There seems to be a common attitude shared even by some abortion rights supporters that abortions shouldn't be too easy to obtain. People apparently feel that if abortions are easy to get, then they would be "abused" — as if women can't be trusted to use abortion "correctly" or as if the meaning of pregnancy would be diminished. Does it make sense to treat abortion as a constitutional right, but not one women should have easy access to? We don't do this with any other right but it is a means by which religious authority figures can interfere in the exercise of a right without having to fight legal battles over criminalizing it.
Can you imagine the outcry if people were told that they have a right to vote, but that voting shouldn't be "too easy" and that they have to go through several hoops to cast their vote? What would happen if people had to sit through counseling on how important voting is and forced to come back to the polling station a second time before the vote can be registered? Voting is at least important as the decision to have an abortion, so why shouldn't the state be sure that citizens fully understand what they are doing and that they have a chance to go home and think about their choices?
Voting rates would surely decline and there would be widespread outrage over obvious efforts to make voting more difficult for those who are least able to devote the time and expense to it. Yet, such policies could plausibly be legal and constitutional. Aren't efforts to make abortion more difficult really in the same category as the hypothetical restrictions on voting: blatant attempts to make abortion more difficult to obtain for the poor and working classes who can least afford to devote the time and money being demanded while technically and formally keeping abortion "legal" for the sake of court challenges?
In Why I Am An Abortion Doctor, Suzanne T. Poppema writes:
[T]here have been some from even prochoice circles who have posed the peculiar argument that a more accessible form of abortion somehow could result in women minimizing the entire notion of pregnancy. Such was the odd subtext of a February 1995 article in the medical journal “Hippocrates” in which the author, in effect, suggested that the availability of an abortion pill made the whole notion of abortion almost too easy for women....
I discussed the article with my executive director, who drew the same inference from the piece. It was the same old reasoning: Women have done something terrible by becoming pregnant and they should have to suffer in dealing with it... The argument wasn’t much different in spirit from the regulatory hoop-jumping my clinic and others have had to perform or from the legislative restrictions some states have imposed or tried to impose.
In fact, it wasn’t different from the essence of the antichoice belief that women should be subjugated and that their bodies are the property of the state. Pregnancy, the argument goes, needs to be associated directly with shame: Shame on any woman who might desire to relieve herself of an unwanted pregnancy.
If women are trusted to manage their own affairs and to take care of their own bodies, then there should be no reason to think that they might somehow “abuse” the right to have abortions. If women have the right to end a pregnancy, there’s no reason to think that pregnancies will become any less important. Does anyone wring their hands over men "abusing" the right to get a vasectomy or that vasectomies might make sexual intercourse less meaningful? Of course not — men's decisions about what to do with their bodies is generally respected in a culture where patriarchal and paternalistic attitudes are fueled by millennia of misogynistic religion.
Women, in contrast, are treated like children who need the guidance of men to avoid making the "wrong" decisions for the "wrong" reasons. The fact that even ostensible “friends” and “supporters” of abortion rights have such attitudes is disturbing. How can they justify their concern over the prospect of women making their own, unfettered and unregulated choices about what to do with their own bodies and reproduction? I doubt many actually think about this and are simply acting on the basis of traditional, religious attitudes about women needing to be treated like children because of inferior reasoning, education, and natures.
Even if their ostensible support for legalized abortion comes with personal opposition to abortion itself, the fact is that you can't respect a person's autonomy if you don't let them make choices you would personally disagree with. Making it difficult for women to make decisions you dislike isn't much better than banning outright those decisions, especially when that attitude is ultimately founded on a faith-based perspective that others can't be expected to share.
This is not a matter of treating abortion like murder, to use the rhetoric of anti-choice activists, because the people in question do not object to abortion per se. Instead, this is an objection to women having access to abortion that is too easy or too quick. Such a position requires the premise that the person seeking an abortion should not be trusted to necessarily make the best, wisest, or most moral decision when it comes to what happens to their own body.
We don't tell voters that they can't be trusted to make the right choice without counseling and some time to think about their choice. We don't tell men seeking a vasectomy that they can't be trusted to make the right choice without counseling and some time to think about it. We only do this to women seeking an abortion, as if they were children who need patriarchal authority figures to guide them and help them make the "right" decisions. This is just one of many sad legacies we have inherited from traditional, patriarchal religions in the West.
