A Moral Science of Women’s Rights
Let us have a fair field! This is all we ask, and we will be content with nothing less. The finger of evolution, which touches everything, is laid tenderly upon women. They have on their side all the elements of progress, and its spirit stirs within them. They are fighting, not for themselves alone, but for the future of humanity. Let them have a fair field!
—Tennessee Celeste Claflin, 1897, social reform advocate, first woman to open a Wall Street brokerage firm
In chapter 1 we met the nineteenth-century Irish historian William Lecky, who introduced the metaphor of the expanding moral circle in his 1869 book A History of European Morals. In his chapter on the “position of women” he postulated that the rise of monogamy and marriage were the primary steps in the elevation of women to a status closer to that of men, and he argues that the primary value of the marriage contract is in granting women equal rights, at least in the home (but, sadly, only in the home): “The utilitarian arguments in its defence are also extremely powerful, and may be summed up in three sentences. Nature, by making the number of males and females nearly equal, indicates it as natural. In no other form of marriage can the government of the family, which is one of the chief ends of marriage, be so happily sustained, and in no other does woman assume the position of the equal of man.”1
This grudging admission that women are the equal of men, as long as they keep to their needlework and don’t set foot outside the parlor, is all the less impressive coming as it does almost eighty years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman2 and after John Stuart Mill’s call for the legal and social equality of women in his treatise (possibly coauthored with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill) The Subjection of Women.3 It also comes about twenty years after the very first women’s rights convention (held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York) in which the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, chiefly authored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was ratified by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. The document was patterned after the Declaration of Independence and contained these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Clearly, Lecky felt this truth wasn’t self-evident in the least, as he opined:
In the ethics of intellect they are decidedly inferior. Women very rarely love truth, though they love passionately what they call “the truth,” or opinions they have received from others, and hate vehemently those who differ from them. They are little capable of impartiality or of doubt; their thinking is chiefly a mode of feeling; though very generous in their acts, they are rarely generous in their opinions or in their judgments. They persuade rather than convince, and value belief rather as a source of consolation than as a faithful expression of the reality of things.4
Unfortunately this attitude was not atypical, and supporters of this uncommon modern notion of women’s equality and their right to vote were harshly scorned and ridiculed. Clearly men felt their comforts and privileges threatened; commenting on the 1848 convention, a reporter for the Oneida Whig had this to say:
This bolt is the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity. If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentlemen, will be our dinners and our elbows? Where our domestic firesides and the holes in our stockings?5
Where indeed?
Nevertheless, in the United States the suffragists and their allies persevered, and after a seventy-two-year battle the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s right to vote, in 1920. The events that led to suffrage for women in America are riveting in their details, though only the briefest overview is possible here.6 It was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott who organized the 1848 conference, after attending the World Anti-slavery Convention in London in 1840—a convention at which they had come to participate as delegates, but at which they were not allowed to speak and were made to sit like obedient children in a curtained-off area. This did not sit well with Stanton and Mott. Conventions were held throughout the 1850s but were interrupted by the American Civil War, which secured the franchise in 1870—not for women, of course, but for black men (though they were gradually disenfranchised by poll taxes, legal loopholes, literacy tests, threats, and intimidation). This didn’t sit well either and only served to energize the likes of Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Doris Stevens, and countless others who campaigned unremittingly against the political slavery of women.
Things began to heat up when the great American suffragist Alice Paul (arrestingly portrayed by Hilary Swank in the 2004 film Iron Jawed Angels) returned from a lengthy sojourn in England. She had learned much during her time there through her active participation in the British suffrage movement and from the more radical and militant British suffragists, including the courageous political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, characterized as “the very edge of that weapon of willpower by which British women freed themselves from being classed with children and idiots in the matter of exercising the franchise.”7 Upon her death Pankhurst was heralded by the New York Times as “the most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century and the supreme protagonist of the campaign for the electoral enfranchisement of women”;8 years later, Time magazine selected her as one of the one hundred most important people of the century. Thus when Alice Paul returned from abroad she was ready for action, though the more conservative members of the women’s movement weren’t quite ready for Alice. Nevertheless, she and Lucy Burns organized the largest parade ever held in Washington, DC, to attract attention to the cause. On March 3, 1913 (strategically timed for the day before President Wilson’s inauguration), twenty-six floats, ten bands, and eight thousand women marched, led by the stunning Inez Milholland, wearing a flowing white cape and riding a white horse. (See figure 6-1.) Upwards of a hundred thousand spectators watched the parade, but the mostly male crowd became increasingly unruly and the women were spat upon, taunted, harassed, and attacked while the police stood by. Afraid of an all-out riot, the War Department called in the cavalry to contain the escalating violence and chaos.9
