Last week saw the Supreme Court considering the question “what is a woman?”. If you’re thinking “but everyone knows the answer to that”, I totally agree. The fact is, it’s just a shorthand. The real question is this: “are women so unimportant that everyone should pretend not to know what women are?” Because right now, quite a lot of individuals and institutions already do.

One day before For Women Scotland’s appeal against the Scottish government opened, Amnesty International UK presented their long-awaited third-party intervention into the case. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an organisation which has long abandoned its feminist principles, Amnesty take the view that women are indeed too irrelevant to require any form of cultural or political recognition. Nonetheless, they haven’t put it quite like that. It’s important to make these things sound less callous and misogynistic than they actually are. Therefore they’ve tacked it to a bunch of other issues:

“Whether it is the right to legal gender recognition, the recognition of LGBT+ families or the right to access healthcare and abortion services the arguments tend to be very similar, if not the same. This is one of those cases.”

That’s their bold for emphasis, not mine. Otherwise I suppose you might think that whether lesbians can adopt, or whether a sexually abused eleven-year-old has to carry a pregnancy to term, involve completely different arguments to whether a man can identify his way into your woman-only rape crisis support group. But hey, Amnesty used bold! Plus an earlier reference to “the autonomy of women”! Case closed, bigots.

This hasn’t been the only time in recent weeks when the right to terminate a pregnancy has been linked to the right to do something else entirely. In advance of last Friday’s vote on assisted dying, the Guardian published a piece suggesting that “‘Slippery’ slope fears over assisted dying have echoes of abortion debate”. This was following a Times piece in which David Steel used his position as “architect of the Abortion Act” to express support for Kim Leadbeater’s bill.

“Few in this country would now argue that a woman who chooses to end a pregnancy should not have the medical care she needs to do so safely,” he wrote, “but the passage of that original bill was far from easy.” Whilst I’m staunchly pro-choice, I have to admit I’m not totally following the reasoning here. “Lots of people used to be against this, then, with the passage of time, they started to think of it as essential” can apply to something terrible just as much as something good. If anything, doesn’t this confirm the fears of those who opposed Leadbeater’s bill? Don’t the promised safeguards, and the avoidance of that “slippery slope”, rely on the kind of vigilance that would never come to view the opposition’s arguments as “not just alien but irrational”? Then again, maybe you should ignore me. If abortion is just like assisted suicide, you might think I’m demanding the maintenance of fierce opposition to it.

Abortion is not like anything else for one reason: pregnancy is not like anything else

Unfortunately, things don’t stop there when it comes to “abortion being just like something else”. We’ve already done prioritising gender identity over biological sex and legalising euthanasia. How about the decriminalisation of sex work? Setting children who’d otherwise grow up to be gay on a path to lifelong medicalisation and sterility? Or even commercial surrogacy? You may have noticed some common threads here. Things that are supposedly “like” abortion have a tendency to unite under the heading “bodily autonomy” whilst involving “choices” which either offer up female bodies for exploitation, or “manage” disruptive (sick, or gender non-conforming) bodies in ways that make life easier for others. You might think abortion is like that, too, whereupon we enter a debate on whether this “bodily autonomy” is really worth such a rampant prioritisation of individualism over social responsibility and relational self-identification. Indeed, if I thought abortion was the same as all those other issues, I’d be against it as well. Yet I don’t think it is, and this is what angers me about these comparisons, not least at a time when abortion access is under attack globally and women are dying as a consequence.

Abortion is not like anything else for one simple reason: pregnancy is not like anything else. One can argue that the slogan “my body, my choice” has a lot to answer for — certainly, it’s had unforeseen consequences — but to reduce it to “choice” alone trivialises what it means to be pregnant and what it means to end a pregnancy. The alternative to having an abortion is never simply “not having an abortion”; it is remaining pregnant and giving birth. It is making a physical and emotional sacrifice that is entirely unique, risking lifelong trauma and in some cases death. The relationship between foetus and gravida is not “like” any other relationship. Abortion is not the same as infanticide, but neither is it the same as tooth extraction. To understand why abortion matters — especially for the most vulnerable women and girls — requires understanding why pregnancy matters. It involves valuing the latter as something active, powerful and specific to female humans, as opposed to merely nine months in which a person being becomes a passive vessel (the anti-abortionist might think of her this way, but so, too, does the commercial surrogacy advocate. They are not so far apart).

I don’t think it’s just intellectual laziness that pushes people to lump abortion with other issues. Sometimes I think it’s an awareness that one doesn’t have a strong case when one views the other issue in isolation — which is certainly the case with the Supreme Court hearing — so one tacks on abortion in order to create a vague impression of all-round progressive goodness (sex denialists also attempt this with anti-racism when they claim sex is a colonial construct). At other times, I think it’s the curse of “the omnicause”. If being on the right side of history means you have to come out in favour of puberty blockers and torture porn, viewing it all through the (very blurry) lens of bodily autonomy can help to silence all those doubts. You can tell yourself that if the far right are attacking abortion rights and coming out against puberty blockers, that just proves they’re the same sort of thing.

There’s also a strong element of coercion in the way abortion rights are made contingent on the approval of other “rights”. As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Right-wing Women, “on the Left, women will have abortion on male terms, as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except at risk of death”. I feel this when women are told that if they do not accept today’s male-centric visions of gender liberation, they are throwing their lot in with “traditional” patriarchs and their anti-choice politics. It is a threat: “do what we want, or you’ll be to blame if you lose rights that can only be withheld from your sex — the very sex we insist you do not name”.

In a piece from 2014, Sarah Ditum asks why we see blood and organ donation as opt-in “but the donation of the whole bodily system entailed by pregnancy as opt-out, and opt-out only under specific criteria?”

“I think I know why: because pregnancy is the only form of corporeal generosity that is specific to the female body. We recognise males as entire beings with an independent moral nature, and understand that it would be an obscenity to compel any man to give up even part of his body for another’s benefit.”

To that extent, I guess we can see the link to the Supreme Court case, but it’s not the link Amnesty posits. It’s the one where women are viewed as unimportant — both when it comes to reproductive rights, and when it comes to having words to describe ourselves.

When the most fundamental arguments for women’s rights become fodder to bolster the most ridiculous male demands, we can see how little we count. The fight for abortion rights matters, but those who use them in this way are not our allies. It’s time to stop treating them as such.