The problem with abortion

When I was in seventh grade, I read a post-apocalyptic novel by Walter Tevis called Mockingbird that had a profound effect on me. I strongly identified with the characters, who were trying to preserve writing in a post-literate society. But one thing really confused me. To show how awful this future world was, Tevis noted that there were robots on every corner who would give an abortion on demand. Wait, what? As a horny teenage girl, a future full of free, anonymous robot abortion sounded pretty good. But Tevis was hardly the only science fiction writer who thought my idea of Utopia was a nightmare.

In the 1970s, Philip K. Dick made a permanent enemy of Joanna Russ and thousands of other pro-choice activists by writing a short story called ‘The Pre-Persons.’ It was about how Roe v. Wade would lead to a world where kids could be “aborted” until their souls entered their bodies — which the US government arbitrarily defined as the moment a child could learn algebra. By that logic, suggests Dick’s main character, any adult who has forgotten algebra should be aborted too.

What does science fiction tell us about the future of reproductive rights? Dick, who described himself as anti-abortion, hit upon a science fiction trope that hasn’t changed much since his story was published. Just a few years ago, Neal Shusterman’s young adult novel Unwind dealt with almost the same scenario as ‘The Pre-Persons’ — in it, parents can choose to “unwind” their teenagers, or kill them and allow doctors to harvest their organs. Similarly, in the recent stories Never Let Me Go, The Island, and House of the Scorpion, people are allowed to commission clones of themselves who will be raised to adulthood and then harvested for organs. In all of these tales, the soon-to-be-aborted organ donors are shown to be fully human, complex people whose lives are being tragically cut short by horrifically immoral laws.

These stories work with typical science fiction logic, asking how a current political issue (in this case, abortion) might evolve in the future. The fear driving these stories is twofold. First, they raise the question of whether it’s appropriate for humans to set an arbitrary distinction between “alive” and “not alive” in the womb, allowing people to abort the latter but not the former. Second, these stories ask whether widespread abortion will usher in radically immoral social systems where people can legally kill autonomous adults for arbitrary reasons like not knowing algebra, or being born a clone.”

…imagine having a baby inside your body.

Of course, it’s not an argument – just a memory. But a memory from a woman who spent her life amid the suffering of the world. The comments get interesting on this one.

Anybody want to jump in and make it three? No? How about just funding the graphic novel?

Just a teaser, really. But it does include a brief flash of the above image, which is nicely creepy. And the twitching bags in the storage container? Dayum.

…those are over 2,000 fetuses…

And what do you know, someone made a horror movie about it.

Exploitation? Welling up of moral anxiety? Both?