Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Abortion is an issue that evokes, on all sides, very strong feelings and judgments
and very heated recriminations. The most radical formulation of the anti-abortion
or "pro-life" side of the debate views abortion as the murder of unborn children,
and so as the equivalent of out and out infanticide, making the legal use of
abortion since Roe v. Wade, at a rate of around 1.5 million a year in the United
States, into a holocaust of the innocent fully comparable to the Nazi genocide
against the Jews. Radical "pro-life" activists who blockade abortion clinics (or
who even commit terrorist acts of vandalism, arson, and murder) see what they
do as what "good Germans" didn't do in the face of Hitler's atrocities, or what
John Brown did do in his attempt at Harper's Ferry to free the slaves through
mass rebellion. While John Brown was regarded as a dangerous and treasonous
fanatic during his lifetime, Union armies later marched through the South singing
the song "John Brown's Body," whose tune Julia Ward Howe borrowed for the
great "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Anti-abortionists thus feel that they would be
similarly vindicated and honored by history [0].
On the other hand, the most radical formulation of the pro-abortion or "pro-
choice" side views opposition to abortion as opposition to the freedom of women,
as hatred of women, and as part of a historical effort to "subjugate" women as
nothing more than baby-making machines or, failing that, to see that they die in
botched abortions as part of, indeed, something comparable to the Nazi
genocide of the Jews. They sometimes interpret the anti-abortion cause as so
heinous that even non-violent anti-abortion protests are regarded as "hate
crimes" which should be suppressed using the most draconian federal anti-
racketeering and anti-terrorist laws [1]. In general, "pro-choice" activists believe
that the availability of abortion is absolutely necessary for the general alleviation
of poverty and for the possibility of better and fulfilling lives for both women and
children.
A similarly bad argument says that abortion should be legal because women will
get maimed or killed getting illegal abortions. That could just as easily be an
argument for legalizing armed robbery or any other crime, since armed robbers
and other criminals can get shot or killed in doing what they do. If something is
genuinely wrong, then the fact that someone engaging in that wrong action might
be hurt or killed is irrelevant. And if the argument is that abortion is too trivial a
thing for women to die because of, that begs the question, since it is precisely the
issue whether abortion is murder or not; and if it is, then it is not any kind of trivial
matter.
A pro-choice bumper-sticker occasionally seen says, "If you can't trust me with a
choice, how can you trust me with a child?" However, although everyone is
trusted with a "choice" whether or not to commit murder, this does not mean that
they can choose whether murder is right or wrong. Just because mothers (and
fathers) have a right to raise their children, they do not have a right to decide that
murder, if it is murder, is OK. If abortion is murder, then the moral and legal issue
is the same whether a mother and a father are thinking about murdering each
other rather than aborting a fetus. Similarly, conservative firebrand and
Republican sometime Presidential candidate Alan Keyes says:
...if your daughter comes and says "Dad, I want to kill grandma for the
inheritance," you wouldn't say "well, this is not a good idea, but it's your choice."
People are trusted with freedom because they are generally trusted not to do
wrong as autonomous moral agents. When they do wrongs, like murder, robbery,
rape, etc., we do not "trust" them by saying that an action is all right just because
it was all right with them.
The basis of the "pro-life" position, in turn, is that human life starts with
conception. The view is that there is no natural point of division in the life of a
person between the fertilization of the egg and the point of the "viability" of a
fetus to survive outside the womb, let alone birth. Furthermore, an embryo
develops quickly, and by the time artificial abortions are likely to be performed,
heart, brain, circulation, and other recognizable organs and organic functions
already exist.
While simple and coherent, the principal difficulty with this "starts with
conception" view, however, is that the views of a very large number of "pro-life"
people are inconsistent with it, if indeed they believe that abortion should be
allowed in cases of rape and incest. If the "starts with conception" view of human
life is to be applied consistently, a child of rape or incest is completely innocent of
those acts and does not deserve to be killed because of the crime of its father [2].
Since the number of "pro-life" advocates who would be willing to force victims of
incest or rape to endure a pregnancy as the result of those crimes is small
enough that it wouldn't matter politically all by itself, our attention should turn to
"pro-life" advocates who would allow abortions in case of rape or incest. They
make the difference politically, but since their views are inconsistent with the
"starts from conception" view, we must ask if there is any other justification for an
anti-abortion stance that would make for a coherent perspective for such people.
