The struggle for women’s equal rights is incomplete and ongoing. In parts of several African countries, girls are subjected to female genital mutilation. In several “Islamic” countries, women are still subject to male guardianship and/or confining dress-code mandates, despite the lack of support in the Quran and in Muslim practice during the time of the Prophet and the first Caliphs. Misogynist violence against women persists nearly worldwide. Even where rights have been conceded with respect to ownership and management of property, voting, holding political office, employment, et cetera; exclusionary practices and abuses persist. Clearly, progress is incomplete.
Currently, criminalization of abortion and obstructions of access to contraceptive devices, even in global-north liberal “democracies”, are a major issue impacting women (and families).
1. Patriarchal roots
In much of the world, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term as illiberal organizations and their followers use concerted action and/or the state power to deprive women (and couples) of their natural rights with respect to pregnancy termination and/or the use of some or all contraceptive devices. Many women’s rights and social justice advocates recognize that this movement to deprive women of their reproductive autonomy is largely a carryover from a patriarchal past, wherein the men and women of the laboring classes were ruled and exploited by the lords or capitalists, while women were subjugated under the authority of the men and generally treated like property.
The modern anti-reproductive-rights movement consists primarily of a number of religious and allied political organizations seeking to impose controversial theocratic strictures which deprive women of their natural human right to limit their childbearing, especially when this involves termination or prevention of an unwanted pregnancy. A part of this movement even goes to the extreme of acting to deprive people of their personal-liberty right to use the medically-approved contraceptive devices with which they could avoid creating unwanted pregnancies. Such organizations typically claim to belong to a so-called “right-to-life” movement; but they usually focus exclusively upon preserving what grows in a woman’s womb, while manifesting far less, if any, concern for the lives of living breathing human persons (despite the massive and preventable loss of lives to: wars, imperial economic sieges, genocidal persecutions, famines, lack of access to life-saving healthcare, and other oft-times lethal privations).
2. Relevant history
Until the 20th century, there were no reliable means of contraception other than abstinence. Throughout recorded history until then, women aborted their unwanted pregnancies for various reasons, namely:
- fear of maternal death (especially when still recovering from a difficult previous pregnancy or in such frail health as to pose a threat of mortality in childbirth),
- poverty and lack of means to properly provide for another child,
- desire to limit number of children,
- to avoid adverse consequences (shame and ostracism and/or other punishment) for an out-of-wedlock pregnancy,
- pregnancy resulting from rape.
Abortions were generally performed with assistance from female family members or experienced midwives using tried and trusted methods (abortifacient herbs and/or pressure, and sometimes invasive physical procedures) handed down by older female family members or acquaintances. These abortions were generally safe.
In the first decades of the 19th century, with growing industrialization, many young women were employed in jobs away from their family homes. Thus, they no longer had ready access to traditional family healthcare providers. Healthcare was then an unregulated business. In and after the 1820’s, a proliferation of entrepreneurial individuals began capitalizing upon the demand for pregnancy terminations, by advertising abortifacient drugs (which were often concocted with dangerous ingredients). Moreover, some unqualified individuals advertised offers to perform abortions. Such quackery often resulted in death or serious injury to the patient.
It was not until well into the 19th century that abortions were criminalized in the US and other English-speaking countries. By the 1860s, physicians organized in the American Medical Association [AMA], were lobbying for criminalization of abortion; and “states” were doing as they asked. Concerns were expressed on moral grounds as well as over the rise in deaths from unsafe abortions. However, the primary motive of the AMA’s academically trained all-male physicians was to eliminate competition in female reproductive healthcare from the cheaper competition: of all-female midwives who were condescendingly disparaged as too ignorant to be trusted as healthcare providers, as well as from the untrained largely male practitioners and drug peddlers who were the primary cause of abortion-related deaths and injuries.
By 1910, all US “states” had outlawed abortion, and the medical establishment’s hostility had marginalized midwifery. By then, for many women in the US, access to abortion was limited to illegal practitioners all too many of whom were dangerous “back-alley” providers. Not all illegal abortions were provided by unqualified operatives, but those performed by trained physicians were generally too expensive for many women. The Jane Collective in Chicago, using properly trained women volunteers, made safe illegal abortions available and affordable locally and provided same to some 12,000 patients (1969—1973).
By the 1960’s, pressure from women’s rights organizations was causing rethink as to the propriety of criminalizing abortion. The US Supreme Court finally recognized (1973) the Constitutional privacy right of women to obtain legal abortion by qualified healthcare professionals during the first 2 trimesters. A strident mostly patriarchal and theocratic movement of opposition then arose seeking to nullify that right.
3. Religious views
Although many religious people disapprove of some or all intentional abortions, most do not embrace the extreme viewpoint of those who denounce all abortion as the killing of an “unborn child” and/or assert that personhood begins at the point of fertilization. In fact (at least with respect to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), there is no scriptural basis for such extreme contentions concerning personhood. Moreover, there is no consensus within any of the major religions concerning the point at which, or the conditions under which, abortion is morally impermissible.
- Buddhists hold divergent views with respect to the issue, but abortion is generally regarded as negative to one’s karma. It is often discussed, not in the language of rights (to life or choice), but of benefit and harm; and the Dalai Lama has asserted that its propriety depends upon the particular circumstances. Abortion is permitted by law in several predominantly Buddhist countries.
- There is no definitive Hindu position with respect to the propriety of abortion. Hindu theology generally regards it as governed by context with respect to obligation for least harm (to mother, family, fetus, and community). Some theologians hold that personhood begins at three months thereby implying that abortion may be generally permissible during the first 3 months of gestation. Abortion is legal in the 2 predominantly Hindu countries (India and Nepal). In the US, 68% of Hindus surveyed believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
- The Jewish law as presented in the Torah (first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible [Christian Old Testament]), Exodus 21:22, views causing the abortion of a woman’s pregnancy as not a homicide or violation of law from God. [If a woman’s miscarriage was caused by another contrary to her will, then the offender was to pay compensation for the loss. It was deemed to be a loss, because the birth of a child was generally welcomed and valued as an addition to the family’s labor force. Causing an abortion was not deemed a homicide for which the penalty would have been death (life for life), Exodus 21:28—29 and Exodus 21:12—14.] The Talmud interprets said scripture as holding that the fetus is not a person until delivered. Said interpretation is based upon Genesis 2:7 wherein the body of the first man became a person (Adam) when God caused it to breathe (an activity which a fetus does not do). Nevertheless, some medieval and pre-modern Jewish theologians, operating within a male-supremacist milieu, wrote in condemnation of most abortions. Present-day Jewish sects diverge, with patriarchal Orthodox sects largely anti-abortion, while more liberal sects are generally permissive. The latter often hold that the decision should not be taken lightly but that it is decision for the pregnant woman to make. 79% of Jewish-Americans hold that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
- There is no prohibition of abortion in the Christian Bible (New Testament). Despite the lack of any scriptural basis, some (not all) ancient and medieval Christian theologians (notably Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas with their patriarchal view with respect to the place of women in family and society) found rationales for condemning abortion as sinful. But even they did not consider abortion until some point (40 days for a male embryo, 90 days for a female) after conception to be the killing of a person. Present-day Christian views regarding abortion vary across the entire range from total opposition to acceptance (often conditional in the final trimester) until childbirth.
- The Qur’an does not speak of abortion. The earliest hadith held that the fetus acquires a soul after 120 days; and Islamic law has no explicit prohibition against a woman’s decision to abort. Views regarding the moral permissibility of abortion have ranged from never to 120 days, and actual prohibitions have been imposed at times in various places. However, Islamic law with respect to abortion is universally interpreted to prioritize the life of the mother over that of the fetus. 12 majority Muslim countries permit unrestricted access to abortion.
Clearly, opinion among present-day adherents of every major religion is divided with those on one side (generally those more patriarchal) condemning abortion as a grave sin in all or nearly all circumstances and those on the opposing side (generally those more supportive of women’s rights) holding that it is morally wrong to deprive a woman of her natural right to control her own body and its womb.
4. Reproductive facts
Human pregnancy involves several stages.
- Requisite preparatory acts: copulation, ovulation, and insemination.
- Fertilization (commonly regarded as “conception”). Following the monthly release of an ovum from the woman’s ovaries, a sperm cell from the man unites with it thereby creating a zygote (fertilized egg). This usually occurs within the fallopian tube before descent into the uterus.
- Cleavage. Cell division transforms the zygote into a morula (cell mass).
- Cavitation. The morula divides into 2 connected structures, trophoblast and embryoblast with a cavity between them, thereby becoming a blastocyst.
- Implantation. The blastocyst implants into the wall of the woman’s uterus (7th day after fertilization) thereby creating a pregnancy. Gestation is defined as beginning with implantation.
- Structural formation. Several additional processes bring the formation, from the cells of the blastocyst, of several structures (including: embryonic placenta, umbilical vesicle, chorion, amnion, umbilicus, and embryonic disc). This stage includes gastrulation which begins about the 17th day after fertilization with the formation within the embryonic disc of the “primitive streak”. The primitive streak is that part of the embryo which will evolve into the fetus.
