Monthly Archives: May 2006

Clarifying the Abortion Debate

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My last article about abortion created some controversy, most of it unnecessary. That’s the thing about the abortion debate: the parties of pro-choice and pro-life — and all the others not confined by this artificial binary — talk past each other, rarely hitting on the same — and crucial — foundational beliefs. What I’d like to do in this short essay is drill down to those important questions. It is only by truly understanding what the proponents of the charged and disparate abortion related views believe that we can make some progress toward a solution. Let’s begin with the most important question of them all.

What is a human being? Answering this is the starter pistol for the entirety of the abortion debate. After all, we’re not concerned with killing animals or demolishing rocks. No, what’s at stake here is human life. So, I ask again, what is a human? Generally speaking, pro-lifers see anything immediately beyond the moment of conception as within this category. Just as soon as the sperm penetrates the egg and genetic material is combined, the resulting cell — and soon small collection of cells — is as human as you or I. This may or may not be correct. Evaluating the answer depends on a wildly vast array of factors, none of them easy. But, since the abortion debate is about humans, we have to define human. Hand waving this difficult question away merely postpones its involvement.

The second question is about human rights. Most of us agree that a mother who kills her five year old child is guilty of murder. That child has a right to live, a right that is more important than any reason the mother might have for taking it away. For those parents who are incapable of providing for their five year olds, for example, we provide systems of foster care. So how important is the right to life?

This leads to more questions. Do all humans have a right to life? What if the human is technically speaking alive but in a vegetative state? Can we pull the plug? If not, why? Now go back to your answer to the first question above. Is an unborn child a human? If it is, does it have the same right to life as the five year old? If it does, clearly killing it — having an abortion, in other words — is just as murderous an act as the one committed by the despairing mother.

These questions, then, must be the basis for any discussion of abortion. In brief, they are:

  1. When, if ever, is an unborn child a human?
  2. Do humans have a right to life?
  3. Under what circumstances can the right to life be superseded by the needs and desires of others?

To see how these play out, think about the views held by abortion activists. Strong pro-life advocates would answer that a child is human as soon as it is conceived, that all humans have a right to life, and that there are no circumstances (except, maybe, critical danger to the life of the mother) under which that right may be taken away. Someone who is strongly pro-choice, on the other hand, might answer that a child is human only after the moment of birth and, therefore, the second two questions are inconsequential to the debate.

Before closing, I’d like to quickly address some of the poor arguments I’ve seen against such a systematic and careful examination of the abortion issue. The first is the notion of privacy. It claims that choices the mother makes ought to be hers alone, without society having any say. Clearly, this is nonsense. There are all kinds of choices a mother might make that every reasonable person sees as falling under the authority of society and its laws. For instance, we would hardly appeal to privacy if a mother knowingly and negligently locked her children in a hot car with the windows up while she went grocery shopping. If the children were to die in this terrible situation, all of us would clamor to see her punished by the courts. Therefore, if your answers to the three questions above lead you to see abortion as murder, you have to believe it must be a criminal act and subject to the same laws and consequences as all other crimes. To claim that abortion is always a private matter is to have assumed answers to the three crucial questions, answers that must first be defended against opposing views.

The second bad argument against a philosophical approach to the abortion debate is that it’s hypocritical of us to be so concerned about the lives of the unborn when children around the world are starving, sick, or abused. Only when we have taken care of the troubles of the born can we worry about the killing of the unborn. This position is considerably more specious than the first. If our criteria for caring about any issue is first having solved all related issues, we’d be forced to care about nothing. We cannot solve all problems and we cannot accurately and objectively weigh all concerns against each other. We pick and choose what to deal with at any given moment and, in so doing, must set aside some issues in favor of others. Abortion is — or may be — a problem. So is the regrettable fact of malnourished children. To grant primacy to one, however, does not cause the other to go away.

What I’ve sought to do in this essay is provide a starting line for what is often a contentious and bilious debate. I ask than anyone responding first set out as carefully as possible to answer each of the three questions I raise before making any additional comments.

Abortion Protests: Missing the Point

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Some issues aren’t easy. Abortion is one of them. But, as is often the case, the sides stoop to worthless hyperbole without so much as a batted eyelash. I recall seeing a photo once of a protester at an abortion rights march. The banner the young woman was holding up read: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a holy sacrament.”

Now, I consider myself to be pro-choice. But statements like the one on the placard horribly oversimplify a complex and very much shades-of-grey argument. It also turns an issue about human life–and death–into a silly “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” sort of unexamined finger-pointing.

Pro-Choicer’s have a tendency to only think about the rights of the woman. Pro-Lifer’s are obsessed only with keeping the fetus alive. Neither side admits that it’s missing much of the point.