Figure 6-1. Inez Milholland’s March on Washington, DC
On March 3, 1913, the women’s rights advocate Inez Milholland led the march on the capital along with her fellow suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns.10
It was a gift. A scandal ensued due to the rough treatment of the women, and suddenly “the issue of suffrage—long thought dead by many politicians—was vividly alive in front page headlines in newspapers across the country.… Paul had accomplished her goal—to make woman suffrage a major political issue.”11
In 1917 women began peacefully picketing outside the White House, but, once again, they were met with harassment and violence. These Silent Sentinels (as they were called) stood day and night (except Sundays) with their banners for two and a half years, but after the United States joined in World War I, patience ran thin as it was seen as improper to picket a wartime president. The picketers were charged with obstructing traffic and were thrown—often quite literally thrown—into prison cells, where they were treated like criminals rather than political protesters, and were kept in appalling conditions. Many of the women went on a hunger strike, including Alice Paul, who was viciously force-fed to keep her from becoming a martyr for the cause. Word of the brutality in the workhouse was leaked to the press, and the public became increasingly incensed at the protesters’ horrific treatment. During what became known as the Night of Terror, forty prison guards went on a rampage and the women were “grabbed, dragged, beaten, kicked, and choked”; Lucy Burns had her wrists cuffed and chained above her head to the cell door; another woman was taken to the men’s section and told “they could do what they pleased with her”; another woman was knocked unconscious; still another had a heart attack.12 These outrages were grave tactical errors. “With public pressure mounting as a result of press coverage, the government felt the need to act.… Arrests didn’t stop these protesters; neither did jail terms, psychopathic wards, force-feeding, or violent attacks. Their next decision was simply to let them out.”13
At long last, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment (originally drafted by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1878) was passed—by a single vote—thanks to twenty-four-year-old Harry T. Burn, a Tennessee legislator who had originally intended to vote against his state ratifying the amendment (which needed ratification of thirty-six of the then forty-eight states to pass), but changed his mind because of a note from his mother.
Dear Son:
Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet.
Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the “rat” in ratification.
Your Mother.14
In the end, then, suffrage for women came down to the vote of one young man, influenced by his mom. It was rumored that “the anti-suffragists were so angry at his decision that they chased him from the chamber, forced him to climb out a window of the Capitol and inch along a ledge to safety.”15 Thus suffrage arrived in the United States, kicking and screaming.
It was a right that women in a number of other countries had already won years before, but one that others would have to wait for—and in some cases they’re are still waiting. Figure 6-2 tracks the moral progress of women’s suffrage, while figure 6-3 tracks the gaps between when all men versus all women were granted the franchise, from Switzerland’s 123-year gap between 1848 and 1971, to Denmark’s 0-year gap in 1915. By comparison, the 50-year gap in the United States between 1870 and 1920 lies midway in this history.
Figure 6-2. Women’s Right to Vote Over Time
The stair-step progress of women’s suffrage is tracked over time from 1900 to 2010, showing two big bursts, the first after World War I and the second after World War II. Tellingly, the expected date for the sovereign nation of Vatican City to grant women the right to vote is “never.”16
FROM SUFFRAGE TO SUCCESS
Once the foundation for one type of rights is built, it makes the work of subsequent rights builders easier. Note the 2013 Global Gender Gap Report, produced by the World Economic Forum, which tracks benchmarks in 136 countries on economic, political, education-, and health-based criteria. The report shows that, between men and women, “globally, 96 percent of the health gap has been closed, 93 percent of the education gap, 60 percent of the economic participation gap, but only 19 percent of the political gap.” Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have the smallest gaps in the world, with northern European countries holding seven of the top ten places. The value of this shift can be tracked economically, as the report concluded: “The index continues to track the strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its national competitiveness. Because women account for one-half of a country’s potential talent base, a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women.”17
Figure 6-3. The Gap Between the Franchise for Men and Women
The spasmodic nature of moral progress is reflected in the shrinking time in years between the dates when men’s suffrage and women’s suffrage were legalized, from 123 years for Switzerland to 0 years for Denmark. Such change is contingent on many social and political variables that differ from country to country.
