Is Abortion Vegan?

So-called “right to life” groups are gaining traction in North America. In the pre-Trump world, I had, perhaps naively, believed the abortion debate had been put to bed politically out here in the West. Alas, ultra conservative ideologies have a way of hiding in plain sight and taking centre stage when opportunity arises. Given its unfortunate current relevance, here are a couple pennies from me.

In my days of futile in-your-face animal rights advocacy, the topic of abortion came up a lot. The contexts were always underscored by questions of hypocrisy. Is it hypocritical of someone who believes in protecting the rights of powerless animals to not also take the side of protecting the lives of human fetuses? Additionally, is it hypocritical of a “pro life” advocate to eat the dead bodies of baby animals?

The answer to both questions is a clean “no.” Starting with the latter, let’s acknowledge that “pro life” is a dishonest label. This is, after all, an Abrahamic movement promoting Abrahamic values. The right to life is not by any stretch a value of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. On the contrary, these religions continually prove to be genocidal, colonial, and brutally controlling. All three are built on devaluation of life, oppressive hierarchy, and preposterous restrictions on free will. Their collective initiative against abortion rights is indicative of these foundational values and has nothing to do with protecting life.

These foundations align flawlessly with animal agricultural practices. Take dairy farming, for example, wherein cows spend their entire lives in forced pregnancy in order to induce lactation. Each time their calves are born, farm workers steal the baby so they cannot drink up their mother’s milk and reduce the farm's yield. Female calves endure the same production cycle as their mothers, and male calves are killed, cut up, and sold as veal meat. The suffering on these farms is unimaginable, but I have witnessed some of it, and I will say this: If there is a more haunting sound than a mother crying out for her stolen baby, I have yet to hear it.

Their suffering is meaningless though to anyone who has decided that the well being of cows simply does not matter. When your value set includes imposed hierarchies, the idea that some lives matter more than others, and the absolute annihilation of free will, does it not make perfect sense that veal, chicken, dairy products, etc. would be on the plate at every single anti-abortion fundraiser?

As for the former question, vegans are not pro life; we are more accurately anti exploitation. When anyone but the person carrying the fetus decides what that person can or cannot do with their body, the pregnant person’s vulnerability is being exploited. End of story.

Once we acknowledge the different value sets informing vegan versus anti choice ideologies, we see that there is in fact cohesion when observing that vegans are always pro choice and that anti choice groups always participate in the exploitation and killing of animals.

I think the confusion over the intersection of these two issues speaks to the successful framing of the false “pro life” narrative and to the inconsistency of vegan messaging. Animal rights cannot seem to settle on being progressive, neoliberal, feminist, atheist, Christian, etc. There is even a large population that believes the movement can somehow be effective if it is apolitical. With its identity undefined, the movement leaves itself to be labelled by outsiders which ultimately results in a constant campaign of PR damage control in which vegans find themselves explaining what they are not rather than explaining what they are. (We don't hunt; we don't wear leather; no, we don't eat fish). This routing of our messaging makes it almost impossible to steer the focus back to the core of the vegan message which is really just that most suffering in the world can and should be prevented since most suffering in the world is a product of unnecessary exploitation. If that message was clear there would be no head scratching as to how a vegan could believe in protecting the autonomy and health of a pregnant person.

So the next time that anti-abortion friend of yours orders the veal cutlet and your pro choice friend gets the stuffed portobello cap, you can pick your jaw up from the floor. You are not witnessing an anomaly. Your friends are simply showing you who they are.