Abortion in the land of the selectively blind
Once again, we're hearing that the pro-life Republican position is "extreme." And as the article linked to above makes clear, once again the media are spinning the issue in such a way to make them seem right.
Once again, we're hearing that the American people do not want Roe v. Wade reversed. Well, yes and no.
I've cited this fascinating repository of data on the subject of public attitudes toward abortion many times before. Every year since Roe was handed down, Gallup has asked the American people the same nuanced questions about abortion. And yes, year after year the polls show that the American people don't want Roe reversed. That is until the questions get specific.
Roe guarantees a right to abortion on demand through the first trimester. It allows states to restrict abortions in the second and third trimesters, except when the mother's life or health would be put at risk by continuing the pregnancy. Most states have chosen to outlaw abortion in general once the fetus reaches the point of viability, that is, at the point at which a fetus is able to survive outside the womb. This is generally understood to be the 24th week of pregnancy when between 20% and 35% of fetuses survive outside the womb.
It should be noted, however, that between 10% and 20% of fetuses delivered at 22 weeks survive. Not until 25 weeks does survival reach 50%-70%.
The recent trend among Democrats has been to advocate scrapping even that restriction. And the kicker, unrecognized my nearly everyone, is that even though pro-choicers try to obscure this fact, Roe guarantees an unlimited right to abortion right up until the moment of birth if a doctor is willing to certify that the mother's life or health would be endangered by carrying the fetus to term.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Now, consider:
The American people are not, for the most part, lawyers. They neither know nor can reasonably be expected to know exactly what Roe v. Wade says. Even less can they be reasonably expected to know how its provisions play out in the real world. It seems rather clear that- quite understandably- Roe v. Wade is, in the mind of most Americans, merely code for a guarantee that abortion will remain legal at all.
So when do the American people think that abortion ought to be legal?
The first trimester of a pregnancy is calculated from the mother's first missed menstrual period through the 12th week of pregnancy. As has been noted, a woman may not even know that she is pregnant before the third trimester expires. It would be interesting to find out how many Americans realize this, and the impact it might have in their attitude toward legal abortion. Would it mean that they would be willing to have abortion remain legal at a later stage of pregnancy, or whether they would re-evaluate whether it should be legal without any restrictions at all?
As things stand, according to Gallup, at least since 1996, never have fewer than 64% of the American people believed that abortion should, except in unusual circumstances, be illegal even at half the stage of development generally treated as the threshold for fetal viability.
The standard pro-life position agrees that abortion should be an option if the mother's life is at stake, a point which somewhat confuses Gallup's categories. Abortion, when the mother's life is at risk, is simply not an issue; there is a broad consensus even among pro-lifers that it ought to be available in such cases.
The problem is with the broad and undefined term "health." Anxiety isn't good for us. A case can, therefore, be made that if a woman is worried about how to care for her child, or even about being a mother, her health is therefore at risk. Everything depends on the willingness of a doctor to certify that it is, in fact, at risk- and the term "health" can be used so broadly that it would not be difficult for a doctor, in completely good conscience, to certify that it was at risk in literally any pregnancy at any stage of fetal development right up to the moment of birth. In fact, there is a strong trend in "blue" states and among Democratic politicians to remove the viability requirement and say plainly that abortion is legal for reasons of "health-" subjectively defined by any physician- right up until the moment of birth.
Attempts to define "health" more specifically, for example as referring to physical health, have been regularly opposed by the pro-choice side. While I am unaware of any attempt to define mental health in terms of specific diagnoses listed in DSM-IV (the "bible" of mental health professionals in the United States), I have no doubt that doing so would also meet adamant opposition from the same people. The pro-choice side is very happy with the ambiguity in the concept "health." After all, it enables the envelope to be pushed to the maximum in terms of the circumstances under which abortion is permitted.
Pro-choice obstetricians have sort of painted themselves into a corner by arguing- correctly- that third-trimester abortions are rare. This handicaps them somewhat in disputing the rather widespread opinion among practitioners of their specialty that in the third trimester the only difference between abortion and Caesarian delivery is whether the baby lives or dies and that there is no case in which the mother's health can in any way be impacted by the child's survival. In other words, once the point of viability is reached, there can never be a situation in which abortion is necessitated by considerations of the mother's health.
But again, all that is required is that an M.D. is willing to certify that it is.
The Democrats and the mainstream media say that the Republican position is extreme. Yet the polls show that the overwhelming majority of the American people believe that abortion should, at least in principle, be restricted to the first trimester! The elephant in the room which both the Democrats and the mainstream media are desperate should not be noticed, and which in most cases they seem not to have noticed themselves, is that if what is "extreme" is defined by how far outside the consensus of society it is, Roe v. Wade, the pro-choice movement, and position of the Democratic party are at least as extreme as is the Republican position, arguably more so, and continually getting more extreme all the time as the push continues to remove even the basically theoretical restrictions on late-term abortions which Roe permits and which most states have enacted.
