There’s something deliciously transparent about the masculine anxieties guiding William Saletan’s latest two hand-wringing pieces on how yeah, yeah, abortion should be legal, but omigod moral ambiguity. Thus, his tin ear to the notion that women are full human beings with every right to decide whether or not we shall continue to do work when the terms of the contract change is rather astounding. The devaluation of women as laborers is exactly why I say that feminism is an economic issue, and honestly, the attitudes he expresses about women’s right not to form a new human being with our own bodies if we don’t want to explain as much about why there’s a persistent pay gap between men and women as anything else. But less upfront framing, more quoting, right?
First piece is remarkably transparent, right from the get-go.
Would you abort a fetus just because it wasn’t yours?
I’m sick of supposedly pro-choice people who engage in non-medical language like this—-you abort the pregnancy, and the woman (remember her?) is the patient. She has a condition she would like to go away. So you stop, aka, abort the process. But really a minor detail compared the obvious issue with this opening statement: In the view of anti-choicers, all abortions are due to a woman aborting someone else’s fetus. That fetus was made by the father and belongs to god, and a mere woman has no right to touch it. Plus, it’s assumed that no woman really wants to—-childbirth is submission to our feminine destinies, and we may resist that up front (because we’re sinners), but if we submit, we’ll be happy we did.
But what Saletan is talking about is an unfortunate situation where a doctor’s office mixed up two embryos, and implanted the wrong one in a woman. This all happened in Japan, a relevant detail because of what happened next, which is that the woman who had the wrong fetus inside her decided to abort at 8 weeks. (Saletan makes this sound like it’s far in a pregnancy, but in fact the Guttmacher uses that as the defining point for really early abortions.) Saletan viciously characterizes the woman who chose abortion as finicky, and even hints that there was a second screw-up, or could have been: