is almost unbelievable to me that even the most entitled-minded women would opt away from the due diligence over something much more drastic. This indicates that the alleged virtues of abortion for its own sake are marketed in lieu of actual female liberty.
So much energy has been spent on demanding that abortion so readily available that not nearly as much energy has been going to improving existing contraceptives and increasing prospects for male contraception. For all this talk about controlling whether a woman wants to be a mother, by comparison not nearly as much mind has been paid to eliminating abortion as something that factors into the sexual liberation question altogether. So much for being supposedly pro-sex; they are not really even interested in improving the prospects for sexual experience or at least lifting the weight off of the minds of the participants. The preoccupation seems to be to abort a fetus in progress. This is analogous to trying to “improve” lobotomies with better tools, as opposed to rendering lobotomies obsolete altogether. Is it not more consistent to advocate for female sexual agency by making abortion a relic of the past?
The advocacy to normalize and make abortions frequent represents nothing more than a declaration that women don’t have a proactive hand in their own pregnancy. Considering that feminism has a history of categorizing heterosexual sex as a variety of rape as perpetuated by male upon female, this is not a surprising position to expect from their camp. But with the strong implication that a woman has no responsibility in her involved sexual act, it is then assumed that she is not involved with the very act of cultivating the fetus where it will not survive if they terminate the pregnancy. The fetus on the natural trajectory of becoming a human being with his or her own agency is something conveniently left out of the conversation by abortion supporters, except those that voice openly that they want to kill it (their words).
Obsession with abortion access is not about female agency, but the opposite. It is the denial of such agency by use of a safety net rewarding women for their mistakes, with men made to pick up the slack. It is nothing short of gynocentric coddling, and an unhinged sense of entitlement.
