#7 The right to life implies a right to safe abortion

This is a follow-up to the Safe Abortion Day on 28.09.2024 with an urgent recommendation to vote or better said: who not to vote for on today's election day on 29.09.2024 in Austria. Unfortunately, an audio version is missing because I am ill and could not record it. I will submit it as soon as possible!

CN: This text is about abortion rights and rules, so there will be talk about death, pregnancies, christian-fundamentalists, violinists and rape (but not in any detail). 

For a long time, I thought that abortion was morally reprehensible. I thought that if you decide to procreate and don't use contraception properly, you must take responsibility for your own actions and live with the consequences. An innocent child should not suffer because of its mother's (bad) decisions. A child is always a gift, and abortion is therefore a terrible murder. After all, fetuses have fingernails when only being 12th weeks old!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn't have much to do with feminism back then and even less with moral theory. But obviously all the more so with the Christian fundamentalist discourse on abortion in Austria - even if I wasn't aware of it, of course. At the time, I wasn't really interested in whether this position was well or poorly founded; what was important to me was what it conveyed about me: I wanted to be perceived as an extremely good, selfless person. Because if that happened to me, I would never abort MY child! I only realized how much damage this attitude can cause many, many years later when I actually met a person who had had an abortion. I realized that there are very good reasons for having one. I became aware of the cliché from which I based my previous position. 

(Internalized) misogyny

I assumed a woman who was promiscuous, lacked foresight and was selfish. Who would place no value on any life that might grow in her womb. My friend made me realize that this cannot apply to everyone. And today I know that this image of a woman that I had in my head was internalized misogyny. Women and those who are wrongly categorized in this way, who lead a sexually self-determined life, have always been devalued. The sexuality of these people is socially assigned a certain entitlement and made dependent on a male-constructed counterpart. It belongs to him. Innocence is a gift, best kept until marriage, and then only his. I don't think the majority of the Austrian population would even see themselves as Christian and hold this view. But the claim that sexuality categorized as female is a matter for a committed relationship and should at best not be acted out too often outside of it is relatively widespread and a continuity of this extreme position. It is not for nothing that the swear word “slut” is regularly used in this context. 

For people categorized as male, there is no equivalent to this, only the saying that they should “sow their wild oats”. This often goes hand in hand with bio-essentialist assumptions about gender, i.e. those that want to define gender differences on the basis of biological differences. It often sounds like this: Men can't help but have many different sex partners, cheat, etc. because they have so much testosterone in their blood. This makes those poor fellas completely incapable of acting on their own will (note the sarcasm). But if, for example, a woman cheats on her male partner, this leads to offense and horror, which in the worst case can lead to femicide. The beginning of this pyramid of violence can already be seen, for example, in the insult of “slut” or “bitch”. In my life, I've been on both ends of these insults.