How Pro-Choicers can "give"

Ellen Goodman is 100% right when she writes that sincere pro-lifers ought to make preventing unplanned pregnancies top priority. As she says, they should be in favor of Plan B, a morning-after pill that could prevent unwanted pregnancies and consequent abortions as well as favoring teaching teenagers about contraception as well as abstinence. Indeed, pro-lifers should agitate in favor of more money into effective contraceptive research since that will ultimately prevent abortions. Even Roman Catholic pro-lifers should back such research since, while contraception is against the precepts of their church, it does not involve what they believe is the killing of a human being.

However, Goodman is wrong to see no opportunity for “give” in the pro-choice position. While it may be a “lie” that “abortion increases the risk of breast cancer” it is a truth that, within the first trimester of pregnancy, an embryo has a head, a torso, arms and legs, that it looks like a tiny human being and that it has a beating heart. An abortion rips arms, legs, and head apart from the body. Those who believe in legal abortion can “give” by supporting an informed choice by which a girl or woman contemplating an abortion is shown a picture or drawing of what the unborn looks like at her stage of pregnancy and told precisely what will happen to it an abortion.

We can also “give” by recognizing that while the choices facing a girl or woman with an unplanned pregnancy are not morally equivalent.

No born person has the legal right to another person’s body. Even if we face an illness that will kill us without access to someone else’s body parts, we have no right to their kidney, their bone marrow or even a pint of their blood. However, the most moral and courageous course of action for someone who can save someone’s life by giving up part of their own is to do so. I have a friend who recently had his kidney transplanted into the body of his father whose kidneys were failing. Most people would, I believe, grant his right to refuse to make this sacrifice but applaud him thoroughly for undertaking it.

The fact that an embryo or fetus might be a human being means that it is more moral to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term that to abort. If a girl or woman is unprepared to raise a baby well, the most moral, courageous and generous course is to give that child up for adoption. Making this moral distinction between the choices available to those with unwanted pregnancies is a major way pro-choicers can “give” to find “common ground” with their opponents.

Finally, we must not adopt a defeatist attitude toward efforts to encourage abstinence, either among teenagers or among adults. Reviving the custom of chaperoned dating could lead to a welcome decline in adolescent sexual activity. Simply changing the way we talk about sex could lead to more abstinence among both teens and adults. Too often, sex is spoken of as a “need.” It should be correctly called a “desire.”