Abortion Bans Don’t Really Make Exceptions for the Life of the Mother

The laws’ “exceptions” rely on an impoverished conception of human life.

This November, ballot measures in twelve different states will seek to encode abortion rights into law. Five of them aim to repeal state-level abortion bans adopted after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Notably in Florida, the vote would overturn the current ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. But the debate over the vote has failed to name the real stakes.

Political ads in Florida have spotlighted women who could not get the abortion they needed in a life-threatening emergency. But defenders claim that the ban makes exceptions for the life of the mother. Florida’s Department of Health has even accused TV ads of misleading the public: it notes specifically how the law allows abortions “to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

Even if ambiguous provisions like this bear no responsibility for the debated health tragedies (which I really doubt), do the exceptions express any kind of respect for the life of the mother?

The answer is no: even with the exceptions, the laws are at war with women’s lives. When the bans prevent ordinary, non-emergency abortions, they literally threaten women’s lives. To think otherwise is to work with an impoverished conception of what human life actually is.

A six-week ban gives women little time even to realize they are pregnant, let alone to end the pregnancy. They have at best a small two-week window. For those who notice too late, their best shot is to leave the state, to spend perhaps thousands of dollars and many hours just to get a fifteen-minute procedure. Of course, stopping ordinary abortions is the purpose of the law.

This outcome is not a mere “inconvenience” for a woman. It crushes the plans and dreams that literally make up her life.

Human life is more than just a heartbeat. Human life means the pursuit of material and psychological values: a productive career, the knowledge needed to navigate the world, meaningful friendships, and fulfilling love. Human life means exercising the sovereignty to choose one’s path, defining, integrating and accomplishing such values across a lifetime.

The ability to pursue these values is not only a requirement of the “quality” of life. Any organism’s life is defined by its distinctive self-sustaining activities, the distinctive values it pursues. A deer’s life is defined by its active pursuit of food and mates. A deer frozen in ice or shot by a hunter (even if it still has many living cells) is dead.

By the same token, a brain-dead being with human DNA and a heartbeat may have something akin to the life of a vegetable, but the living human being we might have loved is gone. It lacks the working human brain it needs to pursue human values. Slavery is abhorrent because it treats human beings as animals, as good for brute labor but not for living by their minds.

Likewise, women forced to bear unwanted children may still breathe and have a pulse and even pursue some human values. They’re not dead. But living is not merely escaping death. It’s the untrammeled, positive pursuit of values.

To rob a woman of the central choice of when and whether to have a child is to rob her of part of her life: it may not destroy her brain but it stops her from using it, i.e., from using her sovereign judgment to control her own body and lifepath. That is a real “impairment of a major bodily function.”

Anti-abortion activists brazenly claim that their bans are in the name of the “life” of an embryo. Yet at six weeks it is barely distinguishable from the embryos of other mammals. It is a tiny mass, roughly the size of a pea, fused to its mothers’ uterus and incapable even of the activity of a flatworm, let alone the activity of a thinking human being. Because the anti-abortion movement fetishizes sub-sub-human entities and dares to pretend they have “rights,” it treats women as sub-human birthing animals.

A woman who wants to live a human existence must be able to eliminate even uncertain threats to her health if she chooses. She should not have to find two doctors who agree or one who will say the threat is “imminent.” Abortion bans that threaten the life plans of a woman are real threats to her life. Those who would thwart her plans in the name of “life” don’t know the meaning of human life.