Abortion is about rights: a woman’s right to control over her body, a baby’s right to live. What makes it all so caustic is that the two rights directly conflict. In essence, the mother is saying, “My right to choice trumps another human’s right to life.” Of course, the Pro-Choice set won’t state it that way because it sounds cold. But that’s what’s going on.

So we find ourselves dealing with two different questions: (1) When is embryo/fetus human? and (2) Which of the two rights–choice or life–is the more valuable?

Question #1 is a scientific one. The clump of cells a couple of days after fertilization is not a human, so it has none of the rights we grant to humans. However, when it is two months from being due, the baby is a human and should be treated as such. The difficulty comes from figuring out when that transition point occurs. Setting aside the religious answer of “When the sperm meets the egg,” we’re left with something best answered by scientific study.

Question #2 is political. Before a baby is human, killing it is no different from killing a cow for meat or a spider that has taken up residence in the laundry room: Non-human equals no human rights. However, after the baby has become fully human, fully conscious and sapient, the politics come fully into play. An easy way to illustrate it is to consider the following hypothetical situation:

Let’s say we have a single mother with a two year-old son. The mother has recently lost her work at home job and has burned through the entirety of her savings. She is now broke. The only jobs available to her now are ones that require forty to sixty hour weeks at locations more than an hour away from home. She cannot afford daycare and has no relatives to take care of the child. Late one night, she makes a difficult decision. She picks up her child, put a small pillow over his head, and holds it there until he stops breathing. The next day, she applies for a new job.

Horrible, isn’t it? We would jump to condemn the mother as a cold-blooded killer, and a selfish one at that. She put her own desires above the needs of her child, even above the life of her child. She ought to be thrown in prison.

But how is this different from a late-term abortion? Assuming we’re not in a situation where the mother’s life is at stake–meaning we’d be trading one life for another, which is a different thing completely–isn’t the mother having the abortion really just killing another human for reasons of convenience? Yes, the human hasn’t been born yet, but as Question #1 points out, that doesn’t mean the child lacks the rights of a human. I have a right to live. You do not have a right to kill me. It doesn’t matter how small I am. As long as I am “human,” my right to life is the most precious of all.

Let’s drift back to the sign our abortion rights protester was holding. If men got pregnant, neither of the two questions would change at all. The issue would remain just as complex and painful.

Finger pointing is easy. But it also accomplishes nothing. If we are to make progress in this divisive issue, we need to set aside gender politics. We need to realize that we are not talking about something like the right to vote or freedom of speech. We are talking about human lives and when those lives can be snuffed out to meet the desires of others.

The abortion debate is hard. Placards like the one mentioned above do nothing but ignore that. They are, just like the bloody fetus signs the Pro-Life crowd likes to wave around, a sign of shallow thinking. And abortion is too important an issue to let it fall pray to unexamined thought.

How to Dismiss Intelligent Design

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Christopher Hitchens once said, when speaking of religion, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” This simple statement gives us all we need to safely ignore the silliness of intelligent design.

Whether one thinks it is good evidence or bad, one cannot deny that there is evidence *for* evolution. We’ve found the mechanisms by which it occurs, we’ve seen it in action, and we’ve traced its effects through the historical record. The gaping holes the creationists claim the theory is riddled with don’t, in fact, exist–but let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are massive, indeed. Those gaps in the knowledge do not negate the evidence. Instead, they tell us that we need to seek out more and, if we can’t find any, reevaluate that which we’ve already unearthed. *But the evidence is still there.*

Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a theory without evidence. “What about the irreducible complexity of the eye?” you say. “Surely that is evidence of a designer.” Ignoring the fact that the eye isn’t irreducibly complex, responding to such a claim is as easy as retorting, “Okay, but what’s your evidence for a designer?”

There just isn’t any. This is why intelligent design doesn’t belong in a science classroom or natural history museum. Let’s say you’re talking to a creationist and he tells you he has lots of evidence for his theory. What evidence could that be? In point of fact, what he means by evidence is wholly contained in finding phenomena in nature we can’t currently explain. If we can’t explain it, then it can’t be explained by our existing theories–a tautology, but an important one to the creationist. For his line of reasoning leads him to see any unexplainable characteristic as evidence for a creator.

This should immediately strike you as odd. After all, human history is bursting with questions people at the time didn’t have answers for–questions that were latter addressed quite easily by advancements in knowledge. To accept the unexplained as hard evidence for a proposition about the nature of the physical world–and God the Creator is surely a claim of such kind–is to believe that there is something unique about our current time. Namely, that we have answered every question the best we will ever be able to.

Thus, to accept intelligent design is to condemn mankind in the future to our present state of relative ignorance.