How Forcing Women to Give Birth Violates the Right to Life
The "pro-life" ideology betrays its own claimed principles.
One would think that the right to live would be a simple concept. But in a complex society with billions of members, whose interests often clash, the recognition of what is deemed one individual’s rights may deny another’s. So before trying to respect a certain right, we must define what that right is, how it should be respected, and what its limits are so that there is no infringement on others.
Not receiving an organ transplant kills about 17 people a day, or over six thousand in one year. According to the National Kidney Registry and Johns Hopkins, both kidney donation and liver donation are very safe for living donors; deaths from these procedures are close to zero. Since potential donors do not need their organs to live (because they have died or can live without the organ), and since those dying without a transplant have a right to live, it must follow that organ donation should be mandatory.
However, overall statistical safety doesn’t mean that there is no risk. Patient deaths can happen from complications from surgery, or hospital negligence. Florinda Gotcher became one victim of such negligence when the surgeon used equipment inappropriate for the type of surgery; she died bleeding out. Theoretically, mandating donation postmortem would present no such ethical complications, but it has happened before that donors pronounced dead regained consciousness just as their organs were about to be removed.
Because mandatory donation would save thousands of people, then if we apply anti-abortion logic to organ donation, the rights of those innocent thousands outweigh the low risk of fatality or serious injury from donation. If “the first right is the right to life”—a favorite phrase of pro-forced birth activists—then with what justification do we deny them?
Opponents will argue the difference is that outside of rape, because pregnant women willingly had sexual intercourse, they owe the pregnancy their bodies for its survival. But if pregnant women can be uniquely compelled to risk their lives, biological sex and sexual activity determine the right to remain alive—a horrific form of discrimination, and monstrously disrespectful to mothers, to whose sacrifices humanity owes its existence.
A claim could be made that the right to life means the number of lives saved from death must be maximized even at the potential—and ultimately inevitable—cost of the lives and health of others required to sacrifice themselves. But then the rights of an individual would depend on the utilitarian value to others of her body parts, and others’ need for those parts in order to save their own lives. If a right is collective rather than individual, in what way is it a right? And if lives are individually disposable, what value can they have as a group?
Some percentage of maternal deaths must be considered an acceptable price to pay for live births. Equal Rights Institute, citing 0.0017 from CDC data, declared in the article above that the percentage should be “at least higher than 1%.” But even a statistically small figure represents loss of lives, so on what grounds will that threshold be determined? How can someone legally forced to risk death by being prevented from defending herself against the risk, by a means that harms nothing but the condition itself, be said to have a right to live?
The statistic presented as an insignificant threat amounts to an average of 700 women’s deaths during or shortly after giving birth within one year in the US; 7,000 over a decade; many thousands across the world, and millions over the span of our species’ existence. But no matter how many women’s lives a pregnancy or birth has taken, just one should have been enough to signal that deliberately stopping someone from obtaining abortion is unjustified. There is no way to be pro-humanity while dismissing a human being as just a number.
Let’s add a name to one of the numbers. Sareena Ali had had a happy pregnancy looking forward to her baby; she was in active labor at a hospital when she and her husband realized that staff weren’t checking on her as they should have been. Sareena went two and a half hours without seeing a delivery attendant. Her pain increased to the point where, as her husband described it, “I couldn't believe the voice coming out of her throat. She was not screaming—it was like she was being slaughtered.” When her husband managed to get staff’s attention, Sareena’s eyes rolled back in her head; attendants joked that she was a “drama queen.”
Emergency staff applied an oxygen mask, but were unaware until Sareena’s husband alerted them that the mask was disconnected from the oxygen tank. An emergency C-section was performed, but the baby did not survive. And five days after being placed on life support, Sareena died of organ failure.
I anticipate the objection that her death was a result of negligence. Giving birth didn’t kill her, anti-abortion activists will say; the hospital’s malpractice did. But the fact is that both are true: the hospital could have saved her life, and the birth directly created the threat to her safety. And as in the case of organ donation, whether or not patients’ care providers are well-equipped or competent is out of their control.
Even with the best possible care, previously normal pregnancies can quickly turn life-threatening without warning. Here, the CDC names several of maternal death’s most common causes within the last decade, including hemorrhage, and cardiomyopathy, or a form of heart disease.
The anti-abortion movement excuse their own actions threatening the lives of others by making a distinction between “direct versus indirect killing.” While opinion varies on whether inducing preterm birth to save a woman’s life is justified, activists agree that “direct and intentional killing of an innocent” is always murder, ethically speaking. Ron Conte would argue that if the goal of forcing someone to give birth is not to kill the person but to save the pregnancy, those who committed the force by blocking abortion are inculpable for any harm she suffers as a result. Besides, others counter, reproduction is a biological process, and perpetuates itself.
Responsibility to others is not limited to directness or intent. Blame for causing harm to someone comes not only from malicious intention to hurt that person, or physical force exerted against her or him, but from any action that another person knows or should know is dangerous to that individual. If one person takes action to intentionally stop another from ending a condition that can cause a host of damages, including death, that first person is morally guilty of any harm that comes to the victim as a result. To deny these deliberate actions or even that force was involved at all is not only blatantly dishonest, but cowardly: the perpetrators will not face the damage they do to innocent human beings.
Since treating life as a fundamental right is incompatible with exploiting the bodies of some to save others, the right to life must mean being individually entitled to freedom from human infringement on one’s life. That freedom necessarily includes the option to protect oneself from harm.
The anti-abortion movement deploys its catchy signature phrase to erase nuance, in an area that according to its own philosophy should be treated with utmost care. Yes, human beings have “the right to life,” but not by any means or at any cost to another person. And only this principle is truly life-affirming.