Inalienable Rights and the Abortion Wars

Abortion should be safe, legal and rare. This chapter describes policies to reach this goal, including widely available sex education, contraceptive information, adoption advice and support and universal schemes of free maternal and child support. The chapter makes clear that opposing an unalienable right to “life” against an unalienable right to “choose” leads nowhere. The abortion debate is obviously a dead end, feeding the most radical positions on each side and allowing no such practical, sensible real-life compromises as the book envisions. In a new preface to this chapter, the editors assert the need to re-assess the author’s conceptualization of the issue in light of the 2022 Dobbs decision. And in a new addendum, Frances Maher argues that women’s lives express the very basis of the book, namely the primacy of our social versus our individual identities. The book assumes that women and men are the same in terms of the “rights versus equality” argument. But the actual so-called bodily integrity of women is different. Women have never been allowed to become the “socially transcendent, utterly self-contained “individual” figures of the human rights tradition. Rather women, having children, inside families, have thereby always allowed men the illusion of individual autonomy. The “right to life” argument ignores the social responsibilities to the resulting baby. The “right to life” ends with birth. The “right to life” argument is basically an attack on women’s desires to become the same kind of human as freestanding men. Ending abortion rights denies to the mother and other family members the promises the book makes on behalf of the equality agenda. While this agenda expresses the depth of the author’s commitments to the equalities of all humans, the abortion issue shows the need for these commitments to extend explicitly to over half of these humans.