There is one reason and one reason alone a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy. And I’m going to explain in this video what that is and why.
Before I tell you what I think justifies a termination, I need to let you know how I arrived at my position, and to do that, I’m going to refer to a story you may be familiar with, John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules”. The book was adapted into an Academy Award-winning feature film in 1999 with events set around the time of WWII.
The titular “Cider House Rules” are a list of rules that the wife of an apple orchard owner typed up each year to post in the migrant picking crew’s bunk house.
The main protagonist, played by Tobey Maguire, is Homer Wells. One of the crew asks him what the list of rules is. He starts to read them and their leader, the smiling and affable Mr. Rose, played by Delroy Lindo, stops him.
He said “You know they ain’t our rules, Homer. We didn’t write em. I don’t see no need to read em”
Mr. Rose was the authority in the cider house, and he kept tight discipline because of how good he was at his business.
But what was his business?
When a worker named Jack challenged his authority, Mr. Rose confronted him and asked what business he’s in. He’s supposed to say he’s in “the apple business” and back down.
Instead, Jack pulled a knife, and Mr. Rose used his own knife to deftly slice Jack’s shirt and coat wide open without touching his skin.
Mr. Rose said, “I’m in the knife business, Jack. You don’t wanna go in the knife business with me.”
Near the end of the movie, Homer read the whole list of rules out loud at the request of Mr. Rose’s daughter, Rose Rose, played by Erykah Badu. The crew thought the rules were stupid and condescending. Rose Rose said they don’t mean nothin at all.
Mr. Rose asked Homer a series of questions afterward: Who lives in the cider house? Who grinds the apples, presses the cider, and cleans up afterward? Who has to live there breathing in the vinegar?
And then Mr. Rose drops the thesis.
He said “Well, someone who don’t live here made them rules. Them rules ain’t for us. We the ones supposed to make our own rules, and we do, every single day.”
I use the phrase “Cider House Rules” whenever I encounter restrictions imposed on others without their consent by people who don’t understand the situation they apply to, and have no personal stake in the consequences of keeping or breaking the rule.
Homer was born in an orphanage run by an obstetrician named Dr. Larch, played by Michael Caine. Women came to him at the orphanage for deliveries, and he said there were two kinds. Sometimes he delivered babies, and sometimes he delivered mothers.
As a young doctor, he refused to terminate pregnancies on moral grounds, and because it was illegal. Over time, his position changed. He treated several women for routine matters and got to know them, and then learned later some lost their lives due to unsafe terminations. One woman actually came to him seeking to end her pregnancy, and he refused. She sought an unsafe procedure and also lost her life as a result.
After facing these tragedies, Larch has a realization. Whether they are legal or not, terminations will happen. Criminalizing them forces some women desperate for care to put their lives in the hands of unqualified amateurs operating in non-sterile conditions, while women with the financial means can travel to seek the procedure in less restrictive jurisdictions and receive care from qualified medical professionals.
He decided that it is not his business, or that of the state, to be making such a deeply personal decision for women. His business was to provide competent medical care.
When some women reach the conclusion that it is not appropriate to carry a fetus to term, there is not much that can prevent them from trying to end it by any means necessary.
Consider the cost and risk. Nine months of gestation. Possibly permanent changes to her body. A real risk of medical complications, some fatal.
When laws written by people who have no stake in her life prevent her from accessing the care she needs, I imagine she might feel desperate… trapped.
You know how they say coyotes will chew their own leg off to escape a trap?
That’s how I imagine a woman might feel when the state is forcing her to give birth to an unwanted child. Trapped and willing to do whatever it takes to escape.
If that means taking a strange pill from the internet, throwing herself down stairs, or seeing an untrustworthy amateur surgeon operating in unsafe conditions, so be it. Anything to escape the trap.
“We the ones supposed to make our own rules, and we do, every single day.”
I love being a Dad, and I wish everyone could experience the joy and pride I feel being the father of three amazing children, but I recognize that some people are not ready, or have no desire at all to be a parent. It is a tall order, and given the state of the world, for many the idea of bringing a child into it is unthinkable. At one time, when I was a young airman overseas, I was not ready, WE were not ready. Together we made the choice to terminate my girlfriend’s pregnancy. It was the right thing to do in that time and place, for both of us. Luckily, we were in Germany, where it was easy to book the appointment and receive affordable care. We were in agreement, but even if I wanted her to keep it, I would have respected her decision not to.
