Unrequested tone policing on abortion rhetoric

Framing is important.

The Republicans know this, which is why they frame their attack on women’s rights as “pro-life”. If we tacitly accept this, then it follows that anyone who questions them is automatically “anti-life”, which is a pretty self-evidently bad stance to take.

Democrats sort of know this, which is why we instead frame the issue in terms of being “pro-choice”, correctly relegating the opposition to “anti-choice”.

Some people didn’t get the message, though, so they call the anti-choicers “anti-abortion”. This framing sets pro-choicers up as “pro-abortion”, which is a stance that nobody actually holds.

Nobody wants there to be more abortions. Abortion is sometimes the best available option, but that just makes it the least of evils, not somehow good. This is why we support comprehensive sexual education and access to all forms of birth control (of which abortion is the last resort).

Abortion is akin to amputation: it’s a lifesaving medical procedure that doctors must be allowed to perform, but we’d rather have fewer instances where it’s needed. If people were involuntarily growing additional limbs, we’d want to be able to remove them, but it would be even better if we could prevent this from happening in the first place.

In this sense, pro-choicers are anti-abortion, but our enlightened approach is to lower the demand for it by reducing unwanted pregnancies, as opposed to interfering with the supply. The anti-choicers are supply-side anti-abortionists, which is as cruel and ineffective as supply-side economics.

So, in an ideal world, all pregnancies would be planned and desired, and abortion would only occur in the rare, tragic cases of circumstances interfering. This is the honest framing behind Planned Parenthood: people should have the ability to choose if and when they become parents. Sex should not entail the risk of involuntary parenthood: that would be cruel to parent and child alike.

This is the core issue: People have the right to autonomy over their own bodies, the right to make reproductive decisions for themselves. That means the right to avoid pregnancy, as well as the right to terminate a pregnancy as early as possible instead of carrying it to term.

In the wake of Dobbs, draconian abortion restrictions have sprung up in all the usual places, and much of the pro-choice activism has focused on the horrific (but entirely foreseeable) medical consequences, with infant and maternal mortality sharply on the rise. You might think that focusing on the worst consequences would make the best argument, but that turns out not to be the case. I’ll explain why.

Let’s take a step back and look at some of the unspoken assumptions behind this issue. Anti-choicers like to claim that abortion is murder, but they don’t really mean it, and we can see that through their inaction.

Think for a moment about what you would do if you found out that a nearby clinic was gleefully bashing in the heads of perfectly healthy newborns against the rocks. Right: you’d go in there and stop it, laws be damned. And you wouldn’t go alone. You’d be at the head of a large mob that included all the cops, too. No such baby-killing clinic would survive its opening day and no law allowing infanticide could pass in the first place.

That’s not what happens with abortion, though. It’s still broadly legal, even where it’s restricted, and while there are cases where some lunatic shoots a doctor or bombs a clinic, these are rare enough to be newsworthy. The fact that anti-choicers don’t react to abortion as they would to infanticide shows that the “baby-killer” slur is a lie. But it’s a lie that serves a purpose: more on this later.

The other way we know they don’t mean it is that the majority of anti-choicers are willing to make an exception for rape. While this stance is less extreme, it’s also incompatible with the idea that abortion is somehow comparable to murder. We wouldn’t ever say, “well, yes, you’re murdering an innocent, but we’ll give you a pass because you were a victim of violent crime”.

There is only one way it makes sense: if you recognize that abortion isn’t murder, but see pregnancy as the rightful punishment for choosing to have sex. In that case, those who were forced get a free pass, while the “loose” women don’t. This is the unspoken assumption at the core of anti-choice: women who enjoy sex deserve to suffer for it, deserve all of the negative consequences.

Anti-choice is not rooted in a love of babies, but rather the hatred of women. As strange as it might sound, this applies equally to anti-choice women. They are female misogynists. So how do you get someone to eagerly participate in their own oppression? By teaching them that doing so makes them better than someone else.

Right-wing women are indoctrinated from childhood to accept a Madonna–whore dichotomy in which women are seen as either morally-pure mothers or filthy sluts who want to have sex for pleasure. So when a woman winds up with an unwanted pregnancy, they are victim-blamed and called “baby-killers”, allowing proper women to feel good about themselves.

