How is it now called "Women's Health Care"?

As we were reminded in the recent election cycle, the issue of abortion is now almost exclusively referred to as a “women’s health care” issue or perhaps a “woman’s health care decision.” Hence the alleged “evolution” of how we are to think of abortion is now complete.

 Once upon a time, pregnancy was believed to issue from a “moral choice” with inevitable, inconvenient, consequences.   Among the possible consequences was an unnatural one, abortion—a decision cloaked in secrecy because (in almost all cases) the life of an unborn child is terminated for the sake of someone’s convenience.

In the 70’s, abortion became “a woman’s right to choose” to not experience the natural consequences of her supposedly amoral sexual liberty.  Now, the language of morality and rights, both of which evoke emotional responses, has been completely sanitized and encased within the hygienic context of “women’s health.”  This new classification is both misguided and deceptive. It is misguided because it moves abortion into a context that completely ignores the stem issue of sexual decisions and their consequences and transfers it into the realm of pharmaceuticals and tongue depressors.  Obvious women’s health issues are involved here.   A pregnant woman either visits a clinic to have the life of her unborn child terminated or she begins a regimen of health care visits and interventions eventuating in the birth of a baby.  That said, to classify abortion within the context of “women’s health care” is simply to create a comforting, therapeutic fog obscuring what is at the root of this. That is—two people who engage in procreative, reproductive activity, but who have no desire to procreate or reproduce. Two people who are engaged in highly consequential behavior, but who have no stomach for the consequences attached to it.   In a saner era, this was called “reckless” behavior.   Now it is part of “women’s health care.”  The way we are told we must think of abortion has come a long way. The biological processes involved in making a baby and murdering it however, remain stubbornly archaic.

This way of framing abortion is also deceptive because it fails to live up to the legal definition of truth which includes, “the whole truth.”  The whole truth—the elephant standing in the room where pregnancy is concerned -- is the life of the unborn child.  With abortion now being a matter of so-called “women’s health care,” the unborn child is reduced to something akin to a malignancy requiring removal.   As a matter of “women’s health care,” abortion is not only marketed as morally neutral, but has implicitly become a noble intervention because it now involves a matter of a woman’s health.  What should be glaringly obvious is that abortion is just as much a matter of fetal health care as it is women’s (or, to be more accurate) maternal health care. The pregnant woman involved is going into a clinic for a procedure—that’s medical--benign enough.  The fetus however, is unknowingly and without his/her consent being escorted into their execution chamber—not so benign.  “Fetal health care” is never part of this discussion because recognition of the unborn child is at odds with the desire of the pro-abortion movement to eliminate this unfortunate reality from the argument.  Classifying abortion under “fetal health care” would also be dubious on the grounds that abortion is notoriously detrimental to fetal health.  That fact is--abortion is in almost all cases an inherently selfish act resulting in the death of an unborn child. That sad reality will not change irrespective of how the popular culture chooses to frame this issue. For the unborn child, the tragic result is the same whether abortion is a moral choice, a woman’s right or a matter of “women’s health care.”