It’s heartening that women are occupying a place in traditionally male-dominated professions in ever-greater numbers. For instance, in 2013, Ursula von der Leyen became the first-ever minister of defense in Germany. In her position von der Leyen has been a powerful advocate for change, laying out the scope of her ambitions in December of that year: “My aim is a united states of Europe, run along the lines of the federal states of Switzerland, Germany or the USA,” which would be defended by a united European army. Including female voices in the political arena is always good for moral progress, as further evidenced by von der Leyen’s call for increasing the number of nurseries in the country and her support of gay marriage. And she is by no means the first female defense minister in Europe. Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert is presently the minister of defense, since 2012, in the Netherlands, Kristin Krohn Devold held that post in Norway from 2001 to 2005, as did Michèle Alliot-Marie for France from 2002 to 2007, Leni Björklund for Sweden from 2002 to 2006, Carme ChacÓn Piqueras for Spain from 2008 to 2011, and Grete Faremo for Norway from 2009 to 2011; in fact, there have been a total of eighty-two female defense ministers around the world.18
Added to the list of powerful women in traditionally male-dominated fields is Mary Barra, who became the first woman CEO of a car company (GM) in December 2013. Her appointment was followed by reports that Fortune 500 companies that have more women in positions of leadership show 50 percent higher profits. There are now twenty-two female CEOs in the Fortune 500, and 16.9 percent of their board seats are occupied by women.19 A Pew Research Center study released the day after Barra took her new post reported that only 15 percent of young women in America say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender, and the share of women in managerial and administrative occupations is nearly equal to that of men, at 15 percent compared to 17 percent. Among young American women, their rate of pay is now up to 93 percent of that of men in comparable positions, up from 67 percent in 1980, and across all age cohorts the average hourly wage for women is 84 percent of that of men in comparable jobs, up from 64 percent in 1980. The likeliest cause of this progress is education: 38 percent of women ages twenty-five to thirty-two now hold bachelor’s degrees, compared to 31 percent of men the same age. As a consequence, 49 percent of employed workers with at least a bachelor’s degree last year were women, up from 36 percent in 1980. According to Kim Parker, the associate director of the Pew Social & Demographic Trends Project, “Today’s generation of young women is entering the labor force near parity with men in terms of earnings and extremely well prepared in terms of their educational attainment.”20 Finally, another Pew Research Center analysis, published in 2013, found that in 40 percent of American households with children, women are the sole or primary breadwinners, a fourfold increase since 1960.21 Although women still have not attained full parity with men in pay, figure 6-4, figure 6-5, and figure 6-6 show these unmistakable trends in narrowing the gender gap, which looks to be closed by the end of the decade if the trends continue. At least in the United States (and various other countries), the pay gap is a fiendishly complicated calculation that depends on many factors, but the long-term trend line is in the right direction.
These graphs showing improvements in the status of women are encouraging, but they don’t tell the whole story, of course. Women in many non-Western nations live under conditions of extreme male domination, most notably in theocracies and nations with corrupt or dysfunctional governments. Women in these cultures endure a litany of horrors, including female genital mutilation, which often causes lifelong pain and increased risks in childbirth; honor killings; child marriage; and even being charged with the crime of being raped that sometimes results in the murder of women by their own families or the state (while perpetrators go free). As second-class citizens, they endure a raft of insults from not being allowed to attend school, drive a car, or get a job to not being permitted to leave home without a male escort or interact with male shopkeepers and doctors.
Figure 6-4. Narrowing the Gender Gap in Education
Percentage of twenty-five to thirty-two-year-olds with at least a four-year college degree shows that women are now ahead of men in earning a bachelor’s degree. In 1970 only 12 percent of women compared to 20 percent of men earned a four-year degree. In 2012 that gap had reversed, with women at 38 percent compared to 31 percent for men. Source: Pew Research Center
Figure 6-5. Narrowing the Gender Gap in Hourly Earnings
Median hourly earnings in 2012 dollars from 1980 to 2012 show women over age sixteen closing the gap of $8.00 an hour in 1980 to $1.04 in 2012. Source: Pew Research Center
Figure 6-6. Narrowing the Gender Gap in Earning Power
Women’s overall earnings as a percentage of men’s earnings in 2012 dollars among twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-olds from 1980, when a woman earned 67 percent of a man in a comparable job, to a near-parity 93 percent in 2012. Ideally, the gap will close to zero in the US by 2020. Source: Pew Research Center
And worldwide, to one degree or another, rape and sexual assault continue to be harrowing issues. Where women are scarce and men unable to marry until their late twenties, rape rates rise, as we have seen in alarming recent crimes reported in India.22 Where women have the courage to enter fields or territories that were traditionally male—most notably the military—rape and assault also rise. In the United States, a widely viewed 2012 film, The Invisible War, reported that the problem of “military sexual trauma” is widespread. Media coverage of both the film and the problem led top military brass to respond with an investigation and prosecution of perpetrators,23 including army brigadier general Jeffrey Sinclair, who was court-martialed and fined $20,000 after pleading guilty to adultery and the mistreatment of a woman who accused him of sexual assault.24
According to the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the overall rate of rape has been declining since the government began collecting reliable data, in 1995. According to the department’s 2013 report, “from 1995 to 2010, the estimated rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations declined 58%, from 5.0 victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older to 2.1 per 1,000.” The bureau’s definition of sexual violence includes “completed, attempted, or threatened rape or sexual assault.” While the rate of all such acts remained stable from 2005 to 2010, completed acts “declined from 3.6 per 1,000 females to 1.1 per 1,000” per year in the United States over that time frame, a decline of 327 percent. (See figure 6-7.)
