No landlord should have the right to kill an unwanted tenant. Why feminists have got it wrong on Abortion..

 

I do not say that feminism is an evil force. Like many other well-intended movements, its objectives are noble. Over the centuries women have been subjugated and often denied an existence, livelihood and life of parity with men. Certainly, this needed to be rectified and the feminist movement has indeed played a big role in achieving emancipation of women. (For futuristic thoughts on gender, this blog might be worth a peek http://karmasutratkos.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-changing-contours-of-gender.html).

However, on the issue of abortion (or ‘voluntary abortion’ as it might be called to distinguish it from miscarriage), the stand of most feminists is not congruent with the ideal of avoiding negative karma in this universe. In this article, some of the arguments and their counterarguments are discussed.  Some practical solutions the massive negativity of killing a foetus are also proffered.

Argument 1:  “An apple seed is not the same as an apple tree”  is used to suggest that the unborn foetus is not the same as a full human being. After all, an apple seed thrown into a bin is not the same as cutting up an apple tree.

Counterargument : In case of an apple seed, even after careful planting it will still take many years before it becomes a robust tree. There are various factors such as soil conditions, weather and so on which determine if the tree will finally happen.  If it is a good apple sapling, the act of destroying such a sapling would most likely amount to killing a tree before it reaches the full potential. According to Centers for Disease control, in USA, as on 2020, only 1 in 100 pregnancies are lost naturally. Hence, if killing a baby is karmically negative and legally wrong and criminal, and the probability of most foetuses becoming a baby is 99%, then there is no reason why killing a foetus should not invite the same condemnation and punishment as killing a baby. 

[There could be further elaborate discussions on various stages from a zygote to an embryo to a foetus, but for all practical purposes, the moment the sperm and egg fuse together, there is an irreversible change which has happened and that new fused cell is a new spiritual entity.]

Argument 2 : “All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.” Susan Faludi.

Counterargument : Needless to say, there is some truth in this statement. In many parts of the world, the moment a woman decides to have a baby, her career and personal aspirations go into deep freeze. The discomforts she faces during pregnancy – from morning sickness to mood swings all have a detrimental impact on her job performance or full-time education.

Having said this, except for failure in contraception and rape (the situation of rape pregnancy is discussed separately), pregnancy is something entered consciously by both parents. Some people would like to pretend it was not a ‘conscious wish’, but just a good-natured spontaneous love-making. If I throw a glass bottle high in the air on a busy street, there is a good chance it will hit someone on the head. I cannot escape the responsibility for it, by arguing that it was just good-natured ‘spontaneous’ act.

This brings us to the other part of the same argument which is Faludi’s implicit complaint that while the pregnancy happens due to an act indulged in by both men and women, women seem to have to bear the lion’s share of the ‘adverse’ consequences starting from the physical symptoms to the collateral damage to career and/or education. Yes, while that is unfair and men should bear equal responsibility for their part of their contribution to the pregnancy, one must remember that this (physical burden of pregnancy) was not created by any man-made system injustice.  Moreover, punishing a third party namely, the unborn child, by killing it, does not make this inequality right (‘two wrongs do not make a right’ principle).

Argument 3 : “To use a woman's body, against her free will and choice, as a receptacle for unwanted pregnancy has got to be seen as a kind of 'legalized rape'……..”Howard Moody.

Counterargument: This is the more elaborate version of the slogan ‘my body, my choice’, sometimes simply referred to as ‘pro-choice’.  The word ‘pro-choice’ almost makes it sound like the fight for the right to kill an unborn baby is a fundamental choice that women should have in free societies. It makes women look like the victim, forgetting that the foetus is the one killed at the end. Hence, unsurprisingly, in order to make women forget the killing part, milder terms were designed to camouflage it, for example, by calling it ‘abortion’. Sometimes even this is further diluted with terms such as ‘removal’,  to create an impression that it is a mere commonplace surgical procedure such as removal of a non-malignant growth. Another term often used is ‘terminating a pregnancy’ as if the decision to terminate a pregnancy by killing a foetus is as simple as closing a tap or putting off a light switch. Do we use similar euphemistic positive phrases for ‘shooting a human who enters our house without permission’ or ‘killing a tenant who refuses to vacate our property’?

