Today is the 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade.
While this is predominately a celebration for American women, I believe that women worldwide can share in the celebration.
In the words of Virginia Woolf, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
The topic this year is a simple one, “why I am pro-choice.”
I am pro – choice because I believe children have a right to know they were wanted. That they weren’t born because of some imagined obligation to church or to god or because some law ruled their mother had to carry them to term.
I am pro – choice because I do not believe that my daughters have less right to decide their futures than my sons.
The simple answer is I am pro choice because I could not be anything else.
I have written to this subject before here, here,and here
to name a few.
I would say to sum up those posts that abortion is a woman’s right. A human right.
A society which would seek to suppress human rights is neither democratic nor just.
And human rights are not up for discussion or debate, they just inherently are.
technorati tags: Blog for Choice
I was with you until you said that abortion is a human right, that is a right innate in every human. Firstly I don’t believe in human rights (read Bentham’s discussions on this topic). Second even if human rights did exist abortion could not possibly be a human right because only half of the population can do it. My main qualm with the pro-choice group is that they believe that women should be the only ones choosing… while men are slapped down with the burden of that choice (they pay child support if it is allowed)… of course thats not really the topic so…
Secondly, why celebrate Roe v. Wade? Roe v. Wade is taught in law to be one of the worst cases of judicial activism ever. The standard procedure for law is to find “the best fit” for the current body of law drawing from the law itself. Instead of doing this Roe v. Wade imported all sorts of extralegal materials to make that decision. Why not choose to celebrate Canada’s legalization of abortion through legal means?
To deal with your second question first.
As you’ll note from my sidebar graphic and as I mention in my opening this is the anniversary of Roe v Wade and all who believe in abortion rights have been invited to blog to the subject today.
I certainly think we should do the same thing to celebrate Canada’s legalization.
As to the first comment. Second even if human rights did exist abortion could not possibly be a human right because only half of the population can do it
So that makes it not a human right because we are more than human? less than?
My main qualm with the pro-choice group is that they believe that women should be the only ones choosing… while men are slapped down with the burden of that choice (they pay child support if it is allowed)… of course thats not really the topic so…
Well as fern hill quotes
“The only way women come close to achieving equality is if they can control their fertility,” said the 65-year-old Carhart. “Abortion rights for men have been available since the beginning of time. When they’re unhappy with a pregnancy, they walk away; it doesn’t matter whether it’s the day after conception or when the child is 10 years old.”
As to Bentham
Quote:
Right is a child of law; from real laws come real rights, but from imaginary law, from “laws of nature,” come imaginary rights….Natural rights is simple nonsense.
Spoken as someone intent on keeping power structures in power and defaming all that doesn’t fit within those structures.
Personally I would find it degrading to even enter into discourse on this nonsense.
Mr. Vincent needs to do a little more reading on the notion of rights–he might be interested in the sources listed below. I myself favour the notion of rights as the reciprocal of obligations. In brief, human rights (in the current universalist incarnation, born out of the carnage of the Second World War)arise out of a state’s obligations to its citizens. As one commentator (Englehart, 2003: 34) noted, rights are universal because states are universal.
The notion of “special rights” might pose a problem in general, but choice on abortion doesn’t entail special rights at all. It’s all “liberty and security of the person” which the state must guarantee. Furthermore, erecting legal barriers against the right to choose is obvious discrimination on the basis of sex, and sexual equality is guaranteed under the Charter. To attempt to frame the right to abortion as a special right for a few is analogous to the specious reasoning in Bliss (that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy was not discrimination on the basis of sex). The Supreme Court of Canada almost apologized for Bliss in a subsequent case, stating:
Discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is discrimination on the basis of sex. The decision of this Court in Bliss, which reached the opposite conclusion, is inconsistent with the Court’s approach to interpreting human rights legislation taken in subsequent cases and should no longer be followed.
I would argue for similar reasoning in the case of choice. There is no special class of persons here other than women, and restricting their rights affects society as a whole.