In spite of all the TV crime shows about serial killer-rapists, most rapists are not psychopathic strangers. The bureau found that “78% of sexual violence involved an offender who was a family member, intimate partner, friend, or acquaintance.”25 At the overall current rate of 2.1 per 1,000 (two tenths of 1 percent), this translates to a rate of 1.6 per 1,000 females who are sexually assaulted by someone they know, and 0.5 per 1,000 by a stranger (five one-hundredths of 1 percent), making stranger danger a statistical outlier.26
Figure 6-7. Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Rates Among Females, 1995–2010
From 1995 to 2010 the estimated rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations declined 58 percent, from 5.0 victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older, to 2.1 per 1,000. Source: U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics
If a study published in 2014 is corroborated, however, the rape rate numbers may be higher than the Department of Justice’s figures because of the problem of underreporting of sexual assaults, not just by those to whom they happen, but also by police departments themselves. These reports are what the FBI relies on for its Uniform Crime Report program, from which such statistics are compiled. According to the new study’s author, University of Kansas School of Law professor Corey Rayburn Yung, there has been a systematic underreporting of sexual assaults in 22 percent of the 210 police departments he examined, leading him to estimate “that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 complaints of forcible vaginal rapes of female victims nationwide disappeared from the official records from 1995 to 2012.”27 However, even when adjusted for these unreported cases, Yung’s estimates show both low- and high-adjusted rape rates as declining since the early 1990s, although they start at a higher rate than the Uniform Crime Report’s figures at about 40 per 100,000 people in 1993, to 25 per 100,000 in 2011. Yung’s high-adjusted rape rate declines from 60 per 100,000 in 1993, to 45 per 100,000 in 2011, and his low-adjusted rape rate declines from about 55 per 100,000 in 1993, to 40 per 100,000 in 2011.28 Whatever the exact numbers are, the decline in the rates of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence are encouraging.29
WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
In a book on moral progress it would be unconscionable of me not to address an area that many people consider to be one of the greatest moral failings of our time: legal abortion. Because abortion is so intimately linked to a woman’s right to control her own body, which in turn has been subject to the same progressive forces of change as other human rights, I will consider the topic here in the context of conceptualizing our morals based on a scientific understanding of human nature, and how employing reason in the continued service of expanding rights further expands the moral sphere.
Throughout history men have tried to exert varying levels of control over women’s reproductive rights. One reason is as obvious as it is simple: In general, men are bigger and stronger than women and they have used this biological fact—as they do against other males in contests over hierarchy, territory, or mates—to their advantage in exerting dominance. With regard to reproduction, men and women can’t be equally certain that a particular child is their offspring, a concept captured by the phrase “mother’s baby, father’s maybe.”30 Women know with 100 percent certainty that they are the mothers of their children (with the exception of rare cases in the modern world when hospitals mix up babies shortly after birth), whereas men know with less than 100 percent certainty the paternity of their issue. Researchers estimate that 1 percent to 30 percent of babies are the product of an “extra-pair paternity” (EPP), in which the biological father is not the partner of the mother.31 The percentage varies wildly depending on the population being studied, as do the error margins inherent in the difficulties in collecting data on such a sensitive subject.32 The anthropologist Brooke Scelza, for example, documented an EPP rate of 17 percent of all recorded marital births among the traditional society of the Himba in northern Namibia, and that such EPPs were “associated with significant increases in women’s reproductive success.”33 (In this context, reproductive success means the number of offspring that survive and reach reproductive age.) The evolutionary biologist Maarten Larmuseau and his colleagues, however, found a much lower rate, of 1 to 2 percent, in a western European population in Flanders, Belgium, noting that “This figure is substantially lower than the 8–30% per generation reported in some behavioural studies on historical EPP rates, but comparable with the rates reported by other genetic studies of contemporary Western European populations.”34 In a survey of sixty-seven studies reporting nonpaternity, the anthropologist Kermyt Anderson computed an average figure of 1.9 percent for men with high paternity confidence,35 which is significantly lower than the 9 percent figure that Robin Baker and Mark Bellis computed from ten studies and reported in their controversial book Human Sperm Competition, in which they hypothesize that spermatozoa evolved to compete against other men’s sperm cells in the reproductive track of the woman (to swim toward the egg to fertilize it, to fight off other men’s sperm from getting to the egg, or to block other men’s sperm from fertilizing her egg if they get there first).36 The likely difference here can be found in Anderson’s second finding: men with low-paternity confidence had a nonpaternity rate of 29.8 percent.37
The evolutionary psychologist Martie Haselton, whom I consulted about this sometimes confusing data, estimates that “the range of nonpaternity in the West is 2–4 percent and perhaps a bit higher elsewhere in the world.” She explained the wider range of figures in non-Western countries this way: “In addition to the strength of norms about marriage, there are norms about fidelity that vary across populations. In the Himba women marry, but there seems to be an accepted norm that people will sleep around. So, women might not suffer the extreme costs that other women suffer if their infidelities are discovered. That might allow them to be freer to pursue a dual mating strategy.” Haselton added parenthetically that extrapolating from modern data to ancestral environments is problematic in that “another issue to consider is that the modern world affords women more independence and privacy. Ancestral women didn’t travel on business trips or have husbands who did so.”38
A dual mating strategy is one in which women seek to secure a sound investment in parental care and food resources through one partner and obtain good genes through another partner if both sets of characteristics are not present in one man. As Haselton explained the phenomenon: “In principle, women could benefit from both material and heritable benefits conferred by male partners, but both sets of features may be difficult to find in the same mate. Men who display indicators of good genes are highly attractive as sex partners; hence, they can, and often do, pursue a short-term mating strategy that tends to be associated with reduced investment in mates and offspring. Therefore, women may often be forced to make strategic trade-offs by selecting long-term social partners who are higher in investment attractiveness than sexual attractiveness.”39
