I submitted the below piece to the bimonthly zine, Sister Species Solidarity. I had never heard of the zine before, but it’s now on my feminist/animal liberationist reading list and I eagerly await the next issue. Creating knowledge and discussion outside of the realm of academia is important work, and I’m glad that the editors prioritize the voices of women and people targeted by sexism. There’s no pandering to male allies for the sake of “diversity and inclusion.” This issue’s theme was Bodily Autonomy, so I wrote about reproductive justice and abortion access. Enjoy!
Not my uterus. Here’s where I found it.
People often ask me, why are you pro-choice? (They will often ask me why I am pro-abortion, and why I care so much more about the lives of chickens, pigs, and cows than unborn humans.) They say that they are pro “all” life, that they don’t think terminating a fetus can possibly be consistent with vegan ethics of causing least harm.
First of all, I’m not pro-abortion. I’m pro-choice, which is an entirely separate framing of reproductive justice. If someone wants to carry a pregnancy to term, they should be able to do so. Every sentient being should be trusted to decide for themself when is the right time to start and build a family, and which kind of family they want to build. Single parents, teen parents, low-income parents, disabled parents, queer/trans parents, parents of color, etc. need support and resources that suit their families’ needs, not shaming.
The difference between a human uterus haver* and a hen is that the human can consent to having a fetus removed (one who is seeking an abortion is specifically asking for that), whereas the hen (lacking the ability to communicate with us humans) can’t consent to having her egg taken. The human and the hen both deserve the right to bodily autonomy and self-governance. Eggs aren’t just “lying around” – if you crack an egg open for a hen they will gobble it right up.
If you want to reduce abortion rates, which is a noble endeavor, the way to do that is comprehensive sexual education, accessible and affordable birth control and sexual health services, and resources and support such as parental leave and childcare support so that people feel like parenting is a feasible choice for them. Forcing a person to carry a child to term and then to keep that kiddo or give them up for adoption doesn’t sound like respecting someone’s bodily autonomy to me.
Also, it would be super if we could talk about not eating the bodies and secretions of other animals without being misogynist toward humans. Eating eggs (for instance) is wrong because taking something that belongs to someone else without their consent is wrong, not because women and periods (and therefore eggs) are gross.
*I am using the clunky phrase “uterus-haver” rather than “woman” because not all women have uteruses (think of trans women, or women who have had a hysterectomy) and not all people who have uteruses are women even though they may still be able to become pregnant (think of trans men or genderqueer or nonbinary female-assigned people.) Access to family planning care and abortions when needed is a reproductive justice issue for people of all genders.
**I will acknowledge one hole in my argument for reproductive justice. I do support spay/neuter programs for domesticated animals. I think it just to ask the question of why I would, when I absolutely oppose the control of reproduction for any human who is capable of consenting to their own reproductive decisions. The compromise with spay/neuter programs for domesticated animals is because we live in a world that is violent to nonhumans and that has exploited them at every turn for millenia. I believe that nonhuman animals are here for their own purposes and do not exist for us to use. At the same time, I wish to avoid causing them harm to the greatest extent that I can. I believe that on the grand scheme of things, not spaying/neutering animals (e.g. dogs and cats) will cause them to reproduce with one another which will ultimately cause more violence to their offspring in this speciesist society.
Hana Low | opening cages for collective liberation 
In the case of humans who can consent, you’re giving too much weight on the mother instead of the fetus. Unwillingly or willingly tieing your body to another sentient being does not give you the right to do to it whatever you like.
If you wake up surgically attached to another person unwillingly by a crazy doctor or willingly for whatever preference, you can’t just decide to kill the other person when you change your mind. You try to live together until you find a doctor that can safely disjoint both of you.
That being said I wouldn’t violently stop anyone from having an abortion though, rather use persuasion. I advocate the pro-sentient life position, but there is a third interesting alternative to the abortion debate:
I completely agree with the comment above. Sorry, but your “logic” is very faulty. I guess, being vegan, you would argue that prawns, for example, have some level of sentience and a right to life, which is why you don’t eat them? well, a human foetus, even at an early stage also has some level of sentience and a right to life (and it usually ends up inside a woman, and living off her, due to a voluntary consensual act of that woman. What is that, if it is not choice?)
Being surgically attached to an alive, awake, very born human being is not the same as having an embryo grow in your belly, robbing you of nutrients and becoming a legal obligation. That embryonic/foetal life isn’t sacred. Bodily autonomy is sacred. No one can or should be forced to sacrifice their own autonomy to another creature. We don’t have obligate organ donation, for example, because we recognize that forcing someone to give up a part of themselves, even after death, is a violation of bodily autonomy.
Second commenter, please present some proof that fetuses are sentient “even at early stages” because my understanding is that consciousness doesn’t develop until the third trimester.
