Who is deserving?

Abortion bans often come with exemptions. But all bans tell a terrible story about women's rights.

I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks considering pregnancy as a result of rape in wartime, for a story I am working on (sometimes I look at my workload and wonder why I don’t become a nature writer instead, except the last time I did nature writing it was about mass death of birds!). Ukraine’s Prosecutor General is investigating 155 cases of Russian soldiers using rape as a weapon of war – the true figure will be much higher.

The anti-abortion activists I spend most of my time looking at do not believe abortion should be allowed in cases of rape, including rape as a weapon of war. Anti-abortion MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg will even claim that abortion following rape is to commit “a second wrong”; others say that it is punishing the foetus for the rapist’s crime.

It remains the case however, that many people – even those who might be broadly anti-choice – believe that if a woman or girl is raped, she should be entitled to abortion. That so many states in the US have banned abortion even in cases of rape has become a cause for outrage. Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin have all implemented bans with no exemptions for when a woman or girl is raped.

Surely, critics of those bans say, that there can be no question to allow an abortion if a woman or girl is raped. Surely!

And they are right of course. No one should force a rape victim to continue an unwanted pregnancy. To coin JRM’s term, it is committing a second wrong.

The exemption exists even in Poland, where abortion is banned in almost all circumstances. In most European countries where abortion is only available on demand before 10/12/14 weeks, a woman can access a later-term abortion if she has been raped. The global outrage when, in post-Dobbs USA, a child was forced to fly across states to access abortion after rape emphasised this: denying girls abortions after rape is seen as a cruelty too far.

Of course, I agree. It is an extreme cruelty. But the problem with exemptions is that they create a hierarchy of who is deserving of abortion care, and who is not. Our argument has to be that all women deserve abortion care, no matter how or why they are pregnant, and no matter how or why they want a termination.

When we advocate for reproductive rights, it’s not surprising that we go to the most extreme cases: where abortion bans force a woman to bear a rapist’s child; where abortion bans force women to give birth to babies that will die within minutes; where abortion bans lead to women becoming desperately ill, even dying.

Look at the harm, we say, pointing to the fear, the grief, the horror. Look what you are doing.

But in our urgency of pointing to the most extreme and horrifying cases, we risk losing sight of how all abortion bans harm all women. Every abortion ban removes women’s fundamental rights over our own bodies, and says that we are less deserving of rights than men. That is to harm every woman, pregnant or not.

A woman who is pregnant for whatever reason and does not want to be pregnant for whatever reason should be allowed to safely and legally access a termination. She should not have to prove that she is deserving of an abortion. She should not have to prove suffering in order to be entitled to her human rights.

Yet that is what exemptions demand. It says that some women are deserving of abortion care, and, crucially, they are only deserving because they have suffered. Other women are not deserving of abortion care because, as the far-right Slovakian L’SNS Party so gracelessly put it, they are “selfish” and “debauched”.

This is fundamental. Not only does it tap into a deeper, ancient misogyny that sees women as only having worth if they have suffered, it also reminds us that women who exercise our rights are seen as selfish. Abortion bans push the message that women should not have their own needs, wants and desires. Our bodies are not our own, they are for the service of others (be that men, patriarchy, the state…).

Rape is a fundamental attack on a woman’s right to her own body – to her bodily integrity. When I interviewed psychologist Kateryna Shukh last year about supporting Ukrainian women who had been raped in the war, she described them as “losing the safety of their own bodies”.

Abortion bans are a further attack on a woman’s bodily integrity. Any ban, even with rape exemptions, says that women’s bodies are not our own and that they can be used, abused, and exploited by patriarchal authority. Abortion bans are a tool of male violence and male supremacy, designed to enforce women’s inequality.

Every woman deserves access to her full human rights. There are no exceptions.

Obligatory book plug

Not much to report on the book front this week except that it is only six weeks until launch!

You can pre-order it here.

What I’m writing

A few months ago I spent a terrifying afternoon on Punternet, the website that allows men to ‘review’ sex workers, often in the most degrading and upsetting terms.

One review came from a man who posted how he had become really turned on while watching women at his gym, and so went to a brothel afterwards to pay for sex.

I could not stop thinking about it. I kept thinking about how women are living our normal lives, taking part in every day activities like going to the gym, and men are looking at us, objectifying us, and then using us an excuse to go commercially sexually exploit another woman.

So I took this review and decided to look into sexual assaults in exercise settings. I sent freedom of information requests to police forces in England and Wales and was absolutely shocked by the results. Girls being raped and groped in leisure centres, women being assaulted in gyms… it was horrifying.

I worked with Lauren Crosby-Medlicott to write The Big Read in the i paper exploring how even when we are exercising, women are being sexually assaulted.

You can read it here:

Women and children can’t even swim without fear of assault – why aren’t they protected?

What I loved

This week is a big shout out to my “media pal” (inside joke) Chaminda Jayanetti for his and Michael Savage’s scoop on how domestic violence victims are being denied safe housing, for the Observer.

Also slightly obsessed with this extract from the new Boris book by Antony Seldon in the Times, and the claim that Johnson liked to say ‘c**t” a lot in front of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain because he thinks that is what working-class people do, and “even though Dom wasn’t, he came from the northeast, which was working class enough for Boris”.

THESE PEOPLE! Honestly…

What I’m reading

I just this morning finished Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, about a 38-year-old British-Palestinian actress who goes to Haifa and then the West Bank to play Gertrude in Hamlet. But it is also about Palestine, and movement, and grief, and family, and what war/occupation does to art and to space.

I finished Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong which was such an important book and particularly urgent with the UK Government’s ever-closer relationship with Kagame’s government in Rwanda.

Golden Age fiction this past fortnight was Sparkling Cyanide, By The Pricking of my Thumbs; and Nemesis. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine that part of the reason I love this era of detective fiction is because of the outfits, which is why I liked Sparkling Cyanide, lots of good silk dresses going on in that one.

What I’m watching

OK so seven years later than everyone else, but I watched Moonlight and it is just as good as everyone said it was. I never felt quite resilient enough to watch it but I am so so glad I did. I also watched The Sound of Music coz it was on the telly.

Thank you for reading! Please subscribe, please share… and I’ll be back next weekend with more insights on abortion rights, more writing, reading, watching.

Ciao for now!

Sian