This is why abortion is an issue

Women have to choose whether they want to bring a given man’s progeny into the world. That’s why abortion is an issue.

But abortion is needed for human evolution to accelerate.

For most of human existence, we were hunter-gatherers. These egalitarian small groups had mating that resembled many animals. Women controlled whom they mated with, and hence whom they gave birth to. This, not “the environment”, is the primary means of evolutionary selection. Humans are more complicated than that sounds. Women don’t always have good judgement. Abortion offered a second opportunity to select.

All this changed by the time of recorded history. Humans developed agriculture, and the settled, hierarchical states that it supported. Women’s roles changed. Children were a farm’s beasts of burden, and women had to have as many pregnancies as possible. Agriculture subordinated women to a restricted role, under the control of men. In general, men don’t take their evolutionary role seriously. They would impregnate many women without concern of whether they’d produce valued offspring. That’s what happens in many species where males have mating choice. Usually it happens when there are plenty of resources to go around. You don’t really need evolution, when the environment is plentiful. Although farmer diets may not have been well-rounded, they were consistent. As long as agriculture ruled, evolutionary selection ceased.

Philosophers begin the abortion story. Recorded history about abortion starts with the ancient Greeks. Aristotle, a realist, decided that abortion was lawful prior to the fetus getting a soul — 40 days for males, 90 days females. He failed to notice any sociological subtext to his views. The Romans were divided, with some refusing to kill any fetus, and others willing to abort if the woman had cause.

The Old Testament describes a test for female infidelity: make her drink a potion that forces a miscarriage, and probably kills her. Some Christians consider this a metaphor that abortion is evil. It’s like calling witch burning a prohibition on smoking. Tertullian, the ultra-prudish early Christian theologian beloved of evangelicals, believed the soul began at conception, hence abortion is always murder. But in the 3rd century, the deeply philosophical St. Augustine returned to Aristotle: a dividing line existed between an unformed, soulless lump, and a little person in the womb.

Jewish texts also divide the fetus into a period before having, and a period with a soul. Abortion in order to save a woman’s life is always appropriate.

Abortion was a dangerous fact of life in Europe and North America, until the 20th century. In the 19th century, perhaps 20% or more of all pregnancies in the US were ended by abortion. Perhaps 30% of women died during them.

Those who provided abortions weren’t doctors, so the new medical profession opposed the procedure. So to did the 19th century feminist movement. They considered it a symptom of marital rape and the seduction of innocent women. These feminists belonged to upper classes, perhaps, but they were radicals. They wanted to recover a role for women to select their own offspring, but they didn’t want them to have to use abortion for it.

Once people moved off farms, things began to change. The role of women improved, and their position in determining future generations grew with it.

By 1910 nearly every US state criminalized abortions, which was often seen as an issue for young, sexually “loose” women. In fact, at least half were married with children. In England it was recognized such women sought abortions. They were advised to abstain or practice withdrawal. In France awareness grew that abortions were used by married women after contraceptive failure. It led to abortion legalization in France.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a new generation of feminists, attuned to the needs of working families, campaigned for a safe abortions for women. This changed perceptions in England and the U.S.. The Soviet Union began by offering free abortions on demand. Stalin reversed course, making it illegal.

In the U.S. momentum built after WWII to provide abortion services to women. By 1970, 13 states allowed abortion to protect the life and health of the woman. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that “health” included mental and physical well-being, permitting abortion for any woman who felt it necessary.

In 1973 the Court made it’s Roe vs. Wade decision, which ruled unconstitutional a Texas statute that made abortion illegal except to save a mother’s life. Roe was a very subtle decision. It determined a right to privacy exists that protects a women’s reasons for having an abortion. She need not claim it was due to rape, or necessary for health. Her decisions are her own.

Opponents of Roe blast this reasoning, since it doesn’t address the issues of fetus life. But Roe hints at the real issue about abortion: who decides whom the next generation will be.

Although our society may believe that men and women should have an equal claim in the next generation, it doesn’t work out that way. Men and women often mate when they’re not sober, or under delusions of romance, or even because they don’t recognize what life conditions they’re under. Men can decide not to participate further in the next generation’s gestation, but women can’t.

Crude nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, believes that population growth is key to a nation or a religion’s power. But humanity needs quality, not quantity, in successive generations. Women will always be in charge of quality control, because they are responsible for bring the child into the world. Abortion is a selection tool.

Some men really hate the female role in determining evolutionary selection. It’s something they sense, although don’t put into words. That role gives women a lot of power, power men have not shared since the dawn of agriculture.

Women oppose abortion, too, because they belong to cultures that inculcate it. But the culture is male dominated.

“Right to life” and “right to choose” are abortion’s slogans. What’s really at issue, however, is who selects the next generation. Men may care a bit, or care a lot about things like ethnicity. Women have a reason to care about the future: it’s under their control.

Men may hate knowing that women don’t want their progeny. They may hate knowing that women have the power to reject any man’s progeny. “You will not replace us,” they may say. That’s what drives abortion opponents, not the fetus. Men want women to live with the offspring they’ve got in their belly, not the one they wish they had. For these foes of abortion, it’s not about the future, but about who controls it.

Of course, this brief, potted history ignores the most common mating scenario in the world, parental choice. Probably more marriages are determined by parents, even today, than by the mating partners. This is, however, just as foreign to the concept of evolutionary selection as male choice. Parents are usually self-interested, hoping to obtain resources. They are biased by wealth and status, and concepts of “appropriateness.”

Human evolution won’t take off until female choice is better protected. Abortion, for better or worse, is part of that.