DAVAO CITY (MindaNews /02 April) — Abortion debates under neoliberalism deprive women of moral agency by isolating their choices from structural conditions, while simultaneously absolving corporations of moral responsibility for environmental toxics that cause involuntary abortions. This moral asymmetry reflects neoliberalism’s broader logic: individualizing responsibility while depoliticizing systemic harm.
When abortion enters public debate, women are cast as moral actors whose choices must be scrutinized, defended, or condemned. Yet the countless involuntary abortions caused by toxic chemicals released into the environment by corporations rarely enter the moral conversation at all. Miscarriages induced by pollutants are treated as unfortunate accidents, technical failures of regulation, or medical events stripped of ethical weight. This silence is not accidental—it reflects the logic of neoliberalism, which individualizes responsibility while depoliticizing systemic harm. Under this framework, women are burdened with moral blame for their reproductive decisions, while corporations escape moral accountability for the reproductive damage their practices inflict. The result is a profound moral asymmetry: women’s agency is constrained and judged, while corporate power is normalized and shielded from critique.
Feminist ethics has long challenged the exclusion of women’s experiences from moral discourse, with Carol Gilligan’s work on relational moral reasoning and Joan Tronto’s emphasis on care ethics underscoring the need to situate agency within structural contexts.
Building on these insights, reproductive justice scholars such as Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger argue that abortion cannot be understood apart from the social, economic, and environmental conditions that shape reproductive outcomes.
Environmental justice research, from Robert Bullard’s foundational studies of pollution and inequality to Stacy Alaimo’s theorization of “bodily natures,” further demonstrates how toxins blur the boundaries between individual bodies and systemic harm, producing miscarriages and involuntary abortions that remain ethically invisible. Neoliberal theorists like David Harvey and Wendy Brown explain this invisibility as a product of neoliberal rationality, which privatizes responsibility and depoliticizes systemic violence.
Taken together, these literatures reveal a striking moral asymmetry: women’s reproductive decisions are intensely scrutinized, while corporate practices that cause reproductive harm are shielded from ethical accountability. This intersection highlights how neoliberalism sustains a double erasure — of women’s structural constraints and of corporate responsibility — thereby depriving women of full moral agency.
If abortion debates continue to focus solely on women’s choices while ignoring the reproductive harm inflicted by corporate pollution, moral discourse will remain distorted.
Neoliberalism thrives on this distortion: it privatizes responsibility, moralizes women’s decisions, and depoliticizes systemic violence against their bodies. To restore women’s moral agency, we must expand the frame of abortion beyond individual choice to include the structural conditions that shape reproductive outcomes. Only by holding corporations accountable for the toxics that cause involuntary abortions can we dismantle the moral asymmetry that neoliberalism sustains. In doing so, abortion becomes not just a question of personal morality, but a collective ethical struggle against the forces that commodify life and normalize harm.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Dr. Jean A. Lindo is an anaesthesiologist. She chairs Gabriela Southern Mindanao and is Secretary General for Mindanao of the Gabriela Women’s Party. She teaches Community Medicine at the Davao Medical School Foundation, Inc.)
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