With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and Florida's new initiative to restrict further the legal right to abortion, the abortion question is once again in the public spotlight. "Pro-choice" advocates tend to be up in arms about these legal actions, whereas "pro-life" advocates, tend to be pleased with the Supreme Court ruling. Once again, these factions find themselves at each others throats, with no signs of resolution in what often seems to be a hopelessly irresolvable difference of opinion. In the wake of these developments I humbly submit to my readers some views that might steer what often appears to be a hopelessly stalled debate into a more productive direction. I do not claim to have "figured it out". I humbly seek feedback from readers, as I fully expect that improvements of my analysis will be needed.
Knowing that I will win many enemies and few friends in raising this thorny subject, I will attempt to peel back what lies behind the intense feelings that lie behind each side of the abortion debate, and look for what is correct and in error about both sides (see, I've already got both sides mad at me). I do believe, nonetheless that there is merit in both perspectives and also ways that each side is missing key points brought up by the other side.
Let's begin with the pro-choicers. Pro-choicers come out of the liberal tradition, which itself grew out of the Enlightenment. The liberal tradition rejects the orthodoxy of traditional values, which are seen as being antiquated, obsolete, not adapted to the modern world, or possibly corrupted by the power that often associated with orthodoxy. Its enemy used to be the Catholic Church and possibly religious fundamentalism more generally. The many prohibitions associated with traditional religious practices have been felt to be suffocating to individual expression, and often enriched the clerical class at the expense of the poor. These traditional standards for behavior are also often embodied in the state, which may jail or even kill for failing to bow down to its authority. The state, to the extent that it is authoritarian, also is an enemy of the liberal tradition. Liberalism represents freedom from the strictures of a narrow system of behavioral control, and a celebration of individualism and individual rights.
The advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries catapulted humanity from its medieval state of feudal subjugation to an aristocracy and religious order to a condition where human rights were championed and government leaders, even be they Kings or Queens, were no better than the average citizen. This was a major advance over the prior hierarchical system, at least from the perspective of the average person.
The main drawback of the liberal tradition was that it was better at knocking down traditional values and authority figures than creating new and better values, or better systems of government that were free of the excesses of authoritarianism. The Terror under the French Revolution was probably the best example of how the liberal tradition went awry. Marxism, Communism and Socialism has proven to be a dangerous form of championing the value of the worker or the average citizen, as it has all too often morphed into authoritarianism, as in the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and other Marxist regimes. Even the United States, which has arguably one of the world's best systems for protecting individual rights, the Constitution, has slowly drifted towards authoritarianism since World War II, as is apparent from the growth of the Military Industrial Complex and the Deep State.
The pro-life movement is a deeply religious one. The pro-life perspective sees life as a sanctified state that deserves all the reverence and respect that the holy miracle of conception is due, based on religious texts. Without such respect for moral guidelines, society, from the religious perspective, is at risk for an "anything-goes" drift towards moral relativism, that not only calls into question fundamental beliefs articulated in the holy books of the great religions, but also collides with deeply held inner beliefs about right and wrong, that fundamentally are coherent with what is written in the religious texts. This is likely an oversimplification, but the pro-life critique of the pro-choice position is a natural consequence of the observed reality that there are no new moral standards being erected by the pro-choicers to replace those that are being torn down in creating a pro-choice society. Liberalism risks creating an amoral society, or one where the morals are entirely dependent on who holds secular power, and have no constancy or universality.
The main drawback of the pro-life position is that those who are not religious feel that they should not be held to the standards of a religion to which they do not subscribe. It appears to run contrary to the principal of religious toleration. The pro-Life position can not easily answer this objection, although its advocates can say with fervor that matches that of the pro-choicers they not only believe abortion is wrong from a religious but also from a personal ethical perspective. For those who do not share this viewpoint, this passionately held feeling has little persuasive power.