Whatever the rate of EPPs was historically—most likely higher in the distant past compared to today, in which the institution of monogamous marriage is encouraged by both church and state—the point is that a woman could, theoretically, select a dual-mating strategy, and it is this possibility that leads men to try to control women’s reproductive choices. Even if no offspring result from an EPP sexual encounter, infidelity rates are high enough that the emotion of jealousy evolved as a result of the phenomenon of mate guarding to fend off potential mate poachers and to prevent mates from defecting to another partner.40 How high are rates of infidelity? Studies vary, but according to the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, about 25 percent of American men and 15 percent of American women have had an affair at some point during marriage.41 Other studies find a range of 20 percent to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20 percent to 25 percent of heterosexual married women have philandered during their marriages.42 Another study found that 30 percent to 50 percent of American married men and women are adulterous.43 As the evolutionary psychologist David Buss notes, “Those who failed in mate guarding risked suffering substantial reproductive costs ranging from genetic cuckoldry to reputational damage to the entire loss of a mate.” The result, he argues, is a range of mate guarding adaptations, from “vigilance to violence.”44 This is an unfortunate response to a very real threat, as evidenced in a survey of single American men and women that found 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women admitted to “mate poaching,” or trying to entice or charm someone out of their current relationship in order to enter into one with them.45 An anthropological survey identified mate poaching as common in at least fifty-three other cultures.46
Although both men and women philander, get jealous, mate-guard, and mate-poach, in the context of expanding women’s reproductive rights and men’s attempt to restrict them, male jealousy and mate guarding—whether through vigilance or violence—are strong causal factors. (Studies show, for example, that in the United States more than twice as many women were shot and killed by their husband or intimate acquaintance than were murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means,47 and that women make up the majority of victims of intimate partner/family-related homicides.48) From stalking to chastity belts to female genital mutilation, throughout history men have tried to control women’s sexuality and reproductive choices. And women have developed several strategies in response: contraception, abortion, clandestine affairs, mariticide (killing one’s husband), and infanticide.
Starting with the latter, anthropologists and historians tell us that infanticide has been practiced by all cultures everywhere in the world throughout history, including and notably by adherents of all the world’s major religions. Historical rates of infanticide have ranged from 10 to 15 percent in some societies to 50 percent in others, but none lack it entirely.49 The killing of babies is often portrayed by theists (for example, in my debates with them) as the single purest act of evil conceivable.50 They are wrong. Normal people do not kill their children for no reason. Like all human behavior, infanticide has nontrivial causes, and the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson unearthed some of those reasons in their study of sixty societies using an ethnographic database of cultures around the world. Of the 112 cases of infanticide in which anthropologists recorded a motive, 87 percent supported the “triage theory” of infanticide, which posits that mothers must make hard choices when times are hard (i.e., they kill their children when resources are too scarce to support another infant), a concept well captured in Edward Tylor’s nineteenth-century anthropological observation that “Infanticide arises from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart.”51 Nature is not infinite in its resources and not all organisms that are born can survive. When conditions are difficult, parents, especially mothers, must decide who is most likely to survive—including future potential children who may fare better when conditions are better—and sacrifice the rest. Daly and Wilson’s survey turned up these reasons for infanticide: disease, deformity, weakness, a twin when parents have only enough resources for one, an older sibling too close in age for resources to support both, hard economic times, no father to help raise the child, or because the infant was fathered by a different sexual partner.52
In Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, Uta Ranke-Heinemann notes how widely infanticide was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, and the Catholic Church’s prohibition against it goes back to the Middle Ages.53 During the historical period of the early rights revolutions, both church and state tried to do something to curb infant killings without addressing the underlying causes (of which they were ignorant). Injunctions were approved and laws were passed, but just as in the bad old days of back alley abortions, if a woman didn’t want her baby there was little anyone could do about it. Mothers would “accidentally” roll over on top of their infants during sleep (called “overlying”), or they dropped them off at foundling homes where the business of infant disposal was swift and private. Wet nurses and “baby farmers” were also tasked with the business of baby removal. In mid-nineteenth-century London it was reported that public parks and other spaces were the site of as many dead babies as dead dogs and cats.54 The popular 2013 film Philomena—about a teenage girl in the early 1950s who has her out-of-wedlock baby in an abbey, where she was forced to give it up for adoption over her cries and protestations—captures the tragedy many women face even in modern times when there are no other viable options for them and their baby.
However one frames the issue, the more important question in the context of moral progress is what can be done about it. Proximate solutions arose in historical times in the form of orphanages and adoption agencies, but the ultimate solution is to be found in contraception and education. A comprehensive international study on the relationship between contraception and abortion conducted by Cicely Marston from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded, “In seven countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland—abortion incidence declined as prevalence of modern contraceptive use rose. In six others—Cuba, Denmark, Netherlands, the United States, Singapore and the Republic of Korea—levels of abortion and contraceptive use rose simultaneously. In all six of these countries, however, overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized in several of the countries that had shown simultaneous rises in contraception and abortion, contraceptive use continued to increase and abortion rates fell. The most clear-cut example of this trend is the Republic of Korea.”55 Figure 6-8 shows these South Korean data. Abortion rates there took some time to start their decline because for a few years women relied on more traditional but far less effective methods of birth control, such as withdrawal, but when replaced by reliable methods, pregnancy rates tumbled, thereby lowering the demand for abortions.
