Whose Choice? Whose Life?

ONE reason pro-choice activists call themselves "pro-choice" and not "pro-abortion" is to highlight the fact that they are fighting to protect women in all areas of reproductive decision-making. The pro-choice stance tries to protect women not only from unwanted pregnancy, but also from unwanted abortion and unwanted sterilization.

The so-called pro-life groups ignore the possibility that a woman's lack of choice can give government or business the right to force women not to bear children. The following cases show that anti-choice can mean anti-life, for the fetus as well as for the woman:

Since at least 1986, female corrections officers in New York City have been told that if they become pregnant, they must have abortions or resign. Many of the women have had abortions. One who didn't was fired for insubordination. The officers, who are suing the Department of Corrections, claim that those who resist are pressured and penalized with irregular shifts, assignments to dangerous and mentally ill inmates and work on barge decks during storms, to name a few.

The reason: union sick-leave policies would mean the city would have to bear the cost of pre-natal care and maternity leaves.

Financial motives are behind a similar case at the Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc. Female factory workers in 14 plants across the country have been forced to choose between sterilization operations and demotion. The company's "Fetal Protection Policy," in effect since 1982, bars fertile women from hazardous and high-paying work involving exposure to a high level of lead.

This policy protects the company from future suits from not just unborn, but unconceived children. To keep their jobs, women workers--no matter what their child-rearing plans for the future--must provide the company with documented proof of infertility.

The aptly named Johnson Controls, Inc. does not pretend to try to protect their full-grown employees, male or female, from hazardous materials. Instead, women workers are assumed to be unable to make smart choices about their reproductive futures, and men, whose own reproductive systems remain at risk to lead exposure, are left alone. Non-existent, spiritual fetuses are the justification for a company's right to: a) deprive potential mothers of high-paying work and b) deprive potential mothers of potential motherhood. An ostensibly "pro-life" policy becomes a policy of sex discrimination and forced sterilization.

ONCE women are denied the right to make decisions about their reproductive lives, the differences between a pro-choice position that protects women's privacy and a pro-life position that protects fetuses are moot.

A pro-life position can offer no guarantees against government or business decisions to force women to undergo abortions or sterilization operations. A pro-choice position, on the other hand, guarantees the rights of women both to terminate unwanted pregnancies and to bring to term wanted ones.

Nobody likes abortion. Pro-choice advocates do not consider abortion an attractive option to birth-control. What the pro-choice position realizes, however, is that once government takes reproductive decision-making away from individual men and women, fetal life as well as the lives of women are at stake. Legal abortion is a right that guarantees women--not government, not private business--the power of all reproductive choice.