On Caitlin Flanagan's “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to Caitlin Flanagan. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

When I was pregnant with my first child, a driver in Denver flew past a stop sign and nearly struck me. Simmering with fury over the near-miss, I wondered how a reckless driver in the U.S. would be punished for killing my unborn baby. The answer varies wildly from state to state, but as best I could tell, in Colorado there would not have been severe enough consequences.

My morbid curiosity unearthed an event that unfolded a few years prior to my pregnancy, in Longmont, CO, when a deranged assailant attempted to steal another woman's 7-month-old fetus to claim the child as her own. After luring her victims with a Craigslist ad for maternity clothes, the wanna-be-mother cut the baby girl out of the womb. Somehow, the real mother survived disembowelment; her daughter did not live.

This case triggered a furor because the murderer could not be charged with murder — Colorado does not have fetal homicide laws. The madwoman was still appropriately sentenced to 100 years in prison on other serious charges, including attempted first degree murder of the mother and the unlawful termination of a pregnancy, but prosecutors' inability to charge her with murder riled up the nation. Colorado lawmakers tried and failed to criminalize fetal homicide after the attack.

Coloradans had tried to pass fetal homicide laws before, including after an earlier Longmont tragedy that occurred a couple years before the murder. A mother was mere days from going into labor when she was struck by a drunk driver who killed her nearly-born son. The middle-aged drunkard had been accumulating DUIs with lenient sentences for about thirty years (along with arrests for domestic violence, assault, disturbing the peace, and possessing crack cocaine), including one incident when he stole and crashed a neighbors car into a tree. After he killed the baby boy, the most severe charges prosecutors could pursue typically carried a maximum penalty of 12 years in prison, because Colorado law does not categorize fetal death as vehicular homicide. The man committed suicide before his sentencing.

These sensational calamities inspired passionate efforts to put fetal homicide laws on the books in Colorado because it seemed profoundly unjust that babies so close to birth were legally considered mere extensions of their mothers' injuries, rather than people in their own right who were robbed of their lives. Had the drunkard struck that mother and child just days later, perhaps as they drove home from the maternity ward with the baby nestled in a car seat for the very first time, then the consequences would have been commensurate to the crime. Granted, the lunatic who tried to steal a fetus will rot in prison and the drunkard dealt himself the death penalty, so no one can claim they were not severely punished. Yet on principle, we want to call a spade a spade, and a homicide a homicide.

But the idea of fetal homicide is bound up with concepts of fetal personhood, which therefore entangles the issue with America's vitriolic abortion debate.

Pro-choice activists worry that if we treat fetuses like people under fetal homicide laws, then pro-life activists could leverage that as a legal precedent for supporting their argument that abortion is murder. And given that pro-life activists do throw their weight behind proposed fetal homicide laws, this is a rational fear. Furthermore, it is reasonable to expect consistency from arguments about personhood, so drawing connections between fetal homicide and abortion laws is not only a cynical ploy in the culture wars.

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Learning about this longstanding legal debate made my wrath towards the awful driver curdle into disgust at the partisans who refused to set aside their differences even to defend unborn babies that no one wants to abort. If some careless fool were to kill my baby, then I would want vengeance whether the crime happened on the day before or after her birth. So when I read Caitlin Flanagan's 2019 Atlantic essay “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate,” her argument resonated in my gravid body.

Flanagan argues that culture warriors “need to face the best arguments from the other side" of the abortion debate, and then lives up to her own admonition by presenting both sides with unimpeachable compassion. She begins by recounting what it was like before either contraception or abortion were legal anywhere in the U.S., and women commonly used Lysol for furtive abortions.

As Flanagan explains, Lysol ads in this era “performed a coy bit of misdirection” to surreptitiously sell women on douching with the disinfectant after sex to prevent pregnancy. When higher concentrations were injected into uteruses to perform abortions, about two thirds of those desperate women died. One vintage Lysol ad in particular haunts Flanagan, with its depiction of a woman burying her head in her hands, wearing a wedding band, paired with the sentence, “I just can't face it again.”

