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.â€
| More from Denise Noe
Stumble It!
August 28th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Are you conceding that an unborn person has no right to the body of the mother? That’s been my argument for the legality of abortion some time now, while the decision whether or not to abort has been a question of cost-benefit analysis. For instance, your description of the fetus leaves out the salient fact that EKG research has long since determined that heartbeat and limbs aside, a child at birth is incapable of any cognitive function such as thought, personality, memory, or purposeful movement of any kind. It’s movements, including smiling and crying, are the result of purely reflexive impulses from the brainstem. I eat animals that had heartbeats, limbs and cognitive brain function, so surely that’s not the basis for the moral assertion here.
Of course, a fetus is a human life and we are obliged to respect it above the life of any other animal by virtue of our own humanity. Although rarely articulated, I submit that’s the reason abortion is generally permitted while infanticide is not. Without the intervening woman’s body and her various superceding rights, lent strength by the fetus’s entire lack of self, the mere humanity of the child is sufficient for us to sustain them. Were life a little harder, perhaps under more primitive circumstances, humanity alone probably wouldn’t suffice as other individuals would not have enough to support the surviving fetus. Which means it’s hardly a matter of morality.
I suppose, as a pro-choice representative, I am ceding that there is a distinct moral dimension, just not between choosing to abort and choosing to carry to terms. As an EMT I would be compelled to dress a fellow EMT down who took undue burdens on themself, placing themself at risk, to save a patient. What would the patient have done if they’d been injured? That same principle applied to the unhappily pregnant girl balances out any moral differential for me between aborting or carrying to term. What’s left is the moral differential between withdrawing life support from a vegetative human being and killing any thinking, feeling animal. I find that difference an exceedingly close call.
All of which begs the question, exactly why is anyone willing to cede a higher value to a human life than another animal’s? Although I practice it myself, I don’t consider it a moral principle at all, but a specieist principle. I’m human, therefore I value my own species over that of others. Nothing moral about it, it’s pure self-interest. I believe we’d have to wander into the realms of theology to claim a justification for a moral distinction, at which point those of us disinclined to believe the theology in question will politely agree to disagree.
August 29th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
You “pro-choice” people sure have to do a long song-and-dance, don’t you?
And if you can’t see that humans are totally different from animals, then you don’t understand the term “morals”. Oh, wait. You already said that.