Figure 6-8. The Relationship Between Abortion and Contraception
This data set from South Korea demonstrates that granting women the right to use contraception causes a dramatic decrease in the number of abortions, along with the fertility rate, which has additional benefits for the progress of humanity in creating a sustainable world.56
A similar effect occurred in Turkey when abortion rates dropped by almost half between 1988 and 1998 (from 45 to 24 per 1,000 married women) even though the overall rate of contraceptive use remained stable. A study conducted by Pinar Senlet, a population program adviser at the US Agency for International Development, however, revealed that there was a shift from traditional, pitifully underpowered forms of birth control to more modern and therefore more reliable methods. “Marked reductions in the number of abortions have been achieved in Turkey through improved contraceptive use rather than increased use.” In short, Turkish couples abandoned natural and unreliable birth control methods in favor of condoms and more effective means of contraception.57
Like all social and psychological phenomena, rates of contraceptive use and abortions are multivariable—many factors are operating at once, which makes inferring direct causal links problematic. When it comes to human behavior, it is almost never as simple as “when X goes up, Y goes down,” and that is certainly the case for contraception and abortion. Different nations and states have different laws and regulations that affect accessibility to both abortions and birth control technologies. Some countries have higher rates of religiosity than others, and this too influences to what extent women or couples use family planning techniques. Socioeconomic forces and poverty rate differences among countries and states also confound conclusions. And so forth. But as I read the data and analysis, here is my interpretation: when women have limited reproductive rights and no access to contraception, they are more likely to get pregnant and this leads to higher fertility rates in a country. When women’s reproductive rights are secure and they have access to safe, effective, and inexpensive birth control, as well as access to safe, legal abortion, they rely on both strategies to gain control over their family size to maximize parental investment. So for a period of time after the legalization of abortion and access to contraception, rates of both increase in parallel. But once fertility rates stabilize—once women feel confident in controlling their family size and their ability to raise a child—contraception alone is often all that is needed, so abortion rates decline.
Why can’t people “just say no” when it comes to sex—that is, use abstinence as a form of birth control, or time their sexual encounters for when it is “safe” during a woman’s natural monthly cycle? They can, of course, and some do, but as the old joke goes that was making the rounds when I was in high school, “What do you call couples who use abstinence, withdrawal, or the rhythm method of birth control? Parents.” In theory, of course, abstinence is a foolproof method of preventing pregnancies and STDs and STIs (sexually transmitted diseases and sexually transmitted infections—you can have the latter without the former), just as starvation is a foolproof method of preventing obesity. But in reality the desires to love physically and to bond socially are fundamental to who we are as human beings; and the sex drive is so powerful, and the pleasures and psychological rewards so great, that recommending abstinence as a form of contraception and STI prevention is, in fact, to recommend pregnancy and infection by default. In a 2008 study descriptively titled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy,” the University of Washington epidemiologists Pamela Kohler, Lisa Manhart, and William Lafferty found that among never-married American adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen years, “Abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse, but comprehensive sex education was marginally associated with a lower likelihood of reporting having engaged in vaginal intercourse. Neither abstinence-only nor comprehensive sex education significantly reduced the likelihood of reported STD diagnoses.” The authors concluded, “Teaching about contraception was not associated with increased risk of adolescent sexual activity or STD. Adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.”58
More evidence against abstinence-only programs may be gleaned from the 2013 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health published in the British Medical Journal and conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between 1995 and 2009 on more than seventy-eight hundred women; remarkably, it was discovered that 0.5 percent—or one in two hundred—of adolescent girls had reported that they’d become pregnant without sex. Are biblical-level miracles afoot in the bedrooms of teenage girls everywhere? This seems unlikely, to say the least. Interestingly, however, adolescents who reported a “virgin pregnancy” were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them. Although the researchers admitted that “Scientists may still face challenges when collecting self-reported data on sensitive topics,” my point in citing these data is that young women who are pressured through home or church to “just say no” rather than given solid information to avoid pregnancy should sexual intercourse occur are more likely both to get pregnant and to lie about how it happened.59 Enforcement instead of education does not work.