If a woman does not want her body to undergo the transformation of pregnancy with all of the associated costs, risks, and limitations, who are we to force her to do it? How can anyone claim that right? If we declare that outsiders can’t make rules for communities, then how can we accept anyone making rules that strip a woman of her agency and autonomy? Not one of us can be compelled to give access to our bodies, even to save the life of another. In 1978 in the case McFall v. Shimp, a Pennsylvania court refused to force a man to donate bone marrow to his cousin, who needed it to survive. The judge ruled that refusing to save his cousin’s life was morally indefensible but concluded compelling someone to undergo an invasive bodily procedure would violate fundamental principles of bodily autonomy. There is a distinction between what we believe someone ought to do and what we are entitled to compel them to do. We may feel that the only right choice is the choice that aligns with our personal morality, but do we have the right to make that choice for a person? Even concerning their own child?
You might argue that donating bone marrow to save an adult is not the same as carrying a pregnancy to term, and you’d be right. But the principle is the same. Does one person’s right to life entitle them to the use of another person’s body without their consent? Does the obligation become enforceable simply because the person whose life depends on it is your own child?
There are few things more intimately invasive than carrying and delivering a child, whether it’s given up for adoption or raised by the birth mother. Even if we are to accept that a fetus is a human being with full rights under the law, those rights do not override the mother’s right to bodily autonomy.
A child is not a punishment for having sex.
And that’s not even getting into the dangers of denying care for conditions such as birth defects or disease that would prevent the fetus from developing normally, resulting in stillbirth, or the loss of the mother’s life through complications which could be mitigated or avoided through legal access to competent medical care.
Since Texas imposed a strict ban on the procedure, for all but a narrow set of conditions, the rate of sepsis among Texan women hospitalized for second-trimester pregnancy loss increased by 55%. We’ve seen a significant rise in maternal in-hospital deaths. The United States as a whole still sees about 18 deaths per 100,000 live births, 45 per 100,000 among black women.
Getting back to Irving’s story, Mr. Rose’s unchecked authority caused a crisis. Homer noticed Rose Rose was pregnant, and she did not want to bear the child. Her desperation was evident and she implied she might try to terminate it herself, which Homer knew could cost her own life. He offered to bring her to Dr. Larch but she said she could not leave because her father wouldn’t let her.
Eventually we learn that Mr. Rose was the father of his own daughter’s child.
Here’s the contradiction. Mr. Rose insisted that outsiders had no right to impose rules on the workers without their consent, yet he had violated his own daughter’s bodily autonomy. The man who rejected outside oppression had become an oppressor within his own community.
And that’s the problem. It’s not enough to say that a community should make its own rules. We also have to ask what those rules can legitimately demand of the individuals who live there.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. But consent isn’t simply a matter of who makes the rules. It also places limits on what those rules can demand of us.
If we recognize that people have a right to govern themselves, how can we deny that an individual has the ultimate authority to make decisions concerning their own body?
Homer was well trained in obstetrics and pregnancy termination by Dr. Larch, but he refused to perform the procedure on moral grounds. He had the knowledge and skill to help her, but his moral objection to the procedure conflicted with his sense of responsibility as someone trained to provide competent medical care.
Homer weighed the strength of his moral objection against his obligation to ease the pain of the suffering girl before him, and he made a choice to relieve her of her burden.
Mr. Rose resists, and tells Homer it’s none of his business, and, like he threatened Jack earlier, asks Homer what business he thinks he’s in.
Homer answers, “I’m in the doctor business. I can help. That’s all I’m saying. I can help”
He delivers the mother.
He later chooses to replace Dr. Larch at the orphanage and carry on his work delivering babies, and delivering mothers.
How a woman got pregnant is not our business.
Why she feels she cannot carry or raise the child is not our business.
The state of her soul is not our business.
The doctor’s business is providing her with competent medical care.
So what is the one and only time and reason a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy?
When she wants to terminate her pregnancy, for whatever reason she deems sufficient.