- Fetal inception. The primitive streak, evolves (by 9th week) into a primal fetus (weighing about 8 grams, less than one 400th as much as a newborn baby).
- Organogenesis. The organs of the fetus then continue to develop until it becomes a fully-formed potential infant (at about 39 weeks) weighing about 3,300 grams (7.2 pounds).
- Lastly, childbirth and placental expulsion (a.k.a. afterbirth). Afterbirth tissue includes placenta and other structures with the same chromosomes and genetic content as the newborn, structures which had nourished and protected the fetus.
The process can, and often does, terminate naturally without resulting in a live birth. Only a tiny fraction of ova will be fertilized; and only an infinitesimal fraction of sperm cells will ever encounter an ovum. In a large percentage of fertilizations (an estimated 60%), the blastocyst will not implant, and no pregnancy will occur. Moreover, in many pregnancies (around 25%) there will be a spontaneous abortion (a.k.a. miscarriage) or stillbirth at some point after implantation. Thus, 70% of fertilizations result naturally in failure to produce a live birth. Given those large numbers, the notion, that pregnancy and personhood begin with fertilization, leads necessarily to the conclusion that Nature, or God as Creator of Nature, is responsible for far more abortions than live births; and Nature or God must therefore be the “Great Abortionist”.
5. Personhood
The fetus does not eat, drink, breath, think, or perform other functions which are inherent in actual persons. Except for reflex motions, the fetus is a purely passive creature within the prospective mother’s womb and wholly dependent upon her body for all of its needs and for its continued functional existence. Naturally, a fetus in the womb, in contradistinction to a baby in the world, cannot be a social person.
Historically, from ancient times until premodern times, influential moralists (invariably men) held widely divergent views with respect to abortion. In some societies, women who deliberately aborted were punished, not for offense against the fetus, but for offense against the prospective father. Some of those, who opposed women being permitted to terminate their pregnancies, used ensoulment doctrine to classify the “fetus” as a “person” and thereby justify their opposition. Actually, authorities differed in their opinions as to the time of “ensoulment”, and proposed times varied over the entire range from conception to childbirth (when intentional activity can begin). Moreover, many proponents of pre-birth ensoulment, perhaps recognizing the absurdity of attributing personhood to a zygote or microscopic mass of undifferentiated cells, chose a time later than conception, that time being either: at an arbitrary fixed number of days, or at quickening when fetal movement begins to be felt in the womb. Beliefs about the time of pre-birth ensoulment then affected doctrine as to when abortion should be deemed impermissible. Nevertheless, even when abortion (nearly always performed by the woman and/or her female family members often with the assistance of a midwife) was outlawed, the law often went unenforced as affected women ignored it.
Contemporary anti-abortion groups often evade the actual history of ensoulment doctrine in order to falsely portray abortion rights as an immoral 20th century invention. The Catholic Church, although admitting that the Christian Church has not always held that personhood begins at conception or fertilization, asserts (falsely) that the Church always regarded abortion as sinful. In fact, for many centuries, early-stage abortion was generally accepted within the Church and often not counted as abortion. [It is only in the second trimester that the fetus has grown large enough for the woman to appear pregnant.] It was only since 1869 that the Catholic Church definitively decided that abortion was sinful from the time of conception and sought criminalization throughout pregnancy.
Those who insist that personhood begins at fertilization often “justify” this claim based upon the fertilized ovum then having the exact genetic content as will a child which develops from it. However, even in a completed pregnancy, much live human cellular material which develops from said fertilized ovum will become tissue to be sluffed off as afterbirth; and said tissue, which possesses the same chromosomes and genetic content as does the newborn infant, is clearly not a child. Hence, genetic content alone cannot define personhood.
Another argument offered by anti-abortion activists is that the ovum’s potential, from the moment of fertilization, makes a “child” entitled to be born. This is a leap into illogic. By way of analogy, an acorn may have the potential to sprout and grow into a sapling which could then grow into an oak tree; but is the acorn a tree? In fact, it is nearly always no more than food for a squirrel. Clearly, potential is not actuality.
Anti-abortion groups also argue that the presence of a “fetal heartbeat” after about 6 weeks of gestation qualifies the “fetus” as a person (“child”, “baby”). Actually, at 6 weeks, the embryo has not yet formed the primal fetus, and said “heartbeat’ is simply an electro-chemical flutter in tissue which will not develop, until after another 4 to 6 weeks, into a fully formed heart. Even setting aside the anatomical misrepresentations, the personhood claim is an arbitrary doctrinal imposition; there is a huge difference between a fetus (in the womb) and a baby or child (as an actor in the world); actual childhood begins at birth, not before.
