Indeed, abortion is an incredible issue. Since the decision of Roe v Wade in 1973, over 50 million abortions have occurred. To the pro-life purist, the seven justices who ruled Roe are responsible for over 50 million murders, a higher quantity than those that Hitler, Mussolini, Bin Laden and Stalin are responsible for combined. To the pro-lifer, a tragedy comparable to the holocaust is happening on a daily basis, and no one seems to care. On the other side, you have the complete opposite position. To the pro-choice purist, a statistic that says "over 50 million fetuses have been killed" is as meaningless as "200 million red blood cells die every day." The true pro-choicer sees getting an abortion as the moral equivalence of getting a haircut and sees the protests of pro-lifers as trying to disturb that fundamental right. Often, the issue of abortion is linked with sex: the pro-lifer professing to keep your legs closed if you don't want a baby, and the pro-choicer claiming that the pro-life position is nothing more than yet another pathetic attempt from the religious fanatics to restrain sexual activity.
I've been convinced to change my mind on many issues, but this is the one issue that I can honestly say I was persuaded to take the complete opposite position. Sure, I've changed my perception of certain things with historical or economic clarity. Sure, I've accepted solid arguments for anarchism, strict atheism, etc., but abortion is the one issue that I completely went from night to day.
Originally, I took the pro-choice position. I found it ridiculous to make any sort of claim that an embryo, a clump of cells, had "human rights." In Vermont, the state where I grew up, this sort of thing was almost non-controversial. I thought that the pro-life position was silly: how could anyone really defend the "rights" of a clump of cells? And a pro-choice purist, I was: I couldn't even understand the mentality of the pro-choicer who was cautious about or condemned abortion "on a personal level." I was the one who would argue that abortion was the moral equivalence of a haircut and the significance of dying red blood cells. I was the one who would advise the teenage girl to do what's "responsible" and get the abortion.
Holy mother of Joseph's erectile dysfunction am I glad for adamant, persistent, knowledgeable pro-lifers who lifted my head out of the gutter.
My conversion to the pro-life position was certainly not quick or easy. I had to keep being edged a bit further to the other side before I finally reached the logical conclusion. It began when I started arguing abortion on political forums. I may have viewed my position as common sense, but articulating the reasons for backing the position was something different. What other debate dynamic could I use other than "because it's a goddamn clump of cells, moron"?
Thankfully, the pro-choicers had me covered. "People have the right to abort whatever they want from their own bodies. How could anyone say you don't own your own body?" "If we outlaw abortion, it will go underground and women getting abortions will die." "What about in cases of rape? She didn't exactly 'open her legs' then, did she?" "The fetus is NOT a human being! Look up Carl Sagan!" "Statistics show that the legalization of abortion lowered crime rates." "Women may not be financially able to care for the child." These arguments sounded intriguing and they backed my position with what seemed to be some solid points. For the most part, I accepted them.
I had to reconsider buying these arguments when posed with the question: what if? What if the fetus was a human being the same as the rest of us with parallel rights? Well, in this case, most of the foregoing arguments would have to be thrown out. "Everyone owns their own body" would actually be a pro-life argument, since it would incline that the fetus would have ownership of itself and therefore has the right to not be killed. The "underground abortion" argument doesn't work if abortion is murder; shouldn't rapists have safe, regulated rape houses so they don't get killed during back-ally rapes? Crime rates were not lowered if abortion is murder, and someone potentially being something of a criminal in the future is not a justification to kill them. If these arguments were applied to the born child, they would be ridiculous: should a mother be able to kill her child if he was conceived of rape or she is not financially able to care for him? All such arguments, then, crumble in the absence of one core claim: the fetus is not a human being.
When I was eventually convinced of this, I still maintained my pro-choice position, but stopped using these arguments. I recognized that they were distracting and unnecessary. To use an analogy to demonstrate the logic behind this, let's say I'm one of those repo men and I get caught "stealing" a million dollar yacht. Clearly, my defense would be that the yacht did not rightfully belong to the alleged owner (due to the contract he signed upon purchase, etc.), and I was simply taking the yacht back to its rightful owner. Therefore, it wasn't theft. The only relevant issue would be who the proper owner of the yacht was. If he was the proper owner of the yacht and I felt like taking a sweet ride that day, I would be a criminal. However, if he was not the proper owner of the yacht and my employer or myself was, then taking the yacht would be an act completely within my rights. If I was, in reality, just a repo man, a quick way to land me in prison would be to argue to the judge that I was financially in a bad spot; I can do whatever I want with my own body and that includes walking into and driving a yacht away; if I didn't take the yacht, I would've taken something else that could've put me in danger; or that I've concluded through some research that taking yachts overall lowers theft rates. No, my point would be concise: it was not stealing because the yacht did not belong to him and it is none of your business why I became a repo man, etc. Similarly, I recognized most of these pro-choice arguments to be red herrings. If the fetus was a human being, these points would be irrelevant. If the fetus was not a human being, but simply a clump of cells that we shouldn't care about, the arguments would be unnecessary to make. In short, I went out with the same argument I went in with: "it's a clump of cells, moron."
I didn't spend much time philosophizing about "when" a fetus transforms into a human being until a little bit later. It was a speech I heard from Ron Paul that got me thinking. He depicted an event he witnessed as a doctor: an aborted baby about two and a half pounds of weight being thrown into a bucket. I began to research the visual aid to help understand the reality of abortion. I found a lot of depictions such as "The doctors would remove the fetus ... and then lay it on the table, where it would squirm until it died ... They all had perfect forms and shapes. I couldn't take it, no nurse could"(Former Planned Parenthood Director, American Medical News, July 12, 1993). It was at this point that I realized that late-term abortion was wrong and that it was important to find the line that needs to be drawn between "clump of cells" and "human being."