The opposite of an abstinence-only program would be a reverse test of my thesis, and here we could not find a better social experiment than in Romania. When the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in 1965 he hatched a scheme for national renewal by severely restricting abortions and the use of contraception, to increase his country’s population. It worked. When abortion had previously been legalized in Romania, in 1957, 80 percent of unwanted pregnancies were aborted, primarily because of the lack of effective contraception. A decade later the fertility rate had fallen from 19.1 to 14.3 per 1,000, so Ceaușescu made abortion a crime unless a woman was over 45, had already delivered (and raised) four children, was suffering dangerous medical complications, or had been raped. The birth rate promptly shot up to 27.4 per 1,000 in 1967. Despite the dictator’s punishments for “childless persons” (monthly fines withheld from wages) or for those with fewer than five children (the imposition of a “celibacy tax”) and rewards for especially fertile mothers with a “distinguished role and noble mission” (state-sponsored child care, medical care, maternity leave), if (pace Yogi Berra) the people don’t want more babies you can’t stop them. The result was a social catastrophe of epic proportions, as thousands of babies were abandoned and left to the care of a state that was inept, corrupt, and broke. More than 170,000 children were dumped into over 700 dank and stark state-run institutional orphanages, and more than 9,000 women died due to complications from black-market (back alley) abortions. The effects are still felt today as many of those orphaned children are now adults with severely impaired intelligence, social and emotional disorders, and alarmingly high crime rates. The book Romania’s Abandoned Children, by Charles Nelson, Nathan Fox, and Charles Zeanah, is a moving account of this tragedy that should be read by anyone with pretentions toward social engineering and the restriction of women’s right to choose.60
If conservatives and Christians want to put an end to the termination of fetuses and infants, therefore, the best path to take is education, contraception, and the recognition of full female rights—which are simply human rights—including and especially reproductive rights. In the United States alone, studies show that safe, effective, and inexpensive contraception has prevented approximately twenty million pregnancies in twenty years, and given the rate of abortion during that time, this means that nine million fetuses were never aborted because they were never conceived. And note that it’s only 7 percent of women who are sexually active, but who do not use birth control, who account for almost 50 percent of all unintended pregnancies and almost 50 percent of all abortions.61 And while I’m citing statistics, one more is relevant to this discussion: according to the National Institutes of Health, childbirth is fourteen times more dangerous to a woman than an abortion.62 This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument “What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?” A rejoinder is, “What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth?”
Of course, many people are deaf to arguments demonstrating the positive impacts of contraception and abortion, because their sole concern is the right to life of the unborn fetus, which, in their view, trumps the rights of an adult woman. I believe the pro-choice vs. anti-choice debate turns more on facts than it does on morals, and if the facts can be resolved, then that may help settle the dispute. (I prefer using the terms “pro-choice” and “anti-choice” because we are all “pro-life.”) The major obstacle here is binary thinking that forces us to pigeonhole into two distinct categories a problem best conceived as a continuous scale. So-called pro-life proponents believe that human life begins at conception; before conception there is no life—after conception there is. For them, it is a binary system. With continuous thinking we can assign a probability to human life—before conception 0, the moment of conception 0.1, multicellular blastocyst 0.2, one-month-old embryo 0.3, two-month-old fetus 0.4, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 human life-form. It is a continuum, from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to newborn infant.63
Neither an egg nor a sperm cell is a human being, but then neither is the zygote or blastocyst because they might split to become twins, or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort.64 Although an eight-week-old embryo has recognizable human features such as face, hands, and feet, neuroscientists now know that at that stage neuronal synaptic connections are still under development, so anything even remotely resembling thoughts or feelings is impossible. After eight weeks embryos begin to show primitive response movements, but between eight and twenty-four weeks (six months) the fetus could not exist on its own because such critical organs as the lungs and kidneys do not mature before that time. For example, air sac development sufficient for gas exchange does not occur until at least twenty-three weeks after gestation, and often later, so independent viability is not possible.65 It is not until twenty-eight weeks, or approximately 77 percent of full-term development, that the fetus acquires sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities typically found in newborns. Fetus EEG recordings with the characteristics of an adult EEG appear at approximately thirty weeks, or about 83 percent of full-term.66
Along this continuum we see that the fetus’s capacity for human thought does not appear until just weeks before its birth. Since abortions are almost never performed after the second trimester—and as we have seen, before that period there is no evidence that the fetus is a thinking, feeling human individual—it is reasonable and rational to provisionally conclude that abortion is not comparable to the murder of a conscious sentient being after birth. Thus there is no scientific justification or rational argument to equate abortion with murder.
Still, an argument might be made that a fetus is a potential human being, since all of the characteristics that make us persons are there in the genes, unfolding during embryological development. True enough, but potentiality is not the same as actuality, and moral principles must apply first and foremost to actual persons, not potential persons. Given the choice between granting rights to an actual person (an adult woman) or a potential person (her fetus), it is preferable to choose the former on the grounds of both reason and compassion. Although more than half the states in the United States now have laws to protect unborn victims from violence—as in the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which treats the killing of a pregnant woman and her fetus as a double homicide—the law does not treat fetuses and adults alike in any other manner. Once again binary thinking lures us into treating a mother and her fetus as the same, whereas continuous thinking allows us to see the substantial differences.
CARVING WOMEN’S RIGHTS
The trend over the past several centuries has been to grant women the same rights and privileges as those of men. Political, economic, and social advances, enabled by scientific, technological, and medical discoveries and inventions, have increasingly provided women not only greater amounts of reproductive autonomy and control, but have also driven an expansion of their rights and opportunities in all areas of life, leading to healthier and happier societies across the globe. As with the other rights revolutions, much progress remains to be realized, but the momentum now is such that the expansion of women’s rights should continue unabated into the future.