If we look at the womb as a temporary accommodation for an unborn child, should the owner of the accommodation (the mother) have the right to kill the temporary occupant (unborn child), assuming the occupant is not wanted by the owner? In case of unwanted tenants who refuse to leave our accommodation despite our written notices, the state permits us to evict them by the due process of law. However, no humane state (to the best of my knowledge) allows us to kill the occupants of my property just because I do not want them anymore on my property. Then why is this terrible deed permitted by nations when it comes to an unborn baby, which is only temporarily occupying the bodily space of the mother?

This also brings us to one of the possible solutions for abortion in a civilised, ethical and humane society. In an advanced society, if a woman does not want to have a baby for any reason, the state must use advanced medical technology to transfer the baby from the womb of the mother to a facility where children can be brought up by the state. If the pregnancy was the result of voluntary sexual intercourse, and provided the mother/father are financially capable, then the mother/father must also pay a one-time discharge fee for contribution towards the child’s upkeep. Then the parents must sign a discharge agreement giving up all her rights to their baby. The state must bring up these babies and perhaps put them up for adoption by genuinely interested, child-seeking families.

Hang on, some feminists might argue. Is it not the owner’s right on how their body should be used? How can the uterus and a woman’s entire body be compared to an inanimate object like a rented room or house?

As mentioned in the 2016 book  ‘Karmasutra The Karma of Sex’ (chapter 12),  this idea that every bit of my body is owned by me and therefore only I must decide how to use it as I think fit, is the fundamental flaw with the paradigm of freedom in Western societies. When we often talk of ‘I’ very often we talk of our intelligence and conscious brain power alone. But the reality of karma is that every unit of our body starting from the cell to organs have their own intelligence and will. As the bullish leader (monarch) of this parliament (of our body),  the brain and conscious intelligence often take the final decisions. But this does not mean our leader (the conscious brain) is always right. For example, our leader sometimes decides it is ‘okay’ to consume copious quantities of alcohol (far exceeding what is easily manageable). If we were able to hear the voice of liver, whose job is to detoxify our body of these incoming toxins, we would have known that Mr./Ms. Liver was screaming hoarse about not wanting any alcoholic drinks. Similarly when a person decides to tattoo his/her skin extensively, he/she thinks they are only doing what they love to their body. However, if Mr. (or Ms.) Skin’s opinion was sought, we would know that it is a gross violation of skin’s right not to be poked, disfigured or pierced.

My point is that pegging the whole paradigm of freedom to the idea of ‘individual freedom’ and then linking this individual freedom to the will of the conscious brain alone (as the last point of call) is a grossly erroneous paradigm. Under this faulty paradigm, societies which call themselves humane, have historically done grave injustices to those who have not been able to articulate their views, using a logical pathway.

To some extent, humane societies have made laws to protect these groups despite their inability to articulate their own rights - for example, children below talking age, mentally challenged, animals and so on.  Yet, even in such so-called ‘humane societies’, there are entities which have their own will which is still not acknowledged merely because these entities are unable to make their ‘will’ known.  (For example, individual organs of the body, foetus inside a womb etc. are still considered decisions of the individual’s conscious brains, even when the decisions of the conscious brain go against the actual wishes of these entities.) Simply because there is no existing technology to listen to what these entities have to ‘say’, we assume these entities have no will. This is a fundamentally wrong assumption, which ethical societies need to get rid of.

I am hopeful that this era will pass and we will come to a more technologically advanced era, where we will be more clearly able to listen to the will of individual organs and the will of unborn babies. Hence, when that era comes (and it may not be too far away), societies/civilisations which call themselves humane will have the duty to listen to both a woman’s uterus and other important reproductive organs as well as the unborn baby, when it comes to abortion.

Even if the last two paragraphs above are more doxological than a ‘scientific’ argument (based on what we currently know), the important ethical principles that must guide our thinking on abortion should be:  

a) No owner of property has the right to kill his/her unwanted tenants

and

b) A third, innocent party should not have to pay for the mistake(s) of other(s) because two wrongs do not make a right.

 

And to the hardcore feminists I would say:

Emancipation of one suffering group should not be at the cost of other speechless beings and their right to live.

When travelling towards light, dark, unethical, torturous pathways are not always unavoidable.  Often, there are better lit, but longer roads available.

©Staju Jacob, 2022.

Staju Jacob is the author of the path-breaking book Karmasutra The Karma of Sex, which deals with the karmic spirituality of consensual sexual actions. This book is available globally on various Amazon sites in Paperback and Kindle, Sony Kobo, Google books, Iphone Ibook etc.  He may be contacted on Twitter @KaRmasutraTKOS  or through www.staju.com