What, then, constitutes a human being? First, I went with consciousness. I didn't like the idea of laying a squirming baby on the table until it died, but if the fetus wasn't and had never been conscious, what's the harm? However, my pro-lifer rivalries pointed out the obvious: I was not drawing the line at "consciousness" out of logical deduction but out of my own, personal squirm of what I thought was just too far. If being aware of what's going on was the issue, wouldn't that mean that there wouldn't be a moral issue with killing someone in a painless matter in their sleep? I eventually recognized that this was the case, but I still did not see how that justified conception as the line to draw. What was the difference, I argued, between the sperm and the egg five minutes before conception other than a chemical reaction? I tried drawing other lines: it becomes human when the brain is developed, when the heart is developed, when the nervous system is developed, etc. Something a pro-lifer said to me resonated. He said that I was using circle logic: that the (early-stage) fetus is not a human being because abortion should be legal, and abortion should be legal because the (early-stage) fetus is not a human being. It didn't hit me immediately, but, eventually, I realized that he was right. I was making excuses to try to grasp on to this idea that abortion was acceptable. I was drawing whatever arbitrary lines would fit my agenda. It was hard to admit it, but I was trying to bend the facts to meet my conclusion rather than using facts to reach a conclusion. It was time to be honest with myself and look at this from a more objective standpoint.
Ultimately, what I refused to accept was that the "chemical reaction" at conception marks the beginning of human development. No longer is it an extension of another person's body, but it is its own, unique human being. Its DNA is human and its signature is exclusive to itself. The zygote isn't even dependent upon the mother until about three days after conception when it starts to feed off of the mother's nutrients (and anyone in a similar situation would be "dependent" on these nutrients). From the moment of conception, the fetus is an autonomous human being; contingent on the fetus not dying or being killed, this fact becomes more apparent as more of its characteristics start to form. The core claim of the pro-choice position is "the fetus is not a human being." To make such a claim, there must be some sort of positive evidence. If it is not a human being, what is it? It is alive and contains human DNA, so it cannot be another species or object. It cannot be an extension or piece of another human being if it has its own DNA signature. The only logical conclusion, then, is that the zygote is a human being. I thank the pro-lifers who woke me up to this fact. I've now been arguing the pro-life position for years and my mindset has completely reversed. I only hope to reach out to more pro-choicers and expose them to the truthful tragedy of abortion.
Why does it matter at what point is human? A person who is comatose and brain-dead with no hope of recovery is also human, but they have no value. Being human has no value in and off itself. Intelligence is valuable. Avoiding pain is a good thing. The cells join is an arbitrary place to draw the line for whether it is right or wrong.
ReplyDeleteYes, I would want to create a safe place for rapists if it would reduce the number of rapes. To say otherwise would mean I cared more about punishing rapists than the people that could be raped. There are less abortions in countries that have legalized abortion, so even if abortion was mortally wrong, the government should still stay out of it. *remembers your an anarchist. facepalms*.
Do you care more about feeling good by resolving your cognitive dissonance than about the truth? Most problems don't have easy answers. Like religion, pro-life is comforting because it gives people an easy answers. They don't have to think very hard anymore. "Abortion is killing babies. It should be illegal." "And screw the consequences" I'll add. By that logic, abortion should be illegal even if making it illegal would cause Armageddon.
There are no absolutes, even where human life is concerned. Human life has meaning only because we give it meaning. I do think life is valuable, but the quality of life is also important. In some situations people are living in such hell that their life has negative value (to themselves). The planet can only support a finite amount of people. It is better to have less people and have them be happy, than more people and miserable and uneducated because they live in poverty because their 16 year old mother couldn't abort them..
Scenario 1) The embryo is conceived. The embryo is aborted.
Scenario 2) The baby is never convinced.
Scenario 3) The person is born. Thirty years later, they have a brain hemorrhage and die.
In all three scenarios, the end results are the same. There is no life. So then, is the person who lived and died equivalent to the embryo? It may surprise you, but my answer is "yes." They are both also equivalent to the person who was never born. If life has value, then death would have an equal but negative value to that life. Life + Death = 0. No life to begin with is also 0. (Though, the guy who was alive at least got to maintain a positive value for a while) Since there is only a finite number of humans that this earth can support, wouldn't it be better to have them born under controlled circumstances to ensure the quality of life? Its silly to cling to preserving life as a moral axiom.
How many animals have you eaten to sustain your own life? Their pain is just as real as yours and many of them live in wretched situations where they are mass-produced (the chickens). I'm not a vegetarian. I just think they should be treated better before we eat them. The universe is cold. Grazing animals tend to have small brains. Animals were only able to obtain enough energy to run large brains by being predators. By exploiting others. This is not pretty, but it is the truth.
The same goes for human society. Capitalism only works because someone is exploited. The Black Death reduced population which ultimately led Europe out of the Dark ages and to the Renaissance. Western Civilization has only been so successful by exploiting other lands. I think if we ever met advanced alien life forms they would try to exploit us in some way. You can't eliminate, but sometimes you can do SOMETHING. We should reduce evil where it is practical to do so, and leave it be where interfering would cause more harm than good. In this case, the government doing nothing would be best.
These arguments can be applied to any type of murder and don't apply to abortion specifically. If I am to use your arguments consistently, any type of murder should be legal. That's a separate issue. In this article, I was assuming that my readers were not psychopaths and recognized that murder was wrong. If you think there is nothing wrong with murder, you may want to start seeing someone. If you want to argue about abortion, tell me how the life of the *unborn* has no value while the life of anyone else does have value.
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