Now, just as the American people are not, by and large, lawyers, and can't be expected to know the details and implications of Roe v. Wade, neither are the doctors. The Supreme Court took a great deal of criticism when it handed Roe down for using the trimester model on the ground that it was arbitrary and not medically meaningful. It's doubtful that most Americans realize how slim the chances of fetal survival are in the case of delivery at, say 13 weeks, or at least have stopped to think about just how early the first trimester actually ends. It's hard to say how people would feel about drawing a hard-and-fast line at viability, although on the basis of their consistent position down through the years it's hard to imagine that an overwhelming majority wouldn't be strongly opposed to permitting abortion after that point except under very extreme circumstances.
Like perhaps when the mother's life is in danger? But again, that doesn't happen. Caesarian section and any form of abortion not specifically intended to be fatal to the fetus are indistinguishable, and in no case would the death of the fetus affect the physical health of the mother either way. As to her emotional health, it's hard for me to believe on the basis of what we know about the attitude of the American public that anywhere close to a majority would see that as ethically legitimate grounds for terminating the life of a viable fetus, especially given the possibility of adoption or other options to address the inability of a woman to care for a child.
The not-uncommon position among pro-choicers that sometimes children are better off dead strikes me as a rather presumptuous one- who are we to make such a decision for them?- as well as frankly rather chilling.
But the problem is that the age of viability keeps getting earlier as medical technology improves. It is true that there is undoubtedly a limit to how much earlier it can get, and that we're probably approaching it. But there remains a substantial percentage of the American people for whom even that isn't the issue.
I've noted before how confused pro-choice politicians and advocates generally seem to be about the fundamental issue involved in abortion. This would seem to be strange, at one level, because matters of biological and medical fact are involved here of which they seem unaware. A human fetus- or embryo, or even zygote- is precisely that: a human fetus, embryo, or zygote. And there is no question as to when it begins to be alive. Pregnancy is generally thought of as beginning with the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus. The religious objection to abortion generally points out that at the moment of conception a genetically unique individual comes into existence (in no sense "part of the woman's body," although residing in it, and contrary to the rather disgusting assertion that arises every once in a while by definition not a "parasite" precisely because it is a gestating member of the mother's species.
By any scientific definition, once cell division takes place and genetic potential begins to be expressed (the latter a process which continues until the day we die), life exists. Human life. And whichever of these points one might choose, they occur so close together that it really doesn't matter.
The fundamental- and unavoidable- question here is whether there is, or even can be, such a thing as a human life that is of no value, or of less value than any other human life. The pro-choice argument is essentially Darwinian; it defines human worth and even humanity itself on the basis of survival of the fit; on what a living member of our species can do or what qualities it manifests. The pro-life argument assumes that human life is precious simply on the basis that it is, indeed, human life, and that once we cross the line of deciding that a deformed fetus or one carrying a gene that will condemn it to a life of illness or suffering is "life unworthy of life," or is "better off dead," who else might qualify? And what gives society the right to make that decision for such an individual?
The argument for abortion crosses a line with implications which go far beyond abortion, and now that it's been crossed there is simply no line we might establish which will not move once more if it seems convenient. As I've pointed out before, in Belgium the law has actually been structured in such a way that a doctor who decides that a patient is better off dead, in some circumstances the patient can be legally euthanized without his or her permission. It's no secret that this is already going on "off the books" all over Europe. While it's less extensive in the United States, where we still imprison medical personnel who take it upon themselves to decide that patients are better off dead (especially without input from the patient!), it's no secret that it happens here, too.
I am fully aware of the dangers raised by Godwin's Law, the notion that if any emotional debate is carried on long enough and hard enough one side will compare the other to Hitler. The argument ad Hitlerum is rightly suspect because it tends to be transparently a matter of hyperbole at best and more often of outright slander. But abortion, euthanasia, and related issues are one area in which it's hard not to see its relevance. I want to make it clear that I always try to assume that pro-choicers are motivated by compassion for women in difficult circumstances rather than a callous disregard for the humanity of the fetus, even though they tend to deny it. I judge no one's motives and choose to assume the most charitable possible explanation for the position of even the most extreme pro-abortionists. But if one considers their arguments rather than their motivations, it's hard for me not to think that it's at least worth noticing that the arguments they use in the case of abortion and euthanasia are exactly the same arguments the Nazis used when made Germany the first Western nation to legalize both. Yes, they, too, argued that abortion and euthanasia were compassionate, that some human beings are literally better off dead. They, too, invoked the economic burden placed on society by the necessity of supporting them. And they, too, thought that society- or individual members of it- had the right to make such decisions without consulting the people most intimately affected by them.
