Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett thinks that eliminating a right to abortion would not force women into motherhood, because we have “safe haven” laws that make it legal to abandon newborns. But she’s wrong about what it means to force someone into motherhood. Barrett herself appears to believe that a human fetus has the full moral status of a person from the moment of conception.
Thus, on her view, a woman who wants to abort her pregnancy is someone who is indifferent to her own child. It is this misunderstanding of the attitudes of women and girls seeking abortion that leads Barrett into error.
Many people reacted in horror to Barrett’s comments, pointing out that the path of pregnancy plus giving up one’s gestated child is often a traumatic path, and it should not be forced upon anyone. While that is true, there is also another serious mistake Barrett is making.
What Barrett misses is that many women and girls who don’t love their fetuses, who desperately want to be rid of them, will love these fetuses very much if they grow into their babies. What Barrett misses is that many people don’t see early fetuses as persons. But there’s no question whatsoever that human babies are persons. Telling a woman, “We’re going to make you create your own child but it’s no big deal, don’t worry about motherhood, because then we’ll let you give up your child” is cruel.
There’s more than one way to force someone into motherhood. Barrett is focused on how depriving someone of an easy legal means to give up her child forces her to mother the child. But we can also force someone into motherhood by forcing her into a situation in which she creates a child she loves. Many women who desperately want to abort would also desperately prefer to raise the child if forced to carry their pregnancy to term.
To illustrate this point, let’s consider a lower-stakes case of forcing. Target recently announced they will be closed on Thanksgiving from now on, to avoid forcing their employees to work on the holiday. In what sense does being open on Thanksgiving force employees to work? After all, they all have the option to quit. But many workers need their jobs. Because they are forced into this bad choice situation, they are forced to work. While some workers may quit when given that choice, that doesn’t change the fact that those who do work on Thanksgiving are doing so because they were forced.
Similarly, in the much higher-stakes case of being forced to choose between keeping one’s own child who grew in one’s body for nine months or giving that child away to be raised by others (by strangers or by the state), being forced into that choice situation is, for many women, being forced into motherhood. The fact that some women who are forced to gestate will also give up their children does not change the fact that those who are forced to gestate and then choose to raise their children have been forced into motherhood.
I can only assume that this point is lost on Barrett because the attitudes of the girls and women I’m describing are so alien to her. If you see someone who wants to abort as someone willing to kill her own child (because you think personhood begins at conception), then you see her as someone who’d be willing to cast her baby aside. But girls and women who want abortions are not baby-killers; they are choosing the deaths of fetuses who are not yet their children.
The right to abortion isn’t just about women’s rights to control whether they are forced to endure the experiences and health risks of pregnancy and childbirth (although that’s hugely important). It’s also about women’s rights not to be forced to turn a fetus that doesn’t matter to them into a child they love and refuse to give up. The right to abortion is about the right to choose whether to become a mother — and no “safe haven” law can change that.
Harman is Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and Human Values at Princeton University. She is author of “Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion” and other publications.