As for Roe v Wade, what is the problem with judicial activism? Strict constructionism is for “textualists and Talmudists.” The times are always a-changin’, and law (a series of texts) needs to be continuously re-interpreted.
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*ENGLEHART, N.A. (2003). The Consequences of a Constructed Universal: Democracy and Civil Rights in the Modern State. Pp. 34-54, in M. Monshipouri, N. Englehart, A.J. Nathan, K. Philip (eds.), Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization. Armonk: M.E. Sharp.
LANGLOIS, A.J. (2004). The Elusive Ontology of Human Rights. Global Society 18(3): 243-261. (Good comments on Bentham here)
DONNELLY, J. (1999). The social construction of international human rights. Pp.71-102 in T. Dunne and N.J. Wheeler, eds. Human Rights in Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I was unclear on one crucial point. Vincent’s argument, to the effect that restrictive abortion laws affect only half of the population, and so are not a human right, is simply specious. That would be like arguing that refusal to serve Blacks in a restaurant doesn’t entail a violation of human rights, because only some people are Black.
I countered with Bliss, in which the SCC had determined that the law in question did not discriminate upon the basis of sex, but only against a class of persons who are pregnant. What I was trying to get at was the notion of special rights, or special exceptions. The former doesn’t apply, and the latter cannot stand against any substantive notion of human rights.
By way of analogy to the issues raised in Bliss, an anti-abortion law discriminates not only against a class of persons seeking abortion, but against women in general. Not only does that compromise the ungendered right to “safety and security of the person” (I didn’t mean “liberty” in my earlier post–apologies), but the right to sexual equality. The latter is a right guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: sexual equality is a recognized human right, one severely compromised if exceptions are made (pregnancy, as in Bliss, or abortion).
Hence it is not feminists but anti-choicers who argue for the “special” in these circumstances–not “special rights,” but “special exceptions.”
Dr. Dawg, do you have any journal entries that are applicable? These books I have no access to and thus have no possible way of reading these particular viewpoints.
I also think the comparison between women and blacks is negligible. You may say that not allowing blacks is violating their right to travel or move. No one has such a right as “a right to eat in that restaurant.” However every person is capable of exercising that capacity and because of that it is a human right, it is a right common to all human beings.
Abortion however is not… and I am insulted at the overly combative tone I’m getting from the original poster. Women are humans you cannot be less or more human unless you add a cultural component to “humanity.” We’re talking about the scientific human, what a system of classification has deemed “human’ or “homo sapian.” For a right to be described as “human” it must be able to be exercised by all humans. Unless by human you mean that it is a right that some humans exercise. In that case my right to scratch my balls is also a human right… but I know thats not what we’re talking about.
Understand genus (human) and species (women) in which this right has to be categorized as one or the other. This is a species right, a sub-level right and thus a “woman’s right.” That is how it would be IF I believed in natural rights. Abortion is not a right women have in Canada (or in the US) it is a capacity which is protected under law… no different from how the corporation is a legal body that protects saavy capitalists. If pro-choice activists went into court demanding their right to an abortion they would be shut down. However by saying they have a right to life, liberty, and freedom the courts allow abortions to take place.
Bentham was a progressive who wanted slow changes. He saw the French Revolution and its 7-8 consequenced revolutions, all caused under the privy that they had fundamental rights. To believe that there are these natural rights that people have. These people felt they could destroy all of the past and create a new future, they were wrong… 9 times. Progressivism from one law, to intermediary law to new law was the way of the future. Abortion in Canada came as part of a legal procedure that was envisioned by law and by law-makers. In America it happened under extra-legal judcial methods.
I’m also rather surprised by your attack on Bentham since most women’s studies programs teach selections of his works since he was the strongest male advocate of women’s equality in the 19th century world.
