Posted on May 5, 2006

Abortion Protests: Missing the Point

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.