April 2005

The Abortion Debate

Pro-choice, with an explanation you probably haven't heard before

Brief Description

I'm pro-choice. It's that simple. However, why am I pro-choice? That's a interesting question. Rather then get all emotional and angry about it, I have a rational argument that I believe cannot be disputed without resorting to hypocrisy. The abortion debate often degenerates to an argument about the definition of human life, or more specifically, to the question of when life begins. The explanation for why the debate transforms into this new life-beginning form is the assumption that everyone will agree that, after their personal definition of the starting point of life has occurred, they will then agree that abortion is morally wrong because all people have equal rights once they are definitely established to be people, i.e., once their life begins. I have a different take on this. I argue that people are not all equal. In a country riled with racial prejudice, such a statement is unfathomably heretical, but I will defend it rationally, and you will come out of it agreeing with me...I hope.

Full Description

Sections:

• My Stance
• Framing the Debate
• Dismissing the Unspoken Assumption
• The Most Heretical Statement
• Reiteration of the Main Points

My views on abortion are quite simple. My reasons, on the other hand, are complicated and deeply thought out, as detailed below. My view is the following, ripped almost without modification from my earlier mind ramblings topic, Abortion and Men's Reproductive Rights. No one has the right to force a woman to undergo nine months of increasingly difficult pregnancy. No one has the right to force a woman to experience the physically torturous event of childbirth. To force that kind of pain and fatigue on another person is akin to torture. No one has the right to force a woman to go through the well-established emotional bond that occurs during childbirth with an unwanted baby. If your response to abortion is adoption then you are sadly naive. First of all, forcing the option of adoption on a woman doesn't solve any of the problems previously stated, pregnancy, childbirth, and emotional trauma. More importantly, adoption just doesn't work. There are so many children waiting for foster families that adding to that group only increases the number of children without families. To put it plainly, this amounts to increasing the number of children in the world who are, quite simply, unwanted. Besides, how does a solution which involves dumping your problem on someone else really count as a solution at all?

The previous paragraph summarizes my view on abortion, and justifies it in emotional terms, by which I mean it justifies my point of view through strong belief and opinion. However, the question remains, what is the underlying source of my opinion? Where does my opinion that forcing a woman to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against her will is wrong come from? This essay argues that everyone, pro-life and pro-choice alike, ultimately agrees with the reason I use to justify my stance on abortion, and that therefore, a pro-life stance is hypocritical.

In order to properly discuss the contemporary debate about abortion, it is worth taking the time to carefully analyze the pattern most such debates follow. When such a debate begins, it usually starts out with the two sides stating either that life is sacred and lies beyond the purview of human authority or that a woman simply has the right to control her own body. From this starting point, there is usually a metamorphosis of the debate that goes quietly unnoticed. The new topic of debate becomes: When does a human life begin? The generally unstated reason for this change in the debate is the generally unstated assumption that if everyone can simply agree when life begins, then the debate will be resolved on the assumption that everyone will agree that abortion is ethical before life begins and unethical after life begins. Usually people don't specifically state this, they just let the argument shift gears in this way without much conscious attention. It is worthwhile taking a moment to reflect on this shift in topic, if only because it is so rarely noticed at a conscious level.

There are numerous points of view on the newly transformed debate. Most pro-life people believe the answer is at conception. Many Catholics behave as if they believe it starts even sooner, since they have ethical problems with contraception, which would interfer with conception. The most extreme point of view in the other direction is generally that life begins at birth. In between conception and birth there lies a nine to ten month window where many individuals' opinions will fall. Some people say the beginning of the third trimester is the magical moment. Some define it by the first heartbeat, some define it by the first brain waves, some define it by the moment past which a removed fetus could successfully survive using medical intervention (a slippery rope since medical technology is always improving).

This, then, is the newly framed debate. An unspoken agreement about the ethics of abortion on either side of the moment of life's beginning sparks a vitriolic debate about when the magic moment occurs.

I believe an opportunity has been missed by the unspoken assumption mentioned above. The opportunity is to transform the debate once again, into terms of a flavor I have never before encountered on this topic. I will transform the debate by ceding to the pro-lifers on the debate of life's beginning. I argue that it doesn't matter when life begins. If people want to believe that life begins at conception, I say fine, let's go with that assumption and see where it takes us.

This would appear, on the surface, to be a complete surrender to the pro-life argument, but only because no one ever asks the most heretical question in the entire debate. I will be heretical enough to ask it here. The assumption that underlies the debate of life's beginning is that everyone already agrees, in advance, about the ethics concerning abortion as it relates to life's beginning. The assumption is that everyone agrees that abortion is ethical before life's beginning and unethical after life's beginning.

A quick sidenote on that statement. Obviously, there are pro-life people who would never agree with the statement that they believe abortion is ethical "at some point". They would argue they believe abortion is never ethical. This is not in contrast to my statement. They have simply defined the moment of life's beginning at the earliest possible moment in a pregnancy, thus there is no time before life's beginning when an abortion could occur because there is simply nothing to abort. Interestingly, just such a debate does seem to exist however, the debate over the ethical use of contraception, as mentioned with reference to Catholics above. This veers too far off topic however so I will avoid it for the most part. Let us assume, for the sake of defining the argument in agreeable terms, that if one believes life starts at conception, then one only agrees that abortion is ethical prior to life's beginning only with absurd sarcasm since one believes there is nothing to abort prior to conception anyway.

