Fetus Focus Fallacy...

[bliss_eternal]

By Joyce Arthur, Pro-Choice Action Network

Pro-Choice Press, Spring 2005

(an article from the Pro-choice action network website--sorry it's a bit dated, but no less relevant.)

Like never before, abortion rights are under threat today in the United States. A concerted 30-year campaign by the anti-choice movement has chipped away at a woman's right to control her life, and tried to turn the tables by focusing attention on the fetus. It looks like it's finally succeeded. In the aftermath of Bush's re-election victory in November 2004, Democrats started backing away from their commitment to abortion rights, and pro-choice leaders started talking about the need to recognize and respect the moral value of the fetus.<1> Do we really want to travel down this dangerous road?

American women are drowning in a sea of state and federal laws restricting abortion. Some of these laws recognize fetuses as persons deserving of protection, such as a new federal law that makes fetuses a separate victim when a pregnant woman is assaulted, and many state laws that criminalize pregnant women for engaging in behaviors that might harm their fetus. Although these laws specifically exempt legal abortion, that's a meaningless sop to the war-weary pro-choice movement, which allowed most of these laws to pass without a fight. Because if the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion is overturned, as many predict, women can probably look forward to being prosecuted, jailed, and even executed for "murdering" their fetuses - something that could never have happened in the bad old days of illegal abortion when fetuses were still invisible to the eyes of the law.


Anti-choicers insist that the key question in the abortion debate is whether a fetus is a person or not. If so, abortion is murder, they say, and therefore obviously immoral and illegal. That is not the key question at all, of course - anti-choicers are committing the "fetus focus fallacy." The practice of abortion is unrelated to the status of the fetus - it hinges totally on the aspirations and needs of women. Women have abortions regardless of the law, regardless of the risk to their lives or health, regardless of the morality of abortion, and regardless of what the fetus may or may not be. On average, abortion rates do not differ substantially between countries where it's legal and countries where it's illegal.<2> Which reveals a more pertinent question: Do we provide women with safe legal abortions, or do we let them suffer and die from dangerous illegal abortions?

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http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/fetus-focus-fallacy.shtml

[smokey nj]

1. Thanks, bliss! This is another great article.