Last month, I wrote on Germaine Greer’s attack on contraception and her repots of how the West has foisted artificial means of birth control on third-world women. As I pointed out then, Greer’s concern in Sex and Destiny (Soddart Publishing, Toronto, 1984, $18.95) is solely for those women, who she feels have been manipulated. Presumably, Western women are far too sophisticated to warrant concern.
Greer has quite changed her thinking since the ’70s when she urged all women to use the Pill. She now acknowledges a link between contraception and abortion: “abortion is an extension of contraceptive technology and the most promising extension of it at that. It is not an alternative…for contraception is too often abortion in disguise.”
While disliking artificial contraception because of its adverse effects, both physical and emotional, on women, she still believes that abortion is permissible. She states that there are now no absolutes, and that “the case of abortion like almost everything else is a case of relative goods and ills to be evaluated one against the other.” Her pro-abortion logic hinges on her view that the unborn child is of no importance at all until after a certain stage of pregnancy. Two further quotes show this clearly.
Feminists impale themselves on the insistence that women should have the right to kill the fetus at any stage in the pregnancy while anti-abortionists speak of all pregnancy termination as if it was third-trimester abortion. There s something ghoulish in this fixation on abortion after quickening and something downright absurd in the pretension that all fetuses, whether ten days old or ten weeks old or twenty weeks old, are the same sort of thing.
If the viability of the fetus is a fundamental consideration, as in the view of this author it ought to be, interception [i.e. very early abortion] has the further advantage that the incipient life is not brought nearer to realization than is absolutely unavoidable.
At least, Greer has the intestinal fortitude to call a spade a spade when referring to killing the unborn child; she avoids employing one of the usual pro-abortion euphemisms. She also acknowledges that the unborn child is a human being who feels pain: she states that early abortion is more humane and the doctor who performs a late abortion is highly unethical and “not acting in the best interests of his patient.” She continues, “Nor is he behaving responsibly toward the fetus, whose capacity for suffering increases as its capacity for independent life develops.”
From a woman’s point of view…
I find it easier to understand the person who believes in abortion because he rejects the humanity of the unborn child than people like Greer who acknowledge that abortion is indeed killing and yet defend this killing as being necessary from the woman’s point of view.
Ms. Greer dismisses outright the documented evidence on the emotional consequences of abortion. She states that women spontaneously miscarrying late in pregnancies suffer more than women aborting an “unwanted” baby. Perhaps her own experience makes it impossible for her to approach this subject objectively or to accept the facts. (She is now unable to conceive: she has had several abortions. These facts are always discussed when she is interviewed; she rejects any possibility that the abortions have caused her infertility.)
Although Ms. Greer gives detailed descriptions of the various methods of artificial contraception in Sex and Destiny, she does not detail methods of abortion. Her view is that early abortion methods (called by her “interceptions of pregnancy”) such as prostaglandin suppositories, vacuum extraction, and the “one-a-month” pill, are solutions to this vexed question. She would like to see “low-cost, easy-access abortion services which can respond sensitively to the pressure of demand.”
…they happen to be very young
Unfortunately, the views of pro-abortion feminists such as Greer receive much more publicity than those of pro-life feminists. I was delighted, therefore, to pick up to Rescue the Future; the Pr-Life Movement in the 1980s, a collection of essays edited by Dave Andrusko (Life Cycle Books, Toronto, $4.95). In one essay, “Feminism: Bewitched by Abortion,” Rosemary Bottcher calls pro-abortion feminists hypocrites for denying the unborn any rights while asking for rights for themselves and other women. Bottcher notes a series of inherent contradictions:
They resent the discrimination practiced against a whole class of humans because they happen to be female, yet they themselves discriminate against a whole class of humans because they happen to be very young. They deplore that the value of a woman ahs been determined by whether some man wants her, yet insists that the value of an unborn child is whether some woman wants him. They resent that women have been “owned” by their fathers or husbands, yet claim that the unborn are owned by their mothers. They believe that sexual freedom cannot include a man’s right to rape a woman, yet proclaim that it does include a woman’s right to kill her unborn children. They lament men’s reluctance to recognize the personhood of women, yet steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the personhood of the unborn.
Perhaps by the 1990s Ms. Greer will have thought through the reason in Ms. Bottcher’s statement and will see that women, men, and children, all are the victims of the abortion Hydra. Ms. Greer is well aware that her condemnation of artificial contraception is grist for the mill of many of us pro-life “fanatics.” In an interview on CBC’s Morningside, host Peter Gzowski pointed out to her that this position made her seem “Catholic.” Greer admitted that “those anti-abortionists” might wish to use her, and she said she deliberately put discussions of various sexual techniques (she was more explicit on the radio than I care to be in print) into the book to discourage any interest from religious circles.
Indeed, the media in general have not responded favourable to her anti-contraception position and have virtually ignored what she says about abortion. Probably she is not being lionized because of the apparent inconsistency in her thinking rather than because of disagreement with her pro-abortion views.
As a woman concerned with the rights of other women, I would urge Ms. Greer to pay some attention to the rights of all the unborn women already aborted. I suggest she spend the next ten years investigating the evidence being compiled by fetologists. If she does that, I look forward to her next book