Some anti-abortion activists assert that modern medical science has established that the evolving embryo is a person. Although said science has elucidated many details of embryogenesis which were not knowable in the past, science cannot be the basis for determining when personhood begins. According to the National Academy of Sciences, science simply does not make such value judgments; it only ascertains material facts. The beginning of personhood is a value judgment (commonly religion-based) upon those facts. Moreover, proponents of the notion of science-based determination of personhood (based upon some physical feature as it evolves in the embryo), typically also insist that the fertilized ovum (a single cell with no brain or other organs) is a “person” (simply because it is genetically human). In fact, they resort to inconsistent arguments to support their preconceived conclusion, an approach which is contrary to actual science.
! The foregoing evasions, falsifications of history, controversial religious dogma, imaginary embryology, and illogical arguments are misused as “justification” for moves to criminalize abortion.
6. Hypocrisy
Patriarchal leaders and their dogmatic followers, in churches (Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical Protestant) which currently seek criminalization of abortion, pretend: a reverence for human life (from the moment of fertilization), and a love for innocent “unborn children”. In fact, their purported reverence for human life and love for innocent children is inconsistent with their violent theocratic histories. Examples.
(1) Throughout several centuries, the Catholic Church incited crusades (“holy wars”) and inquisitions, with mass killing of people on account on different religious belief.
(2) Many of the anti-abortion Protestant Churches had previously provided warped theological “justifications” for chattel slavery, white supremacy, and wars to dispossess the Indigenous nations in what is now the US. The Southern Baptist leadership at first welcomed the Roe v. Wade decision for abortion rights (as upholding religious liberty); but, being a patriarchal church and with support for white supremacy and segregation no longer tenable, it soon after embraced the patriarchal anti-abortion cause as a substitute.
(3) While the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic and of some evangelical Protestant Churches, purportedly for the sake of the “unborn child”, demand laws criminalizing abortion from the time of fertilization; they (notably the Catholic and Southern Baptist Churches), for many generations, simultaneously abetted child molestation by many of their clergy and lay-leaders. Specifically, they concealed the crimes and shielded the perpetrators from exposure and prosecution despite the severe harm inflicted upon huge numbers of actual child victims.
(4) The Catholic Church in Belgium and Italy made a practice (1950—1970) of coercing unwed mothers to place their babies or small children with the Church, which then sold them as purported “orphans” to misled adoptive Catholic parents in the US and then lied to said mothers (as to the actual disposition of said children) and to their stolen children (falsely alleging maternal abandonment).
(5) Church leaders, now seeking to criminalize abortion by redefining legal personhood as beginning at fertilization, have clearly not given up their theocratic proclivities. While they demand absolute religious freedom for themselves, patriarchal Church leaderships and other theocrats seek to impose their controversial sectarian moral stricture upon the entire population, most of which opposes said imposition. [Example. The Roman Catholic Church (as well as Eastern Orthodox Churches, which also condemn abortion) displays crucifixes and statues of the Virgin in its places of worship despite the Biblical Commandment prohibiting the use of any “graven image” in worship, Exodus 20:4. Yet, Church leaders (who justify said practice with double-standard rationalizations) would certainly claim persecution if said practice (condemned as idolatry in Judaism, in Islam, and by many Protestant churches) were criminalized.] Insofar as they succeed in outlawing abortion; they can be expected to move on to target other alleged sins: same-sex relationships, erotica, sex education, blasphemy, et cetera. In fact, they have already done so in multiple US “states”. These would-be theocrats mimic the medievalist Islamist regimes in countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan) where morality police are used to enforce the subjugation of their women.
7. Using wombs
Prior to the abolition of slavery, because slaves were a very valuable property; US slave owners routinely coerced their female slaves to become pregnant and produce slave offspring. Sometimes a master would compel his female slave against her will to submit to unwanted sexual intercourse with a male slave designated by him, the objective being to produce such offspring as would be expected either: to bring a good price in the slave market, or to provide useful labor to his own business. In the Upper South of the US, many slave-owners made a business of thusly breeding slaves for sale to planters in the Deep South, where the slaves were often worked to death on cotton and sugar plantations. There were certainly instances of insubordinate slave women resisting such compulsory motherhood by acting to abort such pregnancies. Nowadays, anti-abortion absolutists, like the slave-masters of the past, act to deprive women of their human right to control their own wombs and reproduction; but, instead of the whip, they use: guilt-tripping indoctrination, direct harassment, and legislated obstructions and prohibitions.
