Is Abortion Necessary for Gender Equality?

This Wednesday, Erika Bachiochi, a pro-life feminist legal scholar, spoke to us about abortion and women’s equality in the context of the 1992 Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

In that decision, the court upheld the essential decisions in Roe v. Wade, stating that women have the right to terminate their pregnancy on the basis of the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. While Ms. Bachiochi took issue with the legal justification of the ruling, what worries her the most is how the court frames abortion as essential to gender equality. 

In the court’s plurality opinion, Justices O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter wrote: “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” 

This rationale mirrored the argument of many leading feminists at the time, including that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg argued, a woman's autonomy over her life’s course is essential to her enjoyment of equal citizenship stature and thus the access to abortion is a necessary condition of true gender equality. Largely due to Ginsburg’s leadership, the right to abortion and women’s equality entered the public consciousness as inextricably connected over the past decades. 

Nevertheless, this allegation does not hold true 20 some years after Casey. According to Ms. Bachiochi, easy abortion access has not rendered women freer or more equal; rather, it frustrates authentic gender equality -- a cause that Ginsburg herself had so passionately defended. 

In her article for the American Jesuit Institute, Ms. Bachiochi writes: “in tearing at the first bond of human solidarity between a mother and her unborn child, the putative right to abortion has distorted the shared responsibilities that adhere in male-female sexual relationships, promoted a view of childbearing as one consumer choice among many and greatly contributed to the dim view of caregiving ever since.” 

Our law has an ability to incentivize and disincentivize our behaviors, she argues. As such, when abortion is made readily available in our society, that reality shapes our culture. Sexual partners may take more risk, leading to more unplanned pregnancies; employers are less willing to accommodate pregnant women; government funds flow more to abortion clinics than to caregiving facilities. All in all, abortion has diminished our view of childbearing as something that is high-cost and low-reward. 

Further, Ms. Bachiochi finds that an easy access to abortion clouds the responsbility of the father in our cultural norm. By “freeing” women from the burden of childbearing, abortion also creates an easy solution for men who does not want to take up the responsibility of fatherhood. Pro-choicers seek to champion gender equality, yet perhaps a more authentic form of equality consists of equal responsibility in child-raising from both the mother and the father. 

The escalating fight over abortion in our society is symptomatic of our flawed view of gender equality, and our future calls for rethinking what equality truly means. “Both men and women seek excellence in all we do,” says Ms. Bachiochi, “perhaps equality is to strive for that excellence, in work and in family.” 

Nancy Yu (Class of 22’)