Pro-choicers sometimes make the emotional and wildly illogical argument that since men can't get pregnant, only women have the right to an opinion about abortion. That assumes- falsely- that the mother of an unborn child who is most profoundly affected by the outcome of a pregnancy. But that is obviously not the case. The party most directly affected is the fetus. As absurd as it might be, it would be far more logical to say that only a fetus has the right to an opinion about abortion!
But since fetuses don't form opinions and couldn't express them even if they could, it falls to society to speak on their behalf. And there is only one answer that wouldn't be presumptuous even if one takes the position that a human being has a right to decide for himself or herself whether to live or die (which I adamantly do not). We, as a society, have no qualms about giving that answer when we forbid infanticide (although late-term abortion such as many Democrats these days amount to simple infanticide in every ethically significant way possible). If it is granted that mere humanity is sufficient ground on which to base a presumptive right to live, the same principle would seem to apply to unborn human life. Roe v. Wade, which addressed the issue in terms of the mother's right to privacy, was answering the wrong question. When it presumed to usurp the authority to define personhood, and in so doing took precisely a matter under dispute among us out of the hands of the state legislators we have elected to resolve controversial issues through debate and deliberation as part of a process in which they are accountable to us all and imposed the opinions of the unelected justices in their stead, it went beyond anything for which it had logical or constitutional warrant.
It's true that there are other lines can be drawn against the trivialization and disposability of human life than its mere humanity. But that is the only line that won't move at the slightest nudge of convenience or societal whim. And if it's a given that human life can be terminated by the decision of any other person for any reason at all, a precedent has been set which puts a great many human lives outside the womb at risk as well.
But all of that aside, both the view that unborn children are not fully human and the view that abortion should never be allowed unless the mother's life is in danger are at least philosophically consistent. None of the other possibilities really are. Either the unborn child is a human life, deserving of the same protection and respect as any other, or it is not. That is an argument often raised by the pro-choice side and by hard-line right-to-lifers alike, and it's impossible to dispute. If an unborn fetus, being (despite the efforts of the pro-choice side to confuse the issue) indisputably both human and alive by any objective, scientific definition of the terms, is entitled to the same protection and respect as any other human life, then the circumstances of his or her conception are irrelevant. A child conceived as a result of rape or incest is no less human, and its life no more or less valuable, because he or she was conceived as a result of rape or incest.
Any time an argument is raised by both sides in a debate it's worth taking seriously, and in this case, there is an additional reason to do so: the argument is unanswerable- or at least irrefutable. I think there is an answer to it, and while I concede at the outset that it is logically hopeless, my heart tells me that sometimes it's so profoundly human itself that I have to confess that I find it hard to resist.
John Warwick Montgomery, a Missouri Synod Lutheran attorney and theologian, is said to have once been involved in a debate on abortion in which his opponent thought to paint him into a corner by asking, "Do you mean to tell me that if your own daughter were raped, and became pregnant as a result, you would refuse to allow her to have an abortion?"
Rather than taking refuge in what I think is a logically unassailable position- that human life is a human life regardless of the circumstances of its origin- Dr. Montgomery's response was disarmingly human. I think- God help me- it would be my answer, too.
Dr. Montgomery is said to have replied that he could say exactly what he would do. He would find the most skilled abortionist available. He would pay for the abortion. He would drive his daughter to the clinic. If they let him, he would hold her hand while the abortion was being performed. He would do anything he possibly could to support his daughter. But there was one thing he would not do.
He would not tell himself that he was doing the right thing.
In some ways it was a profoundly Lutheran answer, recognizing that even our most worthy deeds are stained by mixed motives and flow from selfish, sinful hearts, that even a Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time a saint, and yet a sinner. It rejected the superficial, binary concept of right and wrong to which Western philosophy and theology is so deeply inclined, and recognized that moral ambiguity is an unavoidable part of human life. The Christian cannot be sinless in this sinful world and lives before God, not by sinlessness, but by forgiveness, by grace.
Having known more than one woman who is a rape survivor, I would have a very hard time forbidding a woman in that position almost anything that would make her ordeal easier than it might be otherwise. But I would not tell myself that in supporting her decision to abort I was doing the right thing. Nor would I consider the notion that she had a moral right to make that decision sustainable. A woman certainly has a right to control her own body, one that in the case of rape has already been outrageously transgressed. But that right stops at the point where it becomes a decision about somebody else's body, and especially about somebody else's life.
But in any case, the position of the American people has been remarkably consistent in every way but logically ever since Roe v. Wade was handed down. The access the left has to the mainstream media and the consistency with which the media "spin" the matter to the contrary, one thing is as clear as crystal in view of where the American people actually stand with regard to abortion.
If the Democrats want to claim that the Republican position is "extreme," fine. But the Democratic position is every bit as extreme. Whether the American people realize it or not, their position is not that of Roe v. Wade and does not have a voice in the American political arena just now. And it's hard to imagine that it ever will.
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