This isn't really relevant to any particular post, but I had a conversation the other day that included an argument in favor of abortion rights that I don't buy.
Does anyone wish they had been aborted? I'm sure some tiny number of people genuinely do, and I'm sure many angsty teens claim to. But I occasionally hear something along the lines of "it would be better for some children not to be born into a broken home/drug den/abusive family/etc. etc." Well, look-- I do think that the pragmatic realities of the kind of parents and family situation a potential child is going to be born to are legitimate concerns when considering abortion. In fact, I think they are the paramount concerns. But surely those concerns must be about what is right for society and the people who are already here. I'm not saying you can't argue that an individual situation is unsuitable for child-rearing. But when it becomes a straightforward appeal to what's best for the child, or what the child would want, well... would you rather have been aborted? For those of us not suffering from mental illness, the self-preservation urge is quite powerful. And while the appeal to never being born isn't quite identical to the appeal to death, they're similar enough.
To be clear, I fully support abortion rights, and I acknowledge that this is sort of a straw man. I think though that it's a rather common kind of thinking to wander into, and I don't think it stands much scrutiny.
Incidentally, I'm not one to add that "I favor a woman's right to choose, but with restriction" disclaimer on to everything, in part obviously because I don't really favor any restrictions, but in part because I think those tend to be an unexplained dodge. What kind of restrictions? In how many cases? And, most importantly, how do those restrictions follow from your larger philosophy regarding abortion? I think people tend to say things like "No abortion after the third trimester", and I think the reason is that it's seen as a compromise position. But I find that weird. If you believe that life begins at birth, that a fetus becomes a person at birth, then I don't see how you can believe that at 7 months terminating a pregnancy is worse than doing so at 4 months. Right? If the belief that abortion is moral is founded on the notion that the fetus is not a person, then that belief is true at 6 weeks or 16 or 26.
I suppose some might conceive of a "life begins at viability" argument, where a fetus gains human rights when it becomes viable. But of course, it would be a nightmare to adjudicate, and the right to life would become deeply fickle, dependent on factors like the mother's health and habits during pregnancy, the quality of medical care available, etc.
No, I don't think that many of the restrictions on late-term abortions make sense if you proceed from the assumption that life, and human rights, begin at birth. Which, by the way, seems an essential element to being pro-choice. If a fetus is a person I don't see how you can end that life, no matter what the appeal to pragmatics and societal cost. That's part of the reason why it's so important for pushback against the pro-life question begging about whether a fetus is a person or not. Too often, pro-life people baldly assert things like "of course a fetus is a person". Well, that's exactly the question at hand. Whether or not a fetus is a human or not is the foundational issue of the disagreement.
By the way, for awhile it seemed that the argument du jour for the pro-life set was to assert that legislating that life began at birth was essentially arbitrary, as a baby born much earlier than it's expected due date can live a normal, healthy life. And, in a sense, it is indeed arbitrary to say that life begins at birth. But that's only to recognize that all of the law is a series of arbitrary decisions. For having 19 hits of a drug, you get 6 months in prison. For 20 you get 3 years. Have sex with someone a day before her sixteenth birthday in some states and you'll go to jail; have sex the day after and you won't. We make seemingly arbitrary decisions because life is complicated and we need to establish set rules in order to have a functioning judiciary. And as far as arbitrary distinctions go, defining life as beginning at birth is a pretty good one, with a long tradition.
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3 comments:
I'm fine with abortion before the fetus exhibits a heartbeat, brainwaves, and response to pain. After that, I'm against. This doesn't seem like a compromise so much to me.
It just seems unconscionable to me to be able to say, "Yeah, now it's not a person - now it is. It's arbitrary, I know that, that's just how it is." This is an issue absolutely critical to justice and conscience - the ultimate issue for justice and conscience, even. I'm not sure how someone can disregard the risk of eliminating life that requires protection, which seems a very large risk given an admittedly arbitrary schedule.
I'm probably expressing this poorly, but it seems like you open with an idea like, "You, the pro-lifer, and I, the pro-choicer, are going to do our best to *find* where personhood begins." Then you finish by manhandling this schedule.
That's a fair point at the end. I recognize that this isn't a particularly cogent post. The question of where to declare adulthood is of course a particularly fraught one. What bothers me about the pro-life position is that so often it is a matter of bare assertion-- this is when life starts, and that's that. Unfortunately, where life starts is inevitably a philosophical question and not a scientific one, and people are simply going to have major disagreements about it. To me, the fairest, most sensible and most obvious solution is that life begins at birth, and that position neatly elides many of the very real difficulties in trying to assess physiological measures of where life begins. But of course, it's a contentious question.
"Would the child have been better off not being born?" isn't the relevant question. The relevant question is broader than that: would we (objective observers) prefer a state of affairs in which the child wasn't born -- and all that entails? One of the things it entails is that the woman who chooses abortion might thus have a child later on, when she's more willing and able to raise a child. Then it becomes extremely easy to imagine that the world as a whole would be better off.
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