In some ways both pro-choicers and pro-lifers are quite similar in their positions: they both support the rights of living humans. The difference is that the pro-choicers focus on the rights of the mother and the pro-lifers choose to focus on the rights of the fetus. Is one right and the other wrong? I would hold that both are right: the rights of the fetus and the mother are both worthy of being fairly considered, notwithstanding unavoidably subjective arguments for reclassifying fetuses of certain gestational ages, as not truly human. Just to make it more complicated, the rights of the father are rarely considered in this matter, in most of the discussions of the abortion issue I have encountered. Additionally, there is a long history, which extends right to the present day, of women's rights being disrespected and the authority of men unjustly over-ruling the rights of women. This tends to make the perspective of female pro-choicers more difficult to dismiss. Complicating things even further is that many pro-lifers are women, so it is clearly not a male-female schism that demarcates the differences between the two ideological camps. Yet another complication is that while many pro-choices quite reasonably bring up the issue of pregnancy from rape or incest, or non-viable pregnancy as a legitimation of the pro-choice position, many pro-life advocates have conceded this point to the pro-choicers long ago, and are merely focussing on the viable pregnancies that are not from rape or incest. Admittedly, there are some in the pro-life camp who have not even allowed for abortion in these situations, so the lines are not clearly drawn, and this complicates the argument even further.
While the issue that divides the pro-choicers from the pro-lifers appears on the one hand to be an issue of the morality of terminating a pregnancy before it comes to a natural end or ends in the delivery of an infant, on the other hand it is unavoidably an issue of the rights of women to make decisions about their own health and their own lives, and whether those rights must default to the morality of the state or the medical establishment, which has always been predominantly male in its composition. Pro-lifers see the rights of the fetus as being ignored. Pro-choicers see the rights of women being ignored. The problem from this perspective appears to be, is it a matter of choosing whose rights are more deserving, or, more broadly, how can the rights of the fetus and the rights of women both be respected? It appears inevitable that someone's rights have to be disrespected, but that neither should be.
I will come clean now. I think it should be clear by now where I personally stand, but let me state it anyway: part of me is pro-choice, and part of me is pro-life. Let's start with the pro-choice side. However much one believes that killing a fetus is wrong, the principle of bodily autonomy also seems inviolable. That someone else has the right to tell you what health decisions you must make, particularly when it is the government or a male dominated culture, with the coercive power of the law, seems wrong to me, especially when the primary people affected are women. The immorality of this is particularly evident in the case of rape, incest or non-viable pregnancies, but it may also apply to cases where the fetus has genetic diseases which will result in inevitable death shortly after birth. However much one may believe that killing a fetus is wrong, morality is an inescapably subjective perception, and so the determination that abortion is always immoral can never be made without considering the perspective of the woman who is carrying the child, and whose moral perspectives, based on her own personal circumstances, are inevitably going to be affected in ways that will be individualized in ways that those of us who are not in those circumstances can not fully comprehend. Even many pro-life advocates have conceded that there are extreme circumstances such as rape and incest where the usual moral standards that they are applying to the rights of a fetus are deserving of an exception. From the female perspective, limiting access to abortion seems a moral indignity, which is possibly one reason the debate has become so emotionally heated: That a political and legal system which has been historically predominantly male should have the authority to over-ride a woman's and a mother's rights to make this kind of decision seems unconscionable. Men cannot ever fully comprehend the experience of carrying a child, notwithstanding those who want to erase this barrier by nonsensically claiming that men can have babies too.
Here is the pro-life side of me: the advocacy of the pro-choicers seems to include little or no acknowledgement of the gravity of the decision of terminating a human life. Their rhetoric appears to be all about the rights of the mother, and fails to adequately address the seriousness of the decision being made. While I don't believe that pro-choice individuals are at all ignorant of the seriousness of the decision to have an abortion, their grasp of this is largely absent from or at least not proportional to their rhetoric, which almost exclusively focuses on the rights of the mother. So it is hard not to conclude that they are not paying due homage to what has been sacrificed in deciding to have an abortion.
In modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, there has been a tendency to legitimize anything and everything that technology is capable of. As has often been pointed out, we are far quicker to implement the advances to technology than we are to ask whether it is a good idea to implement them. The rashness of human's adoption of technology has been memorialized in literature, from Prometheus, to Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, to sci-fi movies such as Godzilla or the Terminator series. We all know this, yet we all continue to adopt new technologies before we have fully examined the environmental, health and moral implications of these supposed "innovations". Without going so far as to state that technology is necessarily a bad thing (I'm not prepared to give up the lap-top I'm composing this essay on, for example), I think it is important to acknowledge that with every technologic gain, there is something lost, and that what is lost can sometimes not fully be comprehended until after it is too late to get it back.
From this perspective, it is worth considering what has been lost now that medical technology has made abortion safer and more effective from the perspective of the child-bearing woman.
