The Abortion Debate and Why it Shouldn’t Be a Debate
At midnight on the 22nd of October this year, abortion was officially decriminalised in Northern Ireland; this legal change lifted the possibility of prosecution for both those seeking abortions, as well as from the healthcare professionals that provide them. The change in legislation will go into effect in March of 2020 but, until then, those seeking abortions in Northern Ireland will still be forced to travel to England, Scotland, or Wales to receive them. This new legislation comes after MPs at Westminster voted on the change following a failure by the Northern Ireland Executive to return by the 21st of October despite the Northern Ireland Assembly attempting a last-minute sitting in order to block the law change that proved to be unsuccessful. Previously, Northern Irish abortion legislation stated that abortions were only permissible if there was a risk of fatality, or serious damage to mental or physical health. This change in legislation comes after full decriminalisation of abortion in the Republic of Ireland. These events in conjunction with stricter regulations being pushed in the United States has contributed to a growing global debate surrounding the legality and morality of abortion.
In 2018, a referendum passed in the Republic of Ireland repealing the law prohibiting abortion, yet, following the repeal, protestors have taken to the streets to lobby against the lack of provisions for safe abortions, restrictions on terminations, and illegal activities of anti-choice campaigners. Since January of last year, when the referendum passed in the Republic of Ireland, hospitals that provide access to abortions have been the sites of pickets by anti-abortion protestors. Due to the high number of protestors, who have been found to harass and intimidate those seeking abortions, many feel as though this does not constitute the ‘safe and legal access’ that the law stipulated. Additionally, some seeking abortions are still forced to travel abroad for access to healthcare; an example of this is seen in Kilkenny, where all obstetricians in the local hospital have signed a letter opposing the abortion provisions, with the only other location providing abortions having been the target of relentless anti-abortion campaigners. Fake crisis centres have also been found across Ireland, where staff are accused of providing prospective patients with incorrect medical information and are refusing to perform abortions which puts patients through traumatic and coercive experiences. The new Northern Irish abortion law has likewise garnered strong objections from anti-choice campaigners and officials, leading supporters of the new legislation to fear that the same issues which have plagued abortion decriminalisation in the Republic of Ireland will reoccur in Northern Ireland.
Elsewhere in the world, anti-choice campaigners have also been emboldened by the current legislation changes throughout the United States. Although all nine proposed state abortion bans have been blocked by federal judges, the misinformation surrounding these bills is liable to influence both lawmakers and citizens’ views on the subject. The six states of Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio have all proposed laws which have been dubbed ‘heartbeat bills/bans’ banning abortion after a foetal ‘heartbeat’ has been detected – which typically appears at six to eight weeks gestation. Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina currently have plans to propose heartbeat bans of their own, and several other states have introduced slightly less restrictive bans. These bills can be seen effort to weaken the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade which originally legalised abortion in the United States. The abortion debate is not limited to Europe and North America, however, as recent statements have emerged from Argentina’s president-elect vowing to legalise abortion across the whole of the country. This to follow Uruguay’s own decriminalisation of abortion, one of the first countries to do so in a predominantly Catholic Latin America. This is not to say, however, that the abortion debate is necessarily moving in the right direction. In El Salvador, for example, abortion laws are so strict that incarcerations for experiencing miscarriages are not uncommon.
The abortion debate often centres around one concept: viability. Viability, though, is the source of an important misunderstanding: while the average person has come to understand viability as whether or not the foetus would survive outside the womb, the term is actually used by clinicians to determine whether or not the pregnancy looks healthy enough to continue. The landmark Roe v. Wade ruling was the first to use viability as a legal concept. Now, with the use of costly and aggressive treatments, ‘viability’, as many understand it, has moved further back towards conception, leading to some anti-choice campaigners’ use of this as evidence that abortion regulations should be stricter. The view that anti-choice campaigners hold, however, ignores the nuance of the situation. Not only are the treatments required to save extremely premature babies costly, stressful, and physically and mentally taxing, only 1% of abortions even take place as late as 22 weeks. Even then, the procedure is almost only ever performed because there is a significant risk to health or life. The viability argument is at the crux of the abortion debate, as many seem to believe that those seeking abortions would choose late-stage abortions. However, this is not only entirely illogical, but proven to be untrue, rendering the debate around late-stage abortions unnecessary; any late-stage abortion is almost certainly medically necessary. As viability becomes more of a ‘moving target’ it becomes less, rather than more useful for determining abortion cut-off dates.
Many scientists caution the use of ideology, rather than scientific evidence, to inform laws impacting healthcare. Recently, Alabama Senator Clyde Chambliss stated, regarding his understanding of the heartbeat ban, ‘I’m at the limits of my medical knowledge, but until those chromosomes you were talking about combine – from male and female – that’s my understanding’. Quite obviously, the author of one of the most restrictive bans on abortion is completely unable to provide any credible evidence about why such a ban should be implemented. In fact, the name of the ‘heartbeat ban’ itself is a deliberate misuse of what the term ‘heartbeat’ signifies, focusing on the emotional response to the term, rather than the biological explanation of the foetal heartbeat. In reality, no heart even exists in an embryo at six weeks; the ‘heartbeat’ these bills refer to is actually a result of ‘a group of cells with electrical activity […] We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system,’ Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at UC San Francisco states.
There is conclusive evidence that restrictions, especially those as strict as proposed and found in the United States, Latin American, Africa, and Ireland, not only do nothing to stop abortions from happening, but create an environment where abortions become dangerous and even fatal. Many arguments from those against abortions, including that of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing-voter on the issue, hinge on the idea that abortions are detrimental to the mental health of those that receive them. However, research has concluded that those who requested and received abortions were no more likely to develop depression or PTSD, while those who requested abortions and were turned down were more likely to develop anxiety symptoms, as well as being more likely to fall below the poverty-line. 95% of those who received abortions when requested, stated that they had made the right decision. Additionally, these restrictive laws will disproportionately affect already marginalised members of society, creating confounded risks for low-income individuals, women of colour, transgender men, and genderqueer people, whose access to sufficient healthcare is too often already restricted. These groups have long been subjected to drawn-out waiting periods, mandated counselling before being allowed access to health care, and additional parental-consent requirements. Women of colour also have extremely high maternal and infant mortality rates. Restrictive access to safe abortion is likely to increase many of these risks substantially, as well as causing marginalised individuals to feel unsafe or unable to seek abortions in areas with strict laws.
Criminalising abortion is not the solution to the problem that anti-choice campaigners have lauded it to be. From creating a philosophical debate around what constitutes ‘beginning of life’, to misinterpreting scientific findings and relying on personal beliefs to inform legal decisions, those who oppose the right to safe and legal abortions remain wilfully ignorant to the deeply destructive result of illegal abortion; anyone who states that they are anti-choice because of concerns for the safety of pregnant individuals should immediately garner immense scepticism. The elected officials making restrictive laws or opposing decriminalisation have, time and again, twisted scientific evidence, entrenched the debate in ideological rhetoric, and encouraged harassment and intimidation in an attempt to enforce unfounded restrictions. Those responsible for creating and enforcing laws surrounding healthcare should rely unequivocally on unbiased scientific evidence to do so, leaving unfounded beliefs out of a debate which could so easily infringe on human rights and bodily autonomy.