What could make a married woman living during the great postwar Baby Boom unable to face one more pregnancy? Start making a list of the possible reasons, and you might never stop. Maybe she’d had terrible pregnancies and traumatic births and she couldn’t go through another one. Maybe she had suffered terribly from postpartum depression, and she’d just gotten past it. Maybe her husband was an angry or violent man; maybe he had a tendency to blame her when she got pregnant. Maybe she had finally reached the point in her life when her youngest was in school and she had a few blessed hours to herself each day, when she could sit in the quiet of her house and have a cup of coffee and get her thoughts together. And maybe — just maybe — she was a woman who knew her own mind and her own life, and who knew very well when something was too much for her to bear.

The fictional woman with her head in her hands made me think of a real woman who died as a result of using Lysol to control her fertility: the 32-year-old woman in the Arkansas report whose husband took her to the hospital, where she soon died. Given the era and given that she was 32, there’s a fair chance that the couple had been married for at least a few years; there’s also a pretty good chance they already had children. For whatever reason, she just couldn’t face it again. She tried to do something to save herself — because when you can’t face something, there is no other choice. And she paid for it with her life.

Pro-choice activists appeal to the graphic consequences of back alley abortions to point out that making the procedure illegal does not make it go away. And when it is performed in secret, the mother is often lost as well. They beseech the pro-life movement to also consider the lives of women who will inevitably risk theirs when abortion is illegal. If the baby will be aborted regardless, then we should at least save the mother. Moreover, she may go on to have other children once she's ready for the transformative experience of motherhood, so saving her life begets more life in due course.

But when pro-choice activists make this appeal, they typically avoid referring to a “baby.” Instead, they use clinical language like “fetus" and “embryo.” This tendency is so pronounced that you may have erroneously assumed I am against legal abortion because I have steadfastly referred to “babies” in this essay. By using this rhetorical strategy, pro-choice activists communicate a belief that women's lives take precedent over any potential person forming in their wombs.

This is a mistake. It obviously fails to change anyone's mind, prompting pro-life activists to scoff at the suggestion that a full-term fetus is categorically different than a baby, as if a fetus cannot be a person in the moment just before her birth while obviously becoming one in the moment after. Flanagan expresses how modern technology allows us to peer through pregnant bellies to see how very baby-like the beings inside them are:

The first time I saw one of the new 3-D ultrasounds of a fetus in utero, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at. It wasn’t anything like the black-and-white images I was used to seeing. It looked otherworldly, like we’d finally made contact with a planet we’ve always wanted to reach. In part it was the color, that glowing shade of amber that doesn’t suggest anything medical or technological. It calls to mind something almost ancient, something that suggests the beginning of all things.

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These sonograms are so richly detailed that many expectant mothers pay to have one made in a shopping-mall studio, much in the spirit in which they might bring the baby to a portrait studio. They are one thing and one thing only: baby pictures.

She goes on to express why it is so difficult for many pro-choice activists to call a fetus a baby:

For a long time, these images made me anxious. They are proof that what grows within a pregnant woman’s body is a human being, living and unfolding according to a timetable that has existed as long as we have. Obviously, it would take a profound act of violence to remove him from his quiet world and destroy him.

“Most abortions happen in the first trimester,” a very smart and very kind friend reassured me. I didn’t need to worry about those detailed images of babies — by the time they had grown to such recognizably human proportions, most of them were well past the stage of development in which the majority of abortions take place. And I held on to that comforting piece of information, until it occurred to me to look at one of those images taken at the end of the first trimester. I often wish I hadn’t.

