For all that 'choice' gets talked about positively in the context of abortion, it's really not perceived/interpreted as a free act for a lot of women (some obscene percentage of abortions in America are flat-out coerced, and that's without even considering real or perceived socioeconomic impossibilities), having an abortion is often a canary in the coal mine for other problems for which the woman really can't in any sense be blamed, and even though there are also plenty of times in which that isn't the case it doesn't strike me as at all a good idea to attempt to use penal law to determine what a post-abortive woman's motivations are.
These are actually relatively good reasons for abortion to be legal despite being morally wrong, so if I'm going to bite the bullet and insist that those reasons don't outweigh the state interest in preventing the killing of the very young (which is a difficult moral conclusion to come to and really not the no-brainer I falsely made it out to be in the recent thread in US General) then I owe it to women in these kinds of situations to at least not advocate punishing them. (I also owe it to them to advocate a safe and equitable economic system and legally ensured social protections, so as to not turn being 'pro-life' into some sort of sick combination of pregnancy fetishism and the mere addition paradox. Which is what I think a lot of the 'pro-life' movement does, and which is why I'm still very uncomfortable sharing my basic position on abortion with a lot of the people with whom I share it.)
Reproductive coercion is domestic abuse. On that basis it is only fair to note that this also includes women being pressured into keeping unwanted children (and yes for communal religious reasons and promises of financial assistance etc) The ratio of this is statistically balanced so I think it is unfair to base your reasoning on just one face of this exploitation. The effect of your position is to perhaps unintentionally tacitly endorse the other side of this exploitation which I think you ought to consider.
Yes, women being forced to keep unwanted children is absolutely also abusive.
I'm generally of the position that we need to change the culture around this first and foremost (
why are there children who are constructed/positioned as being 'unwanted' (in this sense)? Surely
someone wants them; surely
someone wants
any child!) rather than focusing on criminal law. I'm 'on the pro-life side' because I am nevertheless willing to entertain anti-abortion policy/legal ideas, but to the extent that I'm more interested in the issue morally than legally I guess I'd be more in line with Tanaka Mitsu and other early seventies Japanese feminist activists, one of whose rallying cries was 'We need a society where women can give birth in peace! We need a society where women become inclined to give birth!' Part of the reason I've become more vocally interested in abortion as an issue and in 'pro-life' as a way of characterizing my thinking about it lately is that I recently had the opportunity to read some work that the contemporary philosopher Morioka Masahiro has done on the history of Japanese grassroots bioethics (Japan is the only country I'm aware of in which 'grassroots bioethics' is a thing). You'll probably remember that I brought up concepts from this tradition in the context of
end-of-life issues too a few weeks back. The conclusions that I reach are somewhat more conservative than those that the Japanese feminist bioethical consensus (such as it is) ended up incorporating--Morioka might or might not accept the appellation 'pro-life' in certain contexts, Tanaka certainly wouldn't, certain people who were heavily involved in what's called the 'conflict between women and disabled people' (guess what that was about!) absolutely would--but they're broadly comparable.
In general my main interest in this is a 'pure' philosophy-of-language interest in pushing back against the idea that 'rights' language is an appropriate way to discuss a woman's stake in abortion. The question then becomes: How to put the 'pure' philosophy into political practice? I do think there's a compelling state interest in keeping abortion rates low and indicating the moral unacceptability of the practice; I'm deeply concerned about the message that putting my own preferred policies into effect would send to women in impossible or even simply undesired situations; I have no idea
yet how to resolve this but I'm working on it.
I'll point out that in addition to investigating the conservative Catholic ideas that you were so (largely rightly) excoriating towards in our conversation earlier and the Japanese Buddhist bioethical ideas that I'm discussing here I'm also being exposed to much more conventional pro-choice American liberal Protestantism through my academic work and the social and political atmosphere at my seminary so it's entirely possible that my views on the
legal/social side of this (as opposed to the moral side, on which I've never considered abortion okay and doubt I ever will) will oscillate wildly over the next couple of years. Going into my degree program I was instructed to remain open to possible changes in my beliefs, so I've gotten
vastly more erratic lately. Check back in another two months and I might have gone full Rosemary Radford Ruether. I might also only be interested in talking about phenomenology. I don't know.