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Thank you for your reply, ALEXIS.
To clarify, my vegan stance on abortion is pro-sentience or rather pro-choice until around 20-24 weeks when consciousness arises (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise). So I’m not interested in embryos and pre-sentient fetuses. To me those are morally equivalent to a tissue growth or a plant. I’m unfamiliar with the adequate positional labels.
he Trouble With Being a Pro-Choice Vegan
Some people think being pro-choice is blatantly at odds with being vegan. If you’re against killing, you should be against all killing, right? Well… no. That would mean that if you’re in favor of some killing then you have to be in favor of all killing. If we’re going to be such sticklers for consistency, someone who is okay with killing in self defense would have to be just as okay with blowing up the entire world.
So there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between being vegan and being pro-choice, but abortion can be an ideologically confusing issue for some vegans, and the reason for this is that not all vegans have identified their own premises. Some vegan rules are compatible with abortion, and some aren’t. The bad news for pro-choice vegans is that a pro-choice stance puts their objection to animal consumption on shiftier ground.
Much of vegan ethics comes down to the concepts of sentience and interests. Vegans say plants don’t need to be protected from humans because plants don’t feel pain and aren’t aware of nor attached to their lives, and so plants (though alive and structured for survival) don’t have an interest in remaining intact or continuing to live. Animals, however, do feel pain and are attached to their lives in some way, and so they do have an interest in not being manhandled or killed. The key difference vegans often point to is a central nervous system, which animals tend to have and which plants lack.
It might seem, then, that an easy out for pro-choice vegans would be to say something like, “Fetuses aren’t sentient until they have developed a central nervous system, so there’s nothing contradictory about killing fetuses before the third trimester and being against the intentional killing of sentient animals.”
However, this creates problems for some ways that vegans argue against killing animals for food. In fact, this creates problems for the ways that most people argue against whatever kinds of killings they don’t like. That’s because it’s possible to kill sentient beings in ways that mimic the criteria that makes vegans okay with killing non-sentient lifeforms. If vegans don’t want to kill sentient beings because they can experience pain and have some kind of awareness of life and their interest in living, then all we have to do is kill these beings in a painless way, while they are unaware of their interests — like by blowing their heads off while they are sleeping or temporarily unconscious. Sentient creatures who are killed like this are no more aware of pain or the violation of their interests and future potential than any plant or fetus that we kill.
All that is left for vegans to say against this kind of killing is that the sentient beings who are killed in this manner still have future potential to enjoy life even if they are not currently aware of it, and we selfishly destroy that potential when we kill them. The problem with this is that it means we can’t kill fetuses either since they have future potential to enjoy life (and thus have “interests” in the vegan definition), even if they are not currently aware of it. Just like someone who is under anesthetic and asleep, gestating humans don’t realize they have potential to enjoy the future, but they have that potential nevertheless, and we take it away by killing them.
In short: if we can’t kill sentient beings because sentient beings feel pain, then we could kill them under anesthetic, or kill them so quickly they don’t have a chance to feel pain; this could potentially allow killing animals for food. If we can’t kill sentient beings because sentient beings have interests that they are aware of, then we could kill sentient beings at moments when they are not aware of their interests, like when they are asleep or otherwise unconscious, or maybe even just drugged up or distracted. This too could allow killing animals for food. But if we can’t kill beings with future interests even if they are not currently aware of these interests because this deprives them of whatever life has in store for them in the future, then we can’t kill fetuses because they have future potential even if they aren’t aware of it yet.
This seems to put pro-choice vegans in a bind.
Pro-choice vegans could try saying that the difference between fetuses who are temporarily unaware of their interests and unconscious animals who are temporarily unaware of their interests is that the unconscious animals were previously aware of their interests (while they were awake) and the fetuses have never been aware of their interests. They could insist that the future potential of a fetus is less important than the future potential of someone who was aware of their interests just a few hours ago (even if they aren’t at this moment). But the question this raises is… why? Why does this previous awareness count so much? If someone is in an irreversible coma and will never be aware of their interest in living again, does it matter that they previously had an interest in living? Does this previous awareness of interests somehow count more than the fetuses’ future awareness of interests? It’s hard to see how it could since we move forward in time rather than backward.
Fetuses and temporarily unconscious humans or nonhuman animals all have potential to enjoy life in the future that they are currently unaware of. The difference is our own perception of that potential. In other words, the difference is self-centered. For the most part, we are more attached to those who are born and who we know personally because we have a better idea of what they are like, how they contribute to our lives and where their own lives are going. A fetus is an abstraction with nothing but potential; they aren’t as deeply intertwined in our lives as the already born, and we don’t really know what their specific goals and ambitions are going to be. Nonhuman animals who are already born are less of an abstraction to pro-choice vegans than fetuses are to them, so these vegans find it less disturbing to kill a fetus than to kill an animal in a way that causes the animal no more distress than fetuses feel as they die.