What appears to have been lost, in my view, is what humans lose as they use science and technology to increasingly bend nature to their will: a reverence for the natural order. Reverence for Mother Nature, and the incredibly complex, fascinating and mysterious processes that govern all life on planet Earth, is notably absent from the scientists and technocrats who implement the cornucopia of technologic innovations for the intended benefit of the human race. The price of this ignorance, as we have seen over the centuries, particularly since the commencement of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century has been the despoliation of our planet. We are killing off living plant and animal species at a rate so fast it has been called the "Sixth Great Extinction". The air, lakes, rivers and oceans are polluted. Our soil has been depleted. Our mountaintops have been leveled to extract the coal that lies beneath. Earthquakes occur everywhere that fracking is widespread, and the fracking wastewater contaminates our aquifers and reservoirs. We as humans are riddled with toxins that have come to us in our food, our water, and the products we use in our homes and offices. We continue to destroy our planet all for the sake of comfort and convenience. There have been huge advances in comfort and convenience in the modern world, especially compared to life life thousands of years ago. Indeed the world that humans lived in thousands of years ago was probably more similar to the world they lived in as little as three centuries ago than it is to the world of three centuries ago is similar to today's world. The price of irreverence of the natural order has been the slow demolition of the natural order.
Let me restate it: the harm that has been done to planet Earth, to ourselves and to our fellow humans has been brought forth out of a lack of reverence for Nature. Even the environmental movement, which opposes the continued despoliation of the planet, has not fully articulated the spiritual dimension of this irreverence. Recently, movements to honor the natural world have arisen in the forms of the natural foods and natural healing movements, which advocate for farming that biodynamically respects the natural order, grows food organically without pesticides, chemicals or bioengineering (GMO) technology, and healing modalities that attempt to align human health with the natural order (e.g., naturopathy, holistic medicine) rather than forcing it to submit to a technologic paradigm.
What does all of this have to do with abortion? I think it has everything to do with it, in that abortion is a medical technology that is brought to bear without concern for the natural order, and for what is lost as we gain something that is valuable to us in taking the life of a fetus. Many traditional societies, and even some modern societies ritually gave thanks for the food, water, shelter, and abundance that chance (or from a religious perspective, Providence) had afforded them. Native Americans often gave thanks when they killed the bison that was a fundamental component of their economy, and which enable them to subsist off the land. Whether people give thanks to God, the Great Spirit, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed, there is and has always been implicit in this thanks a respect for and an acknowledgement of the impenetrable mystery of nature which had allowed for the possibility of human happiness and abundance. In omitting this reverential statement of appreciation of the miracle of life , we desecrate nature and if you are religious, you desecrate something that is holy on a religious level as well. By not honoring the natural order, we invite further exploitation and destruction of the natural order, in a manner that clearly bodes ill for the survival of life on Earth. Pragmatics aside, it is worth asking whether such irreverence is simply morally wrong? However we answer this, seeing what has evolved, particularly in the past century of environmental destruction, makes it seem inescapable that following this course any further would be the height of folly. In order to reverse course, we must change not only our behavior, but our attitude to the natural world, because without proper reverence for it, we will continue to heedlessly destroy the world because technology makes it look like a "good idea".
Some readers may object to the use of words such as "reverence" or "sanctification" which appear to grow out of religious traditions they may not be a part of, but I would argue that these kinds of spiritual terms are appropriate in a subject matter that is intrinsically spiritual. Abortion shouldn't have the same moral standing as getting an oil change on your car, or buying a new cell phone. The spiritual dimensions of life and death decisions could not be more distinct from these kinds of quotidian decisions.
Here's a proposed way out of the conundrum. The debate, as I have framed it above, and as it is often hashed out in the public forum, often omits a key third option: adoption. What if the pro-choice group came together and created an organization — call it the Adoption Option — and publicized that they would find a good home for any newborn not wanted by its parent or parents. No questions asked — whether the child was sick or healthy, whatever the circumstances of the pregnancy, whatever the circumstances of the mother, whatever the religious beliefs, or motivations of the mother, the baby would be placed with pro-choice parents who, having signed up for the program, would agree to adopt this child in order to save the life of a fetus who would otherwise have been aborted. Adoption is a well-known alternative, but it is often not given due consideration. I believe if many women with unwanted pregnancies were encouraged to think less in binary terms, and more in terms of adoption vs. keeping the child, vs. aborting the pregnancy, many would choose the route of adoption. Having a well known organization expediting adoption as an alternative to termination of pregnancy would likely make this happen far more than it now does.