This is parallel to the strategy of getting poor whites to attack poor Black people instead of seeing them as natural allies against economic oppression. Anti-choice women are akin to racist white trash or pre-Civil War Copperheads.

Since the core of anti-choice is misogyny, we have to keep that front and center. But if we focus on the worst consequences—illness and death—then we allow them to frame the issue. Consider all of the recent articles about the fate of married women who wanted to get pregnant but then had a medical catastrophe, such as an unviable fetus. By primarily talking about these cases, we’re buying into their unstated premise.

We’re essentially saying: “Look at Mrs. Smith here. She’s no slut; she intentionally got pregnant with her husband’s baby. It’s not her fault the baby would be born without a brain. There’s no need to punish this woman; she’s one of the good ones. Punish the others! Punish those whores!!!”

At this point, you might want to insist that this isn’t how you meant it, that it’s not what you intended to say. Sure, but that’s how it’ll be heard. When we retreat to defending only those women who have nonviable or dangerous pregnancies, we are abandoning all the ones whose pregnancy is “just” unwanted. Instead of arguing for choice, we’re conceding that they’re right but begging them to be a little bit more merciful in the way they strip away our autonomy.

And this begging won’t work because it turns out that that the cruelty is the point. Anti-choice laws are supposed to hurt women: being forced to have a baby is harmful in itself and is more dangerous than abortion. The fact that these laws kill a few in the process is just par for the course. That’s why, for example, talking about the harm that comes to women who have unsafe abortions out of desperation doesn’t have any impact.

The anti-choicers want women who try to abort their unwanted pregnancies to suffer and die as punishment for daring to choose for themselves. There’s no benefit to harping on the cruelty when it’s exactly what they were hoping for; you’re just making them happier. You can’t threaten them with a good time.

Let me get to the conclusion. In medical terminology, abortions can either be therapeutic or elective. Those nightmare cases are all about therapeutic abortion, which occurs because of medical need. But the overwhelming majority of abortions are elective: chosen because the woman doesn’t want to make a baby. We need to fight for both types so that no woman is ever forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

That’s my unrequested bit of tone policing: I’m arguing that we need to keep the focus on the core issue of women’s rights, on their bodily autonomy and freedom to choose parenthood. Obviously, we shouldn’t shy away from mentioning the additional cruelty of doctors being afraid to treat pregnant women, but we must not ignore the fundamental cruelty of forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, reducing her to the state’s incubator, not a person.

And while I’m giving you the good advice that you don’t want to hear, I need to mention the issue of “women”. In a medical and political context, care is taken to use terms like “pregnant person” to acknowledge that not everyone who gets pregnant identifies as a woman. This inclusive terminology is a good thing, but it’s not particularly helpful in the abortion debate, which is why I haven’t been using it.

The sort of people who oppose a woman’s right to choose whether to be pregnant are not likely to be sympathetic to women who “choose” not to be women. Yes, I do realize that the latter isn’t actually a choice, but they don’t, so using this medically and politically correct terminology just distracts from the core argument.

In practice, anti-choice is focused on women because almost all of the people who get pregnant identify as women. The misogyny that drives this applies just as much to the biologically female who do not identify as women, so the net effect of insisting upon this terminology is to give our opponents something else to attack without strengthening our case.

It is a distinction that makes no difference, and is therefore a hindrance. We need to fight for trans rights in parallel with reproductive rights, but they’re distinct issues despite their common misogynistic basis.

This is all so exhausting. The far right just piles on lie after lie. They say “fetal heartbeat” when there’s no heart or “partial-birth abortion” when there’s no birth or “baby-killer” when there’s no baby. We have to be judicious in which lies we tackle in what order and under what circumstances. And we have to focus on keeping the framing honest, which means fighting for choice, not running away from this by talking only about therapeutic abortion.

So feel free to be angry at me for tone policing you. I don’t care. What matters is that you think this through and follow the winning strategy. What matters is that we restore reproductive rights in America, and this means beating the Republicans.