But vegans don’t want to leave the argument hanging like this, because that would mean that meat eating is okay as long as meat eaters see nonhuman animals as abstractions and don’t feel disturbed at their deaths, which is how most meat eaters actually do feel. There is, however, one last strategy for pro-choice vegans to employ: they can lump abortion in with self-defense.
Most vegans are okay with killing nonhuman animals when immediate human survival depends on it, even though they consider the animals to be “innocent”; pro-choice vegans can use similar arguments to defend abortion. This is a slam dunk when a woman’s life is definitely at stake, but most pro-choice vegans aren’t that strict. Vegans who are okay with abortion no matter how safe the pregnancy and delivery are expected to be can still make self-defense style arguments, but in doing so they’re stretching the definition of self-defense beyond immediate survival into quality of life terrain. And if you appeal to quality of life to defend the intentional killing of “innocent” fetuses when the mother’s life is not at risk, it becomes a lot harder to critique meat eaters who make quality of life appeals to defend killing “innocent” animals.
Pro-choice vegans can still claim that growing, delivering and raising a baby they don’t want — or even giving it up for adoption — causes mothers and their unwanted children more misery than a lifetime of veganism causes meat and cheese lovers. But there’s no way to actually test and measure which misery trumps which, so pro-choice vegans can’t completely dismiss meat eaters who say, “I love animal products and I’m not into most plant foods. Also, I feel better when I eat some animal fat and protein. I would be miserable if I had to live a lifetime as a vegan, so I’m okay with killing animals.” Pro-choice vegans would still want to say that the misery of unwanted pregnancy is nontrivial and the misery of a life without animal products is trivial, but how could they ever prove that?
It becomes a murkier debate this way because pro-choice vegans are admitting that they are willing to intentionally end the lives of others in order to benefit their own lives, just like meat eaters do. The difference between pro-choice vegans and meat eaters is not about selfishness vs. selflessness, but rather about how much value each of us places on certain advantages for ourselves (not having children if we don’t want them, getting to eat animal products if we enjoy them) and whose lives and future potentials we are willing to sacrifice for these personal advantages.
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*pro choice …..my Freudian slip was to be pro life especially because I value a child’s rites above all infant animals…but the word I meant was pro choice in my comments. Peace.
The argument is faulty but I have the solution. The argument is faulty when we turn to sentient requirements, because vegans don’t eat eggs. “You are supporting the death of hundreds of millions of chicks every year”, is what one vegan site claims. Also, autonomy of body is not fair, because the male contributed that sperm. In other words, “you didn’t build that” alone. So, with what right does one human being have the choice to terminate a life if the other contributing human being has a differing opinion? Finally, abortion takes place at all stages of sentient development of the fetus, and with late term abortions, pro choice allows a child that could survive with a non murderous mother who would have a needle put in its head and then murdered and parted out, to be evicted and given to some non murderous pro all life human to nurture, love and raise. So again, you have blood on your theoretical hands if you support abortion at any stage. I think veganism is a projected empathy for animals, insects and all life but infants, for a lasting guilt for having had an abortion or supporting abortion. I promised a solution: and I have the remedy for all pro choice vegans which will save all animal life in their world, and feed all those suffering from their delusion. Since baby fetuses are protein and not animal to you, and that cluster of cells has less rights than those that create a crustacean, I suggest you eat all the dead fetuses in the world. Because in the end–you will save animal lives, and since you are what you eat, This way, you will be authentically aligned with the millions of human lives you support being ended. Tofu/or baby toes? They are both sources of protein. Peace–be vegan and anti abortion, or be the biggest hypocrites on earth.
There are many arguments that come from pro-choice vegan people I’d like to touch:
1. “Freedom” is ethical: This is false. “Respect” is ethical. Veganism does not consider ethical the “freedom” to eat meat.
2. Pain & conscience: This is again false. If that was the case, eating caviar would be widely accepted as vegan. Milk is not widely accepted, even if the cow is happily kept. The same for chicken eggs (which is even more easy to have them happy & free than cows). Additionally, if pain/conscience would be OK, there would no issue on harvesting hormones from sedated animales.
3. Economical situation of the pregnant: For this point we must remember that we don’t kill animals just because our society is advancing (geographically) and thus wiping away their homelands. Instead, we use to move against that, and fight to have those zones as protected or sanctuaries.
If you consider that as allowable for humans, when you wouldn’t for animals, remember that’s another way of specism (which is the main thing we consider, usually).
You lost the debate when you said, reducing abortion rates is a noble endeavor; you literally are saying there is something wrong with it.
Veganism is an act towards NON human animals. That is it; abortion isn’t in the same category.