26th February 2021
By Ruth Bushell
My body, my choice-unpacking the inequality behind the pro-choice mantra.
Every pro-lifer has heard the phrase ‘my body, my choice’. Some of us have had it screamed in our faces. But what does it really mean? It’s a deceptive slogan that sounds as though it follows the basic rules of logic. However, look more closely at the ideology behind it and you’ll find some disturbing implications. In this article, I’ll discuss the dualism behind ‘my body, my choice’, its skewered interpretation of what choice and equality really are and how it contributes towards the dehumanisation of the unborn.
The basic reasoning behind the pro-choice argument is that we should have autonomy over our bodies, we should choose what happens to them. There is something profoundly odd about our preoccupation with being ‘in control’ of our bodies. Mind over matter has always been a mantra of power, of success – but has it gone too far? This ideology implies that mind and body are natural enemies. We see this perpetuated constantly in our culture. In its obsession with extreme diets, exercise regimes and elaborate beauty routines it teaches us that our bodies are simply accessories to be bent and shaped to our will. It’s a dualist argument that glosses over the deeply personal and complex relationship between self and body. It pits people against their physical selves and in the case of pregnancy, against their child.
An inaccurate definition of equality also makes up a large part of the pro-choice ideology. Their claim is that if women are to be equal with men, abortion is a necessary choice. This essentially implies that in order to be equal to men, we need to be more like men. We need to deny that which separates us from men, that is, our fertility, and mould ourselves into beings that are as close to a male as possible. For it seems that only when we are the same, are we equal. The unique life-giving potential of the female form is considered an inconvenience, a hindrance even, to female success and empowerment in our society. We can see this in the enormous stigma that surrounds teen pregnancy, the advertising techniques of birth control providers and in employer’s attitudes towards maternity leave and hiring women who wish to have children.
The statistics show that the women most likely to have abortions are those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and this is perhaps partly what is behind the false idea that abortion is necessary for equality. The statistics show that the women most likely to have abortions are those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and this is perhaps partly what is behind the false idea that abortion is necessary for equality. The pro-choice side take these statistics about the demographics of women who seek abortion and use them to argue that abortion is necessary for women to ‘get on’. 
In the US the abortion industry actively targets black women for abortions because it knows these women are typically more disadvantaged and thus more likely to ‘need’ abortions (1). The ads are framed in a way that suggest abortion will help these women and their families-but all it can do is end a child’s life. It can’t find provide better education, better employment or better housing. Abortion does not solve inequality, it simply adds anther burden onto women who are often already in desperate situations. It’s a common cliche that success requires sacrifice, but there is a world of difference between a man struggling to better himself by working long hours or studying a difficult degree and a woman killing her child because she believes it is necessary to improve her own situation. The 1960’s liberation movement brought in an ideology so obsessed with the idea of sexual liberation, it didn’t consider the consequences and it didn’t bring about true liberation. It removed what it saw as the repression surrounding sex and simply moved it on a stage to our wombs (2). Now, while men are free to have consequence free sex, women are encouraged to control their bodies and to deny a part of their nature, in order to be successful. The mantra might be my body, my choice but it’s a choice that cannot help but be heavily influenced by societal attitudes. Attitudes that say it’s now a woman’s duty to repress her body in order to make it fit better into a culture that is still focused on male ideas of success. As the New Zealand feminist author Daphne de Jong said: “If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status, they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience’.
Once the female body has been demonised and reduced to simply a lesser version of the male, it’s easy to see how the unborn child can be similarly disregarded. If fertility is considered a weakness and a disadvantage, then its consequences are too. The unborn are frequently referred to as ‘parasites’ by the pro-choice movement, seen not as human beings but as monstrous agents taking away a woman’s ability to live her life to the fullest. Barack Obama famously stated that ‘If my daughter makes a mistake I don’t want her punished with a baby.’ To him and many others, another human being’s existence can be nothing more than a ‘punishment’ for someone else simply because they are unwanted. Society has conditioned women to see new life as potential competition for our own lives and happiness and it reveals just how fragile and self-centred our sense of happiness is, that the existence of another person is considered a threat to it.
So we’ve now seen how the ‘my body my choice’ ideology has let women down by promoting a false, and arguably patriarchal, idea of equality. Its also totally dehumanised the unborn by erasing their bodies from the abortion debate and depicting them as their mother’s enemies. The final point I want to make focuses around the idea of ‘choosing’ parenthood and another common pro-choice slogan: ‘every child a wanted child’.
In one sense, the most compelling pro-choice argument is ‘what if a woman doesn’t want children’. It seems logical that women who don’t want children shouldn’t have them, but unfortunately, conception can occur whether one wills it to or not. The first thing to note here is that, despite it being unfashionable to say so, we are biologically wired to want to reproduce. Throughout pregnancy we are already bonding with our children and our attitudes towards children can change dramatically. That said, there will still be those who find the process bewildering and who feel little to no affection for their child. You often hear that in this case it’s ‘better’ for the child to be aborted than unwanted. Behind this belief is the unspoken fear women face that if they have a child they, in turn, will become less wanted, less desirable and less successful. This idea of ‘every child a wanted child’ has some disturbing implications – not least that it’s better to be dead than not wanted. Babies placed for adoption may spend the first few months or years of their lives unwanted-but we all recognise that the humane thing to do is to send them to orphanages not slaughterhouses. To be unwanted is a terrible thing but it is not the worst thing and it’s never as absolute as it sounds. The ‘every child a wanted child’ phrase looks only at mother and baby. It doesn’t consider the women’s family or wider society. It doesn’t consider the future. Every child is wanted to some extent by someone. And even if no individual feels any personal desire for their existence at the time of their conception, humanity as a whole desires its own continuation. Furthermore, if the child has a chance to be born they can become wanted, they can prove their worth. Of course, they shouldn’t have to but we don’t live in a perfect world – and it certainly won’t become more perfect by killing those who are unwanted at the earliest stages of their life.
The fundamental point to make here is that being wanted is not what makes us human or worthy. From the moment of our conception we have innate value as human beings and whether other human beings recognise that value, whether we are ‘chosen’ or not, is irrelevant to its truth. Our society needs to alter its idea of value if it is to properly accommodate not only the unborn but women as well. If our fertility continues to be considered a disadvantage, if we continue to be pitted against our own bodies and if we continue to be pressured into ‘choices’ that best suit a male-centric culture, we cannot claim that our society is truly equal. Certainly, any system that requires the approval of someone else before a person is considered valuable is not an egalitarian one and chanting empty phrases cannot change that fact.
1) For more on this see the works of early pro-life feminists Susan B. Antony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
