More on Abortion: The Pro-Life Angle

EVENT

A few months ago, I wrote this post on my feelings about abortion from a tortured pro-Choice angle.

I suppose, then, that this would be a companion piece... a self-counterpoint. Because last week I described myself as pro-choice with reservations, today I'm pro-life with reservations, and next week I'll swing back.

The pendulum keeps turning.

The fact is that I have a difficult time settling anywhere on this issue, firmly. From both theological and philosophical perspectives, it's really the perfect empirical dilemma... that is, it's a case in which most of us recognize the absurdities at either extreme, but there is a persistant lack of a reasonable dividing line.

I think almost all of us would agree that the Catholic church's stance on contraception is somewhere between misinformed and absurd. I think (and certainly hope) we'd agree that partial-birth abortion is a barbaric, monstrous practice, really separated from infanticide by only the barest of technicalities.

All this said, is there a clear dividing line? Is there a point that makes intuitive sense... where we can say that at this moment we have a jelly, and at this moment we have a human being? I don't think so. On either side of the dividing line, what we have is essentially the same: not a mere jelly, nor a complete human being, but a human being in progress.

And my staunchest pro-Choice friends would argue with me perhaps, but I think that means something. If it looks like a human and moves like a human and responds to sustenance like a human and grows like a human than...

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My cardinal objections to the pro-Life movement are well-known among my mostly pro-Choice friends:

1) A mother should be able to trust her society not to abandon her and her children to poverty. But pro-Life voters often support the rollback of welfare benefits, and are opposed to Universal Health-Care.

2) A mother should be able to raise her child in a society that respects the burden of parenthood and is not judgmental; in short, that supports us in our daily struggle to live and raise a family. But pro-Life voters are often drawn from social conservatives, who will react to an unwanted or unsanctioned pregnancy with sharp repurcussions.

3) A woman should have viable alternatives to pregnancy, outside the (often religiously particular) insistance upon abstinence; not desiring an abotion should be as convenient, anonymous, and dignified as possible. But pro-Life voters often vote also to make contraception unavailable... they won't allow, or will discourage use of, everything from condoms to the morning after pill, even if withholding such options will result in an abortion further down the line.

4) Sometimes, pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, but pro-Life voters are typically unconcerned with the conditions that breed rape and incest (ranging from poverty and poorly funded education on down to, once again, adequate social programming). Nor to abortion activists tend to pursue the enforcement of fatherly obligations (financial and otherwise) with the enthusiasm that they attend to the issue of abortion.

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But I've said these things, and you've heard me.

It's with some reservation (or, I guess, anticipating a sharper rebuttal) that I'll make some arguments from the other side:

5) What is this assumption that women are always pressured into having children? Certainly, where a family has the means to get an abortion, and anticipates a continuing economic obligation to a mother, women in many cases are pressured into abortions. What makes this situation any better?

6) Remember, we don't have Universal health care... women of lesser means are often unable to afford an abortion while more affluent groups can cover it. Abortion not only increases class inequality, but it means that the stigma of single motherhood continues to fall disproportionately among less affluent groups.

7) With the availability of Ultrasound technology, many families may ascertain the gender of a fetus with the intention of aborting it if it is female. Fetuses are also aborted because they may have disabilities or will be developmentally disabled.

These are largely circumstantial objections. My big objection, however, is universal, not circumstantial, and grounded in an understanding of what is a life:

8) The only difference between abortion and infanticide is a line we assign along a continuum, with some necessary arbitrarity, of what is a human and what is not. There is no clean answer. There can be no clean answer. But killing something that has been growing and living for many months... that has fingers and toes and brains and the ability to feel and think... that's too close for comfort.

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Policy wise, there are many compromises that can be made, and should have been made. Enough pro-Choicers admit that abortion is undesirable and enough pro-Lifers want passionately to reduce abortion that many concessions should have been passed long ago. An increase in human services and improvements in health care would automatically reduce the number of abortions, and as expectant mothers had more options, late-term abortions could be more reasonably curtailed, restricted, and prevented.

But none of these concessions have been made.

It's an argument in which most of us stopped listening to the others a long time ago.

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In the past, the sum of all my statements have been generally pro-Choice, but today I'm moving along the opposite current:

There is too much that is human in the unborn to sanction her execution without horror and hurt.

Moreover, I've no shortage of friends with messed-up families, backgrounds, and lives. But none of them, I think, would choose death as an alternative. At some point the struggle became their struggle, and they've chosen to own it.

Maybe that's the key question to answer:

At what point do we earn the right to own our own struggle, where the alternative is no struggle at all? At what point does that responsibility become our right?

~ Connor

EDIT: I'm guilty of a couple unfortunate typos (mix-ups of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, that doubtless made this post very confusing. I've corrected these.