One of the most troubling and seemingly irresolvable parts of our national life is the abortion issue. It bubbled up again recently with the murder of Dr. George Tiller, regarded as a compassionate hero by millions, arch fiend and mass murderer by other millions. How is resolution possible?
A letter to the paper the other day (29 May) suggests part of the problem. The writer asked: Why do those who support abortion say that nevertheless it should be rare? “The simple question to ask … : ‘is abortion the killing of a baby, ie, a human being?’ …if the answer is no, what’s the big deal? Why should the procedure be rare?”
Aside from the gotcha tone of this, a certain part of what’s troubling about the abortion issue is the insistence on a clear distinction between life and non-life. Anti-abortion people draw that line at conception, pro-choice people at birth. Maybe it is necessary for the law to split hairs, but it would help for both parties to acknowledge that in the human experience of this matter, no line can be drawn.
The fact is, the emotional distance between a newly detected conception, a three month fetus, a eighth month viable fetus and a baby human being is much closer than the hair-splitting suggests. It’s a continuum and to most people the termination of a pregnancy at any point on this continuum is a big deal emotionally.
Why should abortion be rare? Because legal or not it is a distressing, unfortunate situation to have to choose between the abstract idea of life, of a potential person, and other human considerations such as the life of the mother, an already fully developed human being, the quality of life for both mother and child if money is scarce and co-parenting not an option.
There’s another overly neat distinction often drawn by pro-choicers: that it’s the woman’s body and she, and not society, should have final say over what’s done with it, including aborting a fetus as she would have her appendix removed. It’s a handy concept, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Pretty clearly our bodies are not our own, but have a civic and political component. A man doesn’t have the right to choose whether or not to employ his body in a war, if there’s a legal draft, or the option to use his body to rape or murder, or irresponsibly contribute to a pregnancy. No, this is my body and what goes on with it is of great interest to me. But society, other people, clearly have an interest in what I do with it as well.
The reason to support women’s right to choose abortion is not because there’s a nice, neat distinction bertween fetus and baby, pre-life and real life, or because it’s her body to do with what she chooses and none of our damn business, but because on balance it seems like the fair thing.
Unwanted pregnancies have been a fact of life throughout history and one for which women are not more responsible than men or society as a whole. But the burden of dealing with the problem has unfairly fallen to women. Prior to 1973 (Roe v Wade), women were in our own society forced to seek shameful, dangerous, “back-alley” solutions. Legislation providing for safe, decent abortion is society’s acknowledgment that in fact a pregnancy is not a woman’s private affair, that we all have responsibility in it.
It would be wonderful if so-called pro-life advocates would throw their energy behind reducing the size of the problem by legislating a social network more conducive to being pregnant and caring for a child. Such civilized measures as universal health care or well-paid childcare sabbaticals could only have a positive effect.
Meantime it would advance the debate if both sides in the abortion rights struggle would stop comforting themselves—or condemning others—with false dichotomies, abstract distinctions, hard and fast lines.
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