A picture of a 12-week fetus is a Rorschach test. Some people say that such an image doesn’t trouble them, that the fetus suggests the possibility of a developed baby but is far too removed from one to give them pause. I envy them. When I see that image, I have the opposite reaction. I think: Here is one of us; here is a baby. She has fingers and toes by now, eyelids and ears. She can hiccup — that tiny, chest-quaking motion that all parents know. Most fearfully, she is starting to get a distinct profile, her one and only face emerging. Each of these 12-week fetuses bears its own particular code: this one bound to be good at music; that one destined for a life of impatience, of tap, tap, tapping his pencil on the desk, waiting for recess.

What I can’t face about abortion is the reality of it: that these are human beings, the most vulnerable among us, and we have no care for them.

When the pro-choice movement leans on clinical rhetoric to bolster its argument, it accidentally concedes that recognizing a fetus as a baby should make us condemn abortion. But those of us with pro-choice views need to confront the value of fetal life rather than sidestep it. Here is my analogy for grappling with the brutality of abortion:

Imagine that a child will die without a kidney transplant, and the only compatible donor is his mother. If the mother gives up her kidney, then she will suffer life-long health ramifications, similar to how pregnancy can forever affects women's health. Most of us would harshly judge a mother who refused her child a kidney and in doing so guaranteed his death — I admit that I would — but at the same time, we should abhor a legal regime that requires anyone to donate their organs. The right to life is not the same thing as a right to live off of another person's body.¹

Of course this analogy is imperfect. Pregnancy and kidney donations are not medically equivalent. However, this illustrates that a mother refusing to share her body with her child should not demand legal remedies, no matter how horrific the consequences. Even though requiring people to donate their kidneys would undoubtedly save lives, nearly everyone can agree that doing so would be dystopian. But most also feel disgust at the idea of a mother denying a life-saving kidney donation for her own child.

The problem with legal remedies is that the devil is always in the details. Because women seek abortions for particularly varied and individual reasons, it is a beastly challenge to write abortion laws that are just in all circumstances. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, new laws are exemplifying this conundrum.

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This past December, the most high profile case to expose shortcomings in new abortion laws made news. A Texas woman was delighted to become pregnant with her third child, but then discovered her newest baby suffered from a fatal birth defect. Her daughter would likely die in the womb, or at most live for just a few painful days. This mother was already experiencing a high risk pregnancy that had required multiple emergency room visits, and she risked significant infection if her baby died inside of her. Because of her two previous C-sections, she was also at risk of never being able to have more children after a third operation, as each subsequent C-section increases the chances of hysterectomy, hemorrhage, or uterine rupture.

She sought an abortion to remain healthy and alive for her first two children, to someday have another baby who would not immediately die, and for the eminently reasonable desire not to risk her own life from infection or hemorrhage. But her doctor told her that she probably did not qualify for a medical exception under the new Texas abortion law, because her baby still had a heartbeat. So she appealed to a judge for permission to get an abortion, believing that her situation should qualify under the law's exception for mothers with a:

life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places [her] at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.

To her relief, the judge granted her permission to get an abortion. But mere hours later, the Texas Attorney General petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to halt the lower court's order and sent letters to hospitals threatening legal action if they performed the procedure. The Attorney General argued that allowing it “opens the floodgates to pregnant mothers procuring an abortion,” and the Texas Supreme Court agreed, asserting that, “Some difficulties in pregnancy, however, even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses.” Ultimately she had to travel out of state to get the abortion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is currently hearing a case that may provide clarity on what kinds of health threats should trigger exceptions to strict anti-abortion laws nation-wide.

For fear of a slippery slope, the Texas Attorney General and Supreme Court believed this mother should carry a doomed child until either her health deteriorated to a more dire emergency or she gave birth to a dying child, under circumstances that would likely preclude her from having another healthy baby later on. The president of the largest pro-life activist organization in the state, Texas Right to Life, concurred, “we need to be clearer than ever that in these circumstances we value the life of the child no matter what doctors are saying,” and pointed out that many Texan doctors are pro-choice advocates. Because the abortion debate has gone rancid, the medical facts indispensable for arbitrating new abortion laws are held suspect — if pro-life activists will not trust doctors to determine when pregnancy carries a “risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced,” then who is qualified to decide?

