The great blindness of progressives is that they think everyone wants to think like them.
Take abortion. There’s a to-do going on in Latin America over abortion at the moment — a periodic occurrence, since Latin America has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the Western world, and feminists hate that. The present cause is the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne malady plaguing Central and much of South America. As epidemic diseases go, it’s mild; the Centers for Disease Control notes that cases requiring hospitalization are uncommon. However, a report of increases in microcephaly — abnormal smallness of the head, a congenital birth defect — among babies born in Zika-stricken areas has officials, and women, in a panic. A causal link has not been confirmed, but the World Health Organization “strongly suspects” one, and the governments of Colombia and El Salvador have even advised couples to delay becoming pregnant.
So, of course, abortion proponents are using the disease to push for relaxing the abortion laws to allow women to rid themselves of their shrunken-headed “burdens.” A few sample headlines should suffice: “How Anti-Abortion Laws in the Americas Are Fuelling the Zika Virus Epidemic” (The Independent); “If Women with Zika Risk Shouldn’t Get Pregnant, They Need Abortion Access” (The Guardian); “The Abortion Rights Dystopia Brought On by the Zika Crisis” (the always overwrought Jezebel).
Why abortion is the only solution for these women is something the authors of the above don’t care to mention; only that it obviously is, and aren’t you for “human rights” (a formulation that makes one wonder what those things in the womb are; glockenspiels?). They also are firmly dedicated to the proposition that Latin America is basically an anti-abortion hellscape, a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, plus a few palm trees.
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It’s an odd thing, though, this equatorial land of purported maternal misery: If it exists, it’s self-induced. Take El Salvador, the go-to example of abortion madness. El Salvador’s penal code is widely read to outlaw all abortions, period (though the United Nations notes that the country’s penal code can be interpreted to make an exception in the case of danger to the life of the mother). This is not some vestige of old-fashioned morality crimping the enlightened mores of 21st-century people. In 1997, the country’s legislature rewrote the penal code to remove exceptions to the abortion prohibition, exceptions that had been in place since 1973. That is, in the late 1990s the country became more anti-abortion, not less. And that wasn’t a fluke. More than two-thirds of the legislative assembly voted for the harsher provision. Then, two years later, the country amended its constitution to recognize human life as beginning from the moment of conception.
Or take Honduras. In 1983, the government enacted a new penal code that sought to provide limited exceptions to a general prohibition on abortion. But in 1985, just before the code was to go into effect, the legislature repealed the abortion changes because of overwhelming protest from constituents. In 1996, the legislature addressed the issue again — and passed three amendments that aimed to crack down further on abortion, by increasing penalties on health-care practitioners who participated in or failed to report abortions, and by redefining abortion as a form of “murder,” not just an “interruption of pregnancy,” as it had been previously.
#share#And what about Brazil, where the Zika outbreak has been especially bad? The law governing abortion there dates to 1940, though it has been lightly amended — for instance, in 1979, to prohibit advertising abortion services. But there is no indication that the country has any desire to embrace a more permissive stance. The country’s Evangelical Christian population is growing, and Evangelical candidates performed particularly well in the nation’s 2010 congressional elections. During that year’s presidential race, President Dilma Rousseff declared that abortion constituted “violence against women,” and neither of her challengers differed. And in 2014, the police broke up what they called the country’s “biggest-ever abortion mafia.”
In other words, women seeking abortions in much of Latin America have trouble obtaining them because that’s what people in those countries want. Why? Perhaps because they have a radically different view of the world than that on offer from “progressive” feminism.
Women seeking abortions in much of Latin America have trouble obtaining them because that’s what people in those countries want.
For the self-assured feminists of post–Roe v. Wade America, or of a United Kingdom with taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, it is a given that what is inside a womb is a cluster of cells that has no dignity or sanctity or right except what is conferred on it by the mother, if she wants to be one. Barbara Boxer let the cat out of the bag: It’s a baby when you bring it home from the hospital — and that’s a “human right.” Now, having embraced that gospel, they want to evangelize it — to these poor, downtrodden, brown women south of the border oppressed by their priests and their abuelas stuck in obstetrical yesteryear.
In truth, though, maybe a whole lot of Latin American men and women are well aware of what abortion is and how it works — and reject it. Maybe they think, like most of the human species before them, that the thing inside a pregnant woman is a baby that deserves protection and care. Maybe they have a sense that people have no “right” to consequence-free sex, and that the government has no part in helping women eliminate the “consequences.” Or maybe they just think that abortion is a bad business, and they don’t want to encourage it.
#related#Whatever the case, the loud-and-proud feminists who want these countries to become as zealously pro-abortion as the U.S. or the U.K. give no consideration to the millions of people who don’t want that — and who have acted through their representatives to prevent it. They simply shout about women’s “rights” and “choices,” and present their work as a great and luminous mercy.
None of these countries are flawless, of course. They have mistreated women; their justice systems have been cruel, abusive, and pitiless; communities have stigmatized when they should have sympathized.
But men and women in El Salvador and elsewhere are not know-nothings just waiting for Jessica Valenti to rescue them from the shackles of biology. The idea that abortion is reprehensible is not farfetched, the idea that its consequences foul not unthinkable, and the belief that it should be restricted as much as possible hardly unreasonable. A more useful feminism would acknowledge those realities, and engage them.
– Ian Tuttle is a National Review Institute Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism.
[Editor’s Note: This article has been amended since its initial posting.]