Lest anyone think I am implying that adoption is the "correct" decision in unwanted pregnancies, let me state that this is not at all the point of promoting adoption. The point of promoting adoption is not to say it is a superior choice, but to honor the unborn life — giving life the respect that it deserves, by avoiding trivializing the meaning of ending a life through "automatic" legitimation of abortion. It acknowledges that whatever you may believe about adoption, the termination of a pregnancy is at minimum a great tragedy, a loss, and something that deserves to be grieved, not trivialized. The promotion of adoption aims to respect the miracle of life, whether from a religious or secular perspective, as well as honoring the mystery of the natural world, by implicitly acknowledging that there are some questions the human mind is not capable of solving. The best we humans can do sometimes is to craft compromises that though imperfect, nevertheless represent the best we are capable of with our many human limitations to respect the miracle of life. Declining to take the route of adoption would never be second-guessed or disrespected. The adoption option respects the unborn life, the mother's life, and the natural order. It bows humbly to the reality that the human mind can not always decipher what is universally morally correct. It respects the beliefs of the religious and the non-religious. It keeps the state from intruding in a moral area where it does not properly have authority. I think the pro-life movement, and even those who are pro-choice would do well to consider adopting the Adoption Option.
Postscript: I think many could fairly object that promoting adoption would merely be a Trojan Horse for condemning or restricting abortion for those who (in their own minds) justifiably want to terminate their pregnancy, and that promoting adoption could easily be experienced as yet another attempt to make women feel more uncomfortable in exercising their right to freely make health care choice and exercise bodily autonomy. Indeed, I think there is a real possibility that adoption could be in practice aggressively wielded by some more fanatical pro-lifers as a weapon to intimidate women into not exercising their free choice. Doing so would indeed negate the entire value of the program, which is meant to preserve respect for all humans, and all life. I believe this could be avoided by assuring that members of the pro-choice community and the pro-life community, or possibly a third interest group, which I would call the pro-respect movement (which includes respect for both women, unborn fetuses and the natural order), are included in the adoption-promoting organization, to assure that the marketing of adoption is not infused with any biases. While pleasing everyone may be impossible, I believe it would also be important to welcome and respect public commentary about the program to minimize any possibility that it could be perceived as biased or prejudicial against women's rights to exercise health freedom, or against the rights of the unborn. I believe that it is inevitable that some women will perceive the promotion of adoption as an attempt to pressure them to not get an abortion, and that others will welcome it as a useful way of reconstruct the decision-making process, so that they give adoption the consideration that it deserves, out of full respect for what is being lost in the decision to terminate a pregnancy, even if they ultimately decide to terminate the pregnancy.
I recognize that there are many who believe that abortion is never morally justifiable, and that every effort needs to be made to stop what they consider to be in every imaginable circumstance to be no less than murder. I know they will object to my compromise solution. I'm not sure how to respond to these criticisms, but I would encourage such individuals to ask themselves whether they would like to have their opinions and sensibilities respected? If the answer is yes, I would ask them if they whether or not they would be willing to give equal respect to the opinions and sensibilities of others who see the world differently from them.
I recognize that there are also many who believe that any attempt to limit the right of a women to abortion is intrinsically a violation of women's human rights. It might well be the case that some might consider even offering alternatives to abortion as a manipulation designed to restrict women's freedom of choice. I also do not feel I have words to easily put these opinions to rest, but I do encourage those who hold this perspective to review the arguments I have presented above and honestly consider whether they appear to be coming from a place of disrespect for women or from a place of wanting to respect all life, human and other, on this planet.
Very interesting to read the comments of James and DC, even though it's been a while since my original post. (Must admit I had forgotten it.)
Seems we have hit upon a topic that is seldom discussed anymore, and that itself is very telling. Society has seemingly accepted promiscuity and many other social mores that were frowned upon 50 years ago. (It certainly was happening though!)
Like technology, there has been an exponential explosion of more sexulation and the introduction of what I consider very bizarre and dangerous practices. Have you noticed that sexually passed diseases and conditions have disappeared from the lexicon? They have become almost as acceptable as the common cold! But they remain much more dangerous with some horrific consequences.
I look forward to more dialogue. It's sorely needed.
Agree, Nancy that the question of abortion and the issue of "free love" or unprotected sex can not easily be disentangled. Thank you for bringing this issue up. The abortion question is much more difficult to resolve in a culture where taking responsibility for one's actions, including the unintended consequences, is not normative. Our sick "not my problem" culture must change if we can ever have any hope of working together to fix our societies ills.