Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abortion, Religious Freedom and Women's Choice

The promise of outlawing abortion is why Trump is president. With Ruth Bader Ginsburg gone, Trump will move to appoint a Supreme Court justice who will do what he can to outlaw abortions.

In 1803, the British outlawed abortions after the fifth month of pregnancy. Why five months? The soul entered the body at that point.

The issue of abortion is – for the individual – a religious question. And you don’t even have to be religious for it to be a religious question. At the moment after birth, we have a baby. Precious. Unique. Deserving of our protection and care. At the moment before conception, we have sperm and egg. No one mourns a period, the regular loss of eggs. No one decides to press charges over the fact that in a single ejaculate more than a billion sperm could be squandered by some horny teenager, enough to populate a planet. Other than the lunatic fringe, nobody argues that we should kill babies or save eggs and sperm – the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. The debate is at what point between those sure compass points does this pass the threshold from living (sperm and egg are alive) to a life. The question of when sperm and egg deserve the same legal protection as a baby rests on your belief – whether or not framed as religious – about when human waste becomes human. The question is whether we can ever be as certain about the point at which this happens as the British Parliament was in 1803. The question is, who should make the choice about when it passes this threshold.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that each individual woman should make this choice.

A woman recently told me about her abortion at 17. From this experience she has become a voter who supports any candidate who opposes abortion. For her, abortion was a traumatic experience from which she wants to spare other girls and women. I was a terrible listener for a host of reasons. But one thing I did not articulate was simply this: I don’t know how any 17 year old with an unwanted pregnancy avoids trauma. Let’s say that you decide to keep the baby, become a mother before you’re old enough to vote, make a commitment to help a little life launch into adulthood, a commitment you’re making that is longer than your own life at that point. That sounds really traumatic to me. Or let’s say that you carry this baby to term and then – your mind and body prepared to care for this new baby – you adopt it out. Or let’s say that you have an abortion, ending that pregnancy. I’ll never be pregnant and have this penchant for running what-if scenarios, but I don’t think I’m different from any other girl or women in that whichever of those three paths I would choose I would wonder for the rest of my life about what it would have been like to have chosen one of those other paths. And with that wondering might come some measure of guilt, grief and second-guessing.

And that would be for myself. I don’t even know how one goes about making such a choice for anyone else.

In the early days of its one-child policy, the Chinese government actually forced abortions on women who already had a child and became pregnant. In places where the church dominates – such as Ireland until recently – the Irish government actually forced women to carry a child to term. The only thing more traumatic than making a choice about what to do with an unwanted pregnancy? Having an abortion or pregnancy forced on you.

Sex is the stuff of pop songs and poetry. It’s wonderful. Rape is the stuff of crime and nightmares. It is awful. What is the difference? Choice.

Pregnancy, too, is a miracle. A little life developing. The promise of a new baby, the life to follow. A forced pregnancy is a nightmare. Wracked by questions of how you will provide for this little person about to come into the world dependent on you, the you who may feel completely overwhelmed at the thought of such a responsibility. What is one difference between a pregnancy that is a miracle or a pregnancy that is a trauma? Choice.

The question is, Who should make that choice? The evangelicals who support Trump know when life begins and they think they should choose for you. Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that this should be the woman’s choice.

We could explore the question of when life begins, when the soul enters the body. I find it a fascinating question. (When does a boy become a man? At 12 like the amusement park ticket prices suggest or at 21 like the bars insist? When do sperm and egg become a baby?) But there is evidence that this question is not the issue for the evangelicals who want to outlaw abortion. For them, this is a matter of them deciding what is right for a woman. What is the evidence? These people protest outside of abortion clinics but never outside of in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics where even more embryos are destroyed than in abortion clinics. The state senator who sponsored a 2019 bill to ban abortions in Alabama carved out an exception for IVF because, he said, “the egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” For him – and I’m sure everyone who voted on his bill – this wasn’t a question of when life began. It was a question of which choices society should allow a woman. As technology advances, we could conceivably make new human life from any cell and make viable an emerging life from about any stage. Science – like religion – has answers but does not have THE answer to the question of whether to treat this tiny potentiality more like a newborn or an ejaculate.

At the root of the question of abortion is the question of whether women have the right to define their own life. Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated at the top of her law school class and had trouble getting a job because she was a mother. (Her husband, who graduated from law school a year earlier, had had no problem getting a job even though he was a father.) Ginsburg fought for gender equality. She thought that women should have the same options that men do. Society was happy to tell women who they should be and what they could do. She thought that it should instead be the woman who defined that and spent decades fighting for gender equality.

Of all the choices that define a woman’s life, it is hard to imagine one as fundamental to who she becomes as the choice about whether to have a child. Some people think they know better than the individual woman about how to reconcile the myriad questions wrapped up in this question. That boggles my mind. Choice is unavoidable in this question of abortion: the question is, Should the choice be made by a voter who has never met this woman or by the woman whose life is so profoundly impacted and defined by which choice she makes?

Yesterday I wrote about the first amendment. It begins by granting to the individual the choice about how – or even whether – to worship, which beliefs to have. Belief is inescapable on this question of when human waste becomes human treasure, and the real question is: whose belief should determine how you act? The first amendment clearly states that is not a job for congress but instead that beliefs and how we act on them is the domain of the individual. Even individual women. On this, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was clear.