The Langlois piece is from Global Society, as noted. He’s got a good critique of Bentham, whom I didn’t “attack,” by the way, but simply disagreed with. It’s not all or nothing with any philosopher, either, so I don’t flush him simply because he’s wrong on the rights issue. In any case, I think his binary: natural rights vs. legal protection, is ill-founded. I don’t believe in “natural” rights–too metaphysical by half for my taste–but rather in (as I already stated) rights as the reciprocal of obligations. There is a historical evolution of the notion of rights, one that became more and more exclusive until the Universal Declaration. Wallerstein is good on this, incidentally: see “Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen.”
I think it’s semantics to argue that refusal of service to Blacks in a restaurant constitutes a human rights violation because every human is capable of going into that restaurant and ordering food. For a start, that’s simply not true: babies, a number of disabled people, those without money, those who can’t travel, are prevented from entering the establishment as well. Hence the class of persons capable of entering the restaurant is not congruent with “humanity.” Does that mean that Blacks can’t exercise their right to be served–on that basis? Rather, the “human right” that’s being violated is the right to equality.
Here’s another example: Jews are the only people who can contract Tay-Sachs disease. Do we argue for the “right” to have Tay-Sachs palliated (it is incurable)? Is this a special right for (some) Jews? Or is the right in question the right to access available medical treatment, a sub-set of the right to safety and security of the person?
Sexual equality is a human right, and so is the safety and security of the person–hence it is under those headings (leave “privacy” aside for the moment) that women have successfully argued their case in Canada. Rights cannot, as you correctly suggest, proliferate to the point that every conceivable situation (eating in a restaurant, seeking an abortion, using public transport, getting treatment for Tay-Sachs) carries with it its own specific rights. So “my right to an abortion” is really loose talk for “access to abortion is an exemplar of my right to equality” and “access to abortion is an exemplar of the right to safety and security of my person.”
Back to Roe v. Wade for a moment. The SCOTUS determined that a right to “privacy” was implicit in the US Constitution. If that is true, I can see how it applies to the abortion decision. I can also understand the reluctance of the judges to line up abortion access with women’s rights–the US is a country, after all, that formally rejected women’s equality under the law by scuppering the ERA. But I’m just as happy that, through another route, they came to the right conclusion, and that conclusion is worth celebrating.
Like I said, I don’t fall for human rights. To characterize a certain set of values that all human beings should ascribe to and call them “rights” is faulty and wrong. Different groups have different values. I didn’t say that they had that “right to visit that restaurant” I said they had mobility rights. The difference being that one is an application of a right (being mobile) and the other is a right (mobility right). This is how I see abortion debate. People are calling the application of a right (in Canada that right is to life, liberty, and freedom) as the right. Its a category mistake.
My issue is not whether or not abortion should happen here. Its not whether or not we have made progress. It is just that, semantics. The term “right” carries a lot of authority and power with it. When a person makes a claim to a right its not regarded the same as wanting just anything. This is why I find it rather insulting with the frivolous usage of the term “right” to describe abortion… as opposed to saying “I’m allowed to have an abortion” or “I can have an abortion if I want.” It has a universalist context so as to apply it across the board to everyone… and yet no country has ever accepted such a thing as a right to abortion. They always legalize abortion in context to some other right or some other law.
Ah. So your only point, after all, is that it’s technically incorrect to call choosing an abortion the exercise of a specific “right” called “the right to an abortion,” but, rather, choosing an abortion should be seen as an exemplar of a more general right, like the right to equality under the law, the right to safety and security of the person, etc.?
Then, technically, I am in agreement. But rights talk is not always technical–in fact, it’s usually colloquial. So I think we can read into “my right to an abortion” the longer “my right to safety and security of my person, not to mention my equality under the law, damned well means I can choose abortion if I want.”
To that, I say, Amen. Or something a little more current.
PV,
Not only is your understanding of human rights flawed as already pointed out, but in any case, reproductive freedom is a right that is directly in the interests of men given that reproductive exploitation and control IS a RACE AND CLASS ISSUE as well as a women’s issue.
End of Story.
I thought it was the Person’s Case that decided once and for all that women’s rights were human rights…