That will leave the "starts from conception" view of human life unanswered (for
the moment), but I think that the revulsion most people would feel at making a
woman bear the child of a rapist can be taken as a sufficient clue that most pro-
life sentiment actually does not come from the "starts from conception"
formulation.
Sure a woman has the right to choose whether or not to become pregnant. She
makes that choice before engaging in sex. To make that 'choice' after a
pregnancy is underway, merely as a matter of birth control, is an immoral act.
Michelman [Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League] and
her allies feel an sense of entitlement to risk-free sex.
The "pro-life" argument then is that the act of choosing to have sex is the act of
choosing to accept responsibility for the possible consequences, i.e. conception.
To them it is no longer a question of a woman's control over her own body when
it involves killing someone else, even if that is "merely" an embryo or fetus. If this
sentiment is found together with a belief that abortion is acceptable in cases of
rape and incest, then the view can only be consistent if the "unborn child" does
not have an absolute "right to life." Abortion would be acceptable if the mother
did not have a choice in the conception. But the "unborn child" has enough of a
"right to life" that a woman must reckon on her responsibility for it in her own free
actions.
The responsibility issue turns up in related debates about welfare. In the early
'90's, the State of New Jersey decided not to increase welfare payments if
women had additional children while already on welfare. One side of the debate
regarded this as an attack on the children, with the assumption that women have
the right to have children even when they know that they can support them only
with public money or that, whether the women have that right or not, the children
must be given public support regardless, just because they having nothing to do
with their origin and are helpless. The other side of the debate held the children
to be their parents' responsibility, regardless of their condition, not the
public's, and refused to concede that the public has an open-ended
obligation to unquestioningly provide the funds that promote the
irresponsibility of parents by defusing the consequences of their
imprudent behavior. As it happened, the outcome of this policy in New
Jersey produced curious alliances, for one effect of it was to increase
the number of abortions as welfare mothers limited births, not through
abstinence or birth control, but by abortion. Consequently, some who
were opposed to abortion turned against the welfare policy because
they saw it as promoting abortions.
What the "pro-lifers" often wanted, however, was the same welfare
policy and a ban on abortions. Opponents then liked to accuse them of
hypocrisy in that respect, as though banning abortion while limiting
welfare payments was inconsistent, but of course it was not: they
wanted to ban abortion because they believed it was murder, but they
might simultaneously want to limit welfare payments in order to make
parents accountable for their sexual behavior -- both abstinence and multiple
forms of birth control would still be available to avoid the imprudent responsibility
of additional children.
Even as the issue of responsibility may separate unconditional abortion foes from
conditional abortion foes in the "pro-life" camp, it also marks a separation in the
"pro-choice" camp: many people who believe that abortion should be available
for many reasons besides rape and incest nevertheless do not like the idea of
"abortion on demand" being used merely as a substitute for birth control.
They also do not believe that minors are competent either to appreciate
the consequences of having sex or to appreciate the consequences of
deciding whether or not to have an abortion. This division produces
some of the paradoxes found in polling data about American public
opinion. A majority of Americans are "pro-choice" in the sense of
believing that abortion should be legal far beyond cases of rape and
incest; but a majority also regards abortion as in some sense "wrong"
and endorses various obstacles to abortion, including waiting periods,
counseling, parental consent, etc. Indeed, a New York Times/CBS News poll,
reported in the January 16, 1998, Los Angeles Daily News, reports that 50% of
Americans actually believe that abortion is murder, though only 22% believe that
abortion should not be permitted. This division is only possible if a substantial
number of people see responsibility, not "right to life," as the decisive issue.
From the poll, we might say that the 45% who believe in abortion with "stricter
limits" reflect this view. The obstacles to abortion in that sense serve, not to
prohibit abortion, but to make it difficult enough to drive home its seriousness. Of
course, to them it is serious, and responsibility is an issue, because of a sense
that an embryo or a fetus is a living thing, and a potential human being, so that
abortion, even if it is not murder, is a morally serious form of killing. As the fetus
approaches viability in the second and third trimesters, and abortion approaches
the palpable practice of infanticide, support for abortion drops off dramatically [3].
