Deciding on what makes something human

Moving right along from the men and feminism debate seamlessly into the abortion debates, we have the pleasure of a back and forth between two bloggers on whether or not a feminist can be pro-life. And since they are both male, we have the added pleasure of examining what two people who cannot possibly know what it's like to have that power to give birth or to have a bunch of members of the opposite sex decide what you can or cannot do with your reproductive abilities orchestrate the debate. I'm not trying to revive the debate over whether or not men can be feminists, but I think that on the subject of pregnancy and what makes something a human, the issue of male power and how men see themselves in relation to women and women's unique ability to give birth is a critical and unspoken issue.

Sheezlebub is putting the smackdown all over both their blogs, reminding the mostly male commenters that are casually kicking around when we should "let" a woman terminate a pregnancy that pregnancy is no walk in the park, it's hard work. When I explain to Hugo, which to his credit he concurs to a degree, that equating a fertilized egg with a child that has died is an insult to nine months of hard work that a woman puts into creating a child, I was also trying to get at that point. They don't call it labor for nothing, folks. In that view, when you force someone to labor against her will, it's slavery.

We pro-choicers know that whether or not something is a real, live human being is an issue of great importance. I don't think that people have a right to kill babies for their convenience, and I would point out that easier access to birth control and abortion would reduce bona fide infantacide by leaps and bounds. So the issue of when a fetus becomes a child is one that should be examined, though not to the exclusion of whether or not the woman carrying it should have her full rights as an autonomous being.

So, when does life begin? To say that it begins at "conception", i.e. when the sperm meets the egg and fertilizes it, is to say that actually begins before a woman is really considered pregnant. As Hugo admits on his blog, a good deal of fertilized eggs do not implant at all; in fact, I've read estimates that put it into the majority. As a culture, we do not actually consider miscarriages and even passed fertilized eggs to be humans worth mourning. We do not have funerals for miscarriages and we don't baptize women's menstrual flow just in case.

Forcing a fertilized egg not to implant isn't even considered an abortion in the medical sense. Conflating the birth control pill and the morning after pill with abortion is a falsehood. But the pro-life side doesn't accept this, because to accept that is to accept two big issues that completely undermine their argument--that abortion is terminating a pregnancy, not killing a baby, and that what makes a pregnancy has more to do with women's bodies than men's bodies. The latter is something that goes by the wayside as everyone argues over whether or not someone who took the morning after pill is a murderous mommy or not.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating--that the pro-lifers define "conception" as what makes a baby is a rhetorical device to reinstate the belief that a baby is made by a man and merely borne by a woman. There are many steps in the process of turning raw material into a baby, but only one is bandied around by pro-lifers as the point that something turns from raw material into a baby, and amazingly enough that step is the only one that involves a man. Anything pre-conception (or, with the morning after pill, pre-intercourse) that prevents bearing a child isn't baby-killing, but anything after a man has planted his seed, if you will, is the moral equivalent of murder. Ejaculation has become the end-all and be-all to pro-lifers of what makes something a baby.

I'm sorry, Hugo, you're a nice guy, but I have to quote you again to make it clear that this attitude is both pervasive and invisible.

Ejaculating inside a woman, with or without protection, is a commitment to raise a child with her. Not willing to do the latter? Don't do the former.

Yes, yes, yes, this is a testament to male responsibility in the pregnancy/abortion/child-rearing debates. But is also just another example of a hyper-focus on the male contribution to baby-making. You have responsibility, but as anyone who is attuned to conservative rhetoric is quite familiar, male responsibility is seen as a byproduct of male control.

All this rhetoric diminishes women's bodies, lives, and experiences. A baby is not just sperm + egg + nine month wait. Women tend to experience the conception as just a beginning of a long process and a lot of work. There isn't a cell in a baby body that didn't come from a woman's feeding it through her own body, and there's not a baby born that wasn't the result of some woman's hard work. To call a fertilized cell a human being is just one more way that women's work has been dismissed throughout history.