8. Involuntary servitude
Relevant articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United Nations in 1948) include: “Article 1 – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”; and “Article 4 – No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. In addition, most countries have laws prohibiting involuntary servitude. For example, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution states “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude […] shall exist within the United States”. Moreover, said Constitution’s 14th Amendment states “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens […]”; and its 9th Amendment (which was ratified in 1791, when anti-abortion laws did not exist in the US, and pre-quickening abortions were common) states “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”.
It is true that the foregoing Amendments were not contemporaneously intended (by the exclusively male enactors) to protect the reproductive rights of women, who were then generally subject to the patriarchal authority of their husbands or other male guardians as well as subject to forced sexual intercourse (only in recent decades criminalized as marital rape) at the whims of their husbands. However, the enactment (in 1920) of the 19th Amendment (which prohibits denial of voting rights on account of sex) provided equal citizenship rights to women and extended to them, at least in principle, the equal protection of the aforementioned Constitutional rights.
Despite the general acceptance of the foregoing human rights in the abstract; in actual practice, many governments have imposed, by law and/or other means, involuntary servitude upon their women with respect to the reproductive functions of the women’s bodies. In the US, 6 Justices of the US Supreme Court (in 2022) substituted their anti-abortion prejudices for the actual content of the US Constitution with their ruling to permit “states” to impose reproductive bondage upon every woman wanting to terminate her problem pregnancy. As of 2026 January, 13 US “states” have enacted laws which criminalize, some with extreme punishments, virtually all abortions; and several others have imposed such severe restrictions as to largely deny access. Only 9 “states” leave the decision to the woman and her healthcare provider.
9. Deceitful pretexts.
In order to “justify” legislation which obstructs access to family-planning medications and/or procedures, some anti-reproductive-rights groups deceitfully use false assertions that such obstructions are for the purpose of protecting the women who would use them.
In response to pressure from anti-reproductive-rights politicians, the US government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disregarded (in 2006) its own medical science experts’ recommendation to make the emergency contraceptive pill (which prevents pregnancy when taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse) available to women under age 18 without prescription. The pretext for this denial of access was a pretended concern for the safety of the young women who would use said emergency contraception. The actual result was 7 years of unnecessary extra costs, burdens, delays, and health risks for affected young women, as well as otherwise avoidable unwanted pregnancies.
In the US, even before the (2022) overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion obstructionists had sometimes obtained legislation imposing such onerous restrictions and burdens upon abortion providers that they were forced to cease operation thereby depriving many women of access. Obstruction was clearly the actual purpose of post-Roe lawsuits to deny access to mifepristone, the drug widely used for safe medication abortions.
Although the proponents of such measures have often asserted that the purpose of such restrictions was to prevent risk to the life and health of the pregnant woman; in fact, childbirth presents a much greater risk to a woman’s life and health than does abortion performed by a qualified healthcare provider. Statistically, the maternal death rate from childbirth in the US (1998—2005) was 14 times greater than the rate from abortion.
Reproductive rights have also been attacked with laws purporting to recognize a so-called “conscience right” whereby employers and service-providers (licensed pharmacies, religiously-affiliated hospitals and clinics, private universities, and government-funded contract providers of social services) are allowed to opt out of civic mandates to provide access to those reproductive health services which they purport to disapprove upon moral grounds. Case in point, some “state” governments in the US have gone to the extreme of permitting licensed pharmacists to abuse the public trust inherent in their licenses by refusing to provide prescription and non-prescription contraceptives and/or other FDA-approved family planning devices to patients. Provision of healthcare services by employers and service providers is, in fact, a component of the social contract between the parties and is (or certainly should be) to satisfy the healthcare needs of the employee or patient or service recipient, not to indulge the employer’s or service provider’s desire to impose its sectarian religious strictures. Under such laws, the rights of affected employees and patients are effectively voided by the entities which have contracted to serve them. Of course, from a rights perspective, those individuals, who believe that it is immoral to use artificial contraception or to abort a pregnancy, have the right to decide for themselves to refrain from personally engaging in those practices. However, when they arrogate to themselves the prerogative to make that decision for others (whether employees, or patients, or fellow humans); they certainly perpetrate an abusive intrusion into the private lives of those who are thereby deprived of control over their own bodies.
11. Disparate impact
Obstructive measures do not generally prevent affluent women (those with the requisite funds and the means to travel to jurisdictions with more liberal policies) from accessing safe and effective abortion services and/or medically-approved contraceptive devices. It is poor women who are either: prevented from obtaining needed abortions and/or contraceptives; or driven to resort to do-it-yourself or other dangerous procedures.