What is of greater interest to me is the assumption that everyone agrees that after life begins, whenever that event occurs, abortion is unethical. The supporting argument is that after life begins, a human then exists, and all humans have equal rights, most namely the infinite right to exist.

Finally, this brings us to the point I wish to make, the point I use to justify my stance of being pro-choice, the point which, after explanation, most readers will discover they agree with despite its atrocious nature. That point is the following. I believe that all people are not equal, particularly that all people do not have the same degree of right to exist as all other people. Some people have a greater right to exist than others. Most readers believe this as well, but they do not realize it yet, because such a statement is so unorthodox they have never given it the necessary consideration to realize the truth of their belief on this issue.

How can I justify such an assertion? It goes like this. I believe that people have the unlimited right to exist, up to the point where that right infringes on other people's major rights, such as the right to control their own body. Don't worry, I won't rely merely on arguments concerning a woman's control over her body, I have better examples to draw on. Once one person's right to exist ventures into territory where that existence can only be perpetuated at the expense of another person's body, that right to exist becomes weaker than the other person's right to control their body.

If I were going to stay without the bounds of the abortion debate, I would use the argument that a woman has the right to control her own body to defend my assertion, but not only is this pointless due to the fact that it is framed within the original debate to begin with (the same people who disagree about abortion disagree about a woman's right to control her own body), but worse, relying on such an argument is entirely circular, as it brings us back to the same debate we began with, thus providing no useful resolution. Instead, I will use, by analogy, similar situations where almost everyone agrees, regardless of their stance on abortion. I will argue that anyone who agrees with my analogies but disagrees solely on the topic of abortion is a hypocrite whose beliefs cannot be rationally defended since such beliefs are entirely paradoxical and therefore illogical.

What analogies do I have in mind? Here's three, all related: blood donation, kidney donation, and bone marrow donation. Do we, as a society, believe that people who have a kidney to spare (true of every single human that exists) should be legally obligated to donate a kidney whenever one is needed? Do we, in fact, believe that the government should physically sieze a person with two kidneys, take them to a hospital by force, and remove that person's kidney without their permission? Clearly the answer is no. No one agrees such behavior is acceptable. It would save people's lives, there is no doubt about that, and yet we do not require people to do this. People have the right to simply let other people die rather than offer transplants and donations that could save lives. Seems kind of unfair to the people who are dieing, but that is what we believe. Almost without exception, that is what everyone believes.

Why do we believe this so strongly even though it costs lives? The reason is simple. We believe a person's right to control their own body outweighs a person's right to exist at the expense of the first right. That's all there is to it. That's the reason we legally let people let people die, to coin a phrase.

Bone marrow donation makes the point even more clearly. Bone marrow compatability is extremely low outside the family. This means that a potential bone marrow source is a person who is personally connected to the patient who requires the transplant, through a sheer coincidence of unlikelihood. Even when two people such as this are brought together, where it is possible no other potential source will ever be found, the person with the life-saving bone marrow still has the right to say no and let the patient die. This is what we all believe. The alternative, a police-state that forcibly removes parts of people's bodies without their permission, is truly unthinkable to us, a worse heresy than my statement above.

A pregnant woman is in a very similar situation. One person depends on another person for their very life. There is no debate about the fetus's personhood since we ceded to the pro-lifers earlier in this essay. The question is this: does the fetus have a right to exist that supercedes the mother's right to control her own body? In some way, pregnancy is a greater bodily trauma than the donation situations mentioned above. While kidney donation is a severe situation and leaves the donating person in weakened health, the same is not true for blood or bone marrow donation, and yet we all believe and agree that blood donation, for example, should not be a state-requirement of all civilians. Is there an argument that favors a fetus's right to exist over the mother's health and control of her body, but which also allows people to refuse to donate blood that can save people's lives? If there is a rational argument, not an emotional one, that justifies such a hypocrisy, I cannot think of it myself and I have not yet heard it from anyone else.

Some people might respond that babies and fetuses are helpless. They need someone else to stand up for them because they can't stand up for themselves, but this argument makes no sense. Someone who requires a blood transfusion to live is equally helpless. The fact that they aren't a baby is of no relevance. Such an argument is based on our tendency to think that babies are cute, or that we are obligated to take care of babies, but this is not rational or logical, it is purely emotional. Anyone who's existence depends on another's person is helpless by definition, regardless of their age.

I will summarive the main points. One, the debate on abortion degenerates to a debate on life's beginning. Two, this is premised on the assumption that abortion must necessarily be unethical after life's beginning because, three, all people, once they exist, have the infinite right to exist. Four, all people do not, in fact, have the same right to exist. Some people have less right to exist than others, namely, people whose existence depends on the body of another person. Five, therefore, abortion is ethical regardless of the ridiculous debate over when life begins. And finally six, anyone who agrees with the arguments made about bone marrow, kidney, and blood donations, but still holds a pro-life stance, clings to a necessarily hypocritical point of view, unless they can otherwise state a rational argument in their favor that I am, as yet, unaware of.

I would really like to hear what people think of this. If you prefer private feedback, you can email me at kwiley@keithwiley.com. Alternatively, the following form and comment section is available.

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