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Recalling the 3D ultrasound of a 12-week baby in the womb, Flanagan writes:

The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal. The argument against it doesn't take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.

This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.

If the pro-choice movement wants to regain the legal upper hand, then it may need to make cultural concessions. Foremost, we shouldn't play word games that sugarcoat the tragedy of abortion.

We should also return to the position popular among Democrats in the ‘90s that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” That was President Bill Clinton's formulation, but by the time Hilary Clinton ran for his old office, her campaign staff convinced her to drop it because they believed it was out of touch with an electorate that has come to believe “rare" is a concession to the pro-life movement. By 2019, pro-choice activists were condemning the phrase for “operating from the assumption that abortion is a bad thing.”

The power of Flanagan's essay is how artfully she counters that heart numbing sentiment. In an earlier piece on the abortion debate, Flanagan bemoans:

Young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies there is something shameful about the procedure, even if it has kept many people in the pro-choice tent. In the present state of American politics, compromise — even the rhetoric of compromise — is understood as appeasement, and we seem to have decided that it is better to risk losing everything than to give an inch.

Allowing that it might ever be appropriate to judge a woman for getting an abortion is the most painful cultural concession today's pro-choice movement could make. But if we cannot reassure society that we value life at its genesis, then society may not trust us with the responsibility to choose when, or if, we are ready to create one.

Flanagan describes the stakes of allowing the state to seize control of that choice:

No matter what the law says, women will continue to get abortions. How do I know? Because in the relatively recent past, women would allow strangers to brutalize them, to poke knitting needles and wire hangers into their wombs, to thread catheters through their cervices and fill them with Lysol, or scalding-hot water, or lye. Women have been willing to risk death to get an abortion. When we made abortion legal, we decided we weren’t going to let that happen anymore. We were not going to let one more woman arrive at a hospital with her organs rotting inside of her. We accepted that we might lose that growing baby, but we were not also going to lose that woman.

Our pro-choice movement needs to sort out its priorities. Are we invested in the project of ensuring that no woman ever again arrives at a hospital with rotting organs? Or do we care too much that people we disagree with will pass judgment on the choices women make?

When it comes to sex, feminists both fight for abortion rights and valorize consent. So as feminists contemplate whether moral judgment from pro-life activists is too irksome to bear, they would do well to remember these words from Eleanor Roosevelt:

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

1. In this essay, I do not attempt to address the full breadth of the abortion debate; instead, I narrow my focus to build on Caitlin Flanagan's argument. For a fuller accounting, consider philosopher Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, in which he devotes a chapter to the problem of taking life from embryos and fetuses. Though I do not agree with him entirely, his is the most thoughtful analysis I have come across.

Singer cites an analogy from feminist philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson that is quite similar to my own. Here is his summary of Thomson's analogy:

Imagine, she says, that you wake up one morning and find yourself in a hospital bed, somehow connected to an unconscious man in an adjacent bed. You are told that this man is a famous violinist with kidney disease. The only way he can survive is for his circulatory system to be plugged into the system of someone else with the same blood type, and you are the only person whose blood is suitable. So a society of music lovers kidnapped you, had the connecting operation performed, and there you are. Because you are now in a reputable hospital you could, if you choose, order a doctor to disconnect you from the violinist; but the violinist will then certainly die. On the other hand, if you remain connected for only (only?) nine months, the violinist will have recovered and you can be unplugged without endangering him.

I think her version is a bit too convoluted. For example, by specifying a talented musician, she introduces questions about earning moral worth, whereas the potential of every unborn child is uncertain — we cannot know whether a baby will achieve greatness, mediocrity, or villainy. And by setting up her hypothetical with a kidnapping, her analogy is more aligned with a pregnant rape victim than unwanted pregnancies broadly. Plus, she fails to focus on the mother-child relationship. By incorporating motherhood into my analogy, I try to keep my thought experiment as similar to the abortion debate as possible.