If the pro-choice response is that dead or mutilated women is a lot to pay for a
morally edifying lesson in responsibility, the only problem with that is that
feminism is perfectly willing to use a "that's just tough" argument of moral
responsibility against men when it comes to the very same issue: Since it is
entirely the right of a woman to choose abortion or not, the man who may have
unintentionally gotten a woman pregnant has no say in the matter at all, once he
has donated his sperm. If a man went to court because he wanted a woman to
abort a child that she wanted but he didn't, there would be a firestorm of
partisans from both Right and Left against him. He chose to have sex, therefore
his rights end immediately, and he is absolutely responsible for the rest of his life
for that child, regardless of his wishes. If he didn't want the responsibility, he
shouldn't have had sex with the woman. So feminists are perfectly willing to use
an argument that responsibility begins with sex against men, that their rights end
at intercourse, but then they are unwilling to allow that women should be just as
responsible about their own sexual choices and held equally responsible for the
rest of their lives for the consequences of their choices. This can easily strike
both men and women as a "heads I win; tails you lose" approach to sexual
responsibility -- a double standard.
On the other hand, even if we accept that the fertilized egg may be a person, this
still leaves untouched what I consider to be the principal argument for "choice,"
which is the argument of Roe v. Wade itself: Privacy. I say that human beings
have a natural right, not a Constitutional right, but a natural right, which the
courts are obliged to recognize under the Ninth Amendment, to privacy: the
privacy of property -- real and personal -- and of person. And nothing is more
private than our own bodies. A state with the considerable invasive power to
police bodies, in particular women's bodies in this case, is a state that will
exercise its power, as it already does in the Income Tax regulations and the
despicable war on drugs, to leave nothing else private. That is not the kind of
state that we should wish to have. Feminists of a totalitarian and Stalinist bent,
like Catharine MacKinnon, do not like the stated grounds of Roe v. Wade
because, as good totalitarians, they do not believe in privacy.
The "pro-life" response to this can be that crimes on private property are still
crimes and that privacy cannot protect murder. That is true, but it is not practical
to prosecute even real crimes when it is not in the capacity of the state to prove
them, and rights of privacy deny to the state such capacity in many cases. There
is even such an example from Islamic Law: there is a Tradition of the Rightly
Guided Caliphs (the first four Caliphs), which is one of the bases of Islamic Law,
that when a man informed the Caliph Omar that he had seen someone drinking
wine, which is forbidden by the Qur'ân, Omar asked him how he had seen this.
When the man replied that he had looked through a window into the miscreant's
home, Omar rebuked him for being in the wrong, for peering into a private home
(a very serious offense when we realize that the Arabic word "harem," h.arîm,
means, not just the women's quarters, but also "sacred" and "forbidden"). Omar,
as it were, threw out the case. We now would say this is an early example of the
"Exclusionary Rule," which disallows the evidence of crime if it is unlawfully
obtained.
Assuming that abortion is murder, however, does beg the question about
whether abortion is murder. Since reasonable persons disagree on that, what
privacy protects is not murder, but the reckoning of conscience about whether
abortion is murder or not [4]. Privacy also protects women from suspicion of
murder just because of natural spontaneous abortions and miscarriages. These
events are common enough and tragic and traumatic enough without adding the
gratutious terror of the police showing up, perhaps with a political axe to grind,
and starting an inquisition.
Thus, as a matter of law rather than morality, the privacy protection of abortion is
the best for a free society.
In American history, we may think of ethnic groups with high fertility rates as poor
groups, but one of the highest fertility rates in American history was that of Jews
at the beginning of the 20th century: 5.3 children by age 45, identical to Mexican
fertility and larger than black (4.2) or Irish (3.3). That fertility rate did not chain the
Jews to poverty. On the contrary. The large families created whole new sources
of wealth in the American economy. With wealth and success, the fertility rates
dropped, even before modern birth control and abortion were available. For
things like the social freedom of women, the development of wealth is absolutely
necessary, and that has tended to come in countries where booming economies
accompany growing population.