Valuing fetuses?

Ugh. I didn't want to get involved in this discussion over Frances Kissling's exhortion to assign a value to a fetus, a dubious proposition that will get us into nit-picking over which woman counts more than her fetus and which does not. Ampersand deals with it, as does Jessica at Feministing.

To make my position extremely clear--if I thought a fetus was a baby, I would balk at abortion. That's why I have problems with late-term abortion, though I don't think it should be made illegal because women tend to get them only if it's a matter of absolute necessity. It's not a baby. I am well-acquainted with babies, and they are not the size of fingernail clippings.

People who believe that fetuses are babies have their own reasons which range from religious exhortations to believe that something that doesn't look anything like a baby is a baby to deciding that the male contribution to baby-making is the one that makes it a baby because of religion. While I make no bones about my belief that these views are pushed forward by a male-dominated religious establishment for self-serving reasons, you are free to believe what you'd like.

But when I hear people like Kissling tell us to assign "value" to a fetus, I get all bent out of shape. It reminds me of all those exhortions to Democrats to learn the meaning of "morality", even though it's been predominantly Democrats who argue that discrimination and military adventures that kill living, breathing, feeling people for the benefit of the very wealthy are immoral. No, we have to give in a little, pay some fake tribute to the bullshit belief that they height of morality is peeking in your neighbors' windows to make sure that the pee-pee is being put in the right hole. I'm sick of it.

There's nothing moral about lying about what you believe in terms of baby-making. It's not a freaking baby. Forcing me to say it's half a baby for political expedience is just a step to getting me to admit that a pinpoint cluster of cells has more fucking rights than a woman with memories and future if the wingnuts will let her have it. It's not a baby. God doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. Jesus probably did and if he saw people killing in his name while weeping over some man-on-man anal sex, he would probably go bananas. Get...a...grip.

I am particularly weirded out over the notion that if we could take a fetus out of its mother and stick it in an incubator, that would change things. Not really. Once we have that technology, we'll also be able to harvest sperm and eggs from men and women, make test tube babies, and grown them in incubators. Should we do that because we can? Because more potential lives can be lived? No more than you should fuck every night without birth control to make sure no potential life is missing its chance.

The death knell to the pro-choice movement was giving into the idea that abortion shouldn't be "birth control". What the hell is it, then? It's not the preferred form of birth control, but that's what it is. Throwing yourself off a bridge if pregnant is a form of birth control, for god's sake. We are allowing the connotation that "birth control" means "convienent" overrule the actual meaning of the word. Birth control means controlling birth. Remember that when you hear the phrase that abortion shouldn't be used as birth control. That's one of those brillant oxymoronic phrases that marketers are so good at crafting that override your sense of reason. When people say that abortion shouldn't be used as birth control, remind them that they meant that abortion shouldn't be a primary method of birth control. Which is almost never is.

Contraception means preventing conception. That's different. These distinctions are also deliberately blurred so that contraceptive methods can be passed off they the anti-choice movement as post-conception birth control, i.e., abortion. Now we have contraceptive methods like emergency CONTRACEPTION and the birth control pill being passed off as abortion methods.

And most importantly, abortion doesn't mean killing anything. It means terminating a pregnancy. Many women have aborted without knowing--they were pregnant for a day and then got a period. Miscarriages are a euphemism for natural abortions. You can say a fetus is dead, and that's true enough. But that doesn't mean that abortion means going Dirty Harry on some fetuses. The anti-choice side has managed to redefine abortion, which is a woman-centered term regarding terminating her state of pregnancy, into a fetus-centered term that means some kind of killing.

Sorry to go off on a rant, but as a language person, I see how small choice like who is the object of the abortion procedure (woman or fetus?) makes a huge difference in how we perceive these things. The fetus-centered view has been a clever distraction from the anti-woman policies of anti-choicers. Giving into the insistence that women's role in their own pregnancies be devalued further on our side will only bolster their argument that this is about preserving the fetus, woman be damned.