In these ways—the rational justification for including women as full rights-bearing persons no less deserving than men, the interchangeability of women’s perspectives with those of men, the scientific understanding of the nature of human sexuality and reproduction, and the continuous thinking that enables us to see and comprehend the difference between a woman’s and a fetus’s rights—science and reason have led humanity closer to truth, justice, and freedom.
As an example of how far we’ve come in just the past two generations (and how oppressed women were as recently as the early twentieth century), I close this chapter with the story of two women—mother and daughter—both named Christine Roselyn Mutchler. The mother was born in Germany and passed through Ellis Island in 1893 with her parents, who then moved to Alhambra, California. Mother Christine married her husband, Frederick, and gave birth to baby Christine in 1910 (and a second daughter three years later), but their lives were shattered shortly after that when Fred told his wife he was going out for a loaf of bread and never returned. Abandoned by her husband, left with no money or food to care for herself and her two small children, mother Christine was forced to return to her father’s home.
Unknown to her at the time, Fred had wandered off and walked into the county jail with delusions that his father-in-law was after him. After being examined by a physician, he was sent to a mental hospital for more than a year. During this time, with his delusions in remission, Fred wrote heartbreaking letters to his wife asking about her and the children, but Christine’s father kept the letters from her and she continued to believe that she had been abandoned. In time she found work as a housemaid for a friend of a successful motion picture executive named John C. Epping, whose wife had recently died. Desperate for a daughter and enamored by three-year-old Christine, Epping talked Christine’s father into forcing her to allow him to adopt the child. Young, poor, scared, and intimidated by her father, Christine reluctantly agreed to the adoption, although a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times show that a probation officer on the case opposed the adoption, declaring “she believed Epping saw possibilities of a future Mary Pickford in the little girl, and that the child should have a home in some private family where home life and education would be the principal features.”67 Based on the false information provided by Christine’s father that Fred had abandoned them, the judge granted the adoption.
Figure 6-9. Sculptor Franc Epping
Born Christine Roselyn Mutchler and given the adopted name Frances Dorothy Epping, the sculptor started using the masculinized version of her adopted name—Franc—to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of sculpture. Her sculptures portray strong women with muscular features in empowering poses.69
Epping promptly changed the name of his newly adopted daughter to Frances Dorothy Epping, addressed her by her middle name, and (unbelievably) told her she was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and that his deceased wife was her true mother. Now age four, Christine/Dorothy apparently did not accept the fictional story and rebelled—or perhaps Epping changed his mind about raising a daughter as a single dad—because he shuffled her around through a series of surrogate parents, including sisters at the Ramona Convent in Alhambra and caretakers at the Marlborough Preparatory School in Los Angeles, before shipping her back East for a year to live with his sister in the Catskills, and then on to Germany, where she lived with Epping’s relations. During that period Dorothy discovered that she had a talent for the arts, in particular sculpture.
She then returned to Los Angeles and finished her secondary education, after which she was reunited with her original family and told the truth about the adoption. She went on to college at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, in the 1930s under the tutelage of Joseph Wackerle, who, at that time, was the Third Reich’s culture senator and who received praise from both Goebbels and Hitler. (She later recalled being stunned by the hypnotic pull Hitler had on an audience of one of his speeches she attended.) In the meantime, Dorothy’s real mother, Christine, was instructed by her father to divorce her husband, Fred, after which she met and married a vegetable cart vendor in Los Angeles, left her father’s oppressive rule, and began to rebuild her life and new family. But the tragedy of being forced to give up her firstborn child haunted her the rest of her life. As the world changed and Christine saw how women became more empowered in the second half of the twentieth century, she continually asked herself why she didn’t speak up and oppose the adoption.
Meanwhile, as Dorothy came of age she soon discovered that family law and the adoption courts were not the only worlds ruled by men. Her chosen profession of sculpture was a heavily male-dominated one, so to be taken seriously she began using a truncated version of her first name, Frances—Franc—and that gained her entrée into the German academy and subsequent galleries and museums (even now one can find references to “his” work). She later recalled that when the professors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich found out “Franc” was a woman, she had to listen to lectures from the hallways because only men were allowed inside. From the early 1930s through her death in 1983—by which time it was acceptable for women to shape clay, wood, and stone with their hands—Franc Epping’s work was shown in numerous exhibits throughout the United States, including the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. One of her works, The Man with a Hat, even appeared in an episode of the original series of Star Trek. I know because I own that piece, along with many other sculptures of hers, which I inherited from my mother (see examples in figure 6-9).
You see, Franc Epping was my aunt; her real mother, Christine, was my grandmother; and I am proud to be related to such a resilient and determined woman.68 Aunt Franc’s sculptures portray strong women with muscular features in empowering poses—allegories for what women for generations have had to rise to in order to gain the recognition and equality that are rightfully theirs. This book was written in the inspiring presence of those carved stones.