Dear Reader: I wrote the post below in 2011, and I’m writing this note in 2018. By now, my views on abortion have shifted, so that some of my statements below no longer represent how I feel. I’ve marked the most important ones with asterisks and notes in the text, but I’m leaving the original text as-is. It’s informative to see where I landed initially, as a left-leaning person who hadn’t yet thought very much about abortion. There are far more than only two stances Americans might take on this critical issue.
How I wound up speaking publicly about abortion
I never imagined myself standing in front of a group and proclaiming my beliefs on abortion. I’ve never been pregnant and thus have never had the option of getting an abortion, nor have I experienced the joys and struggles of raising a child, not to mention the terror of a pregnancy that might cost me the support of my family or my partner, or that might cost me my personal health or safety.
I have zero direct experience with this issue. So who was I to stand up and talk about it? Nobody, that’s who. Or at least, that’s how I felt.
And yet, through an unexpected turn of events, here I was, speaking at last week’s Reach Out Wisconsin forum on abortion. I spoke in front of around thirty people who included not only friends from Madison’s progressive east side, but also conservative friends and acquaintances and a Pro-Life Wisconsin representative.
Maybe I should have seen this coming. When I invited Facebook friends to the forum, they informed me that the message read, “Katie Songer has invited you to Abortion.” If they accepted the invite, it would announce, “Sarah is attending Abortion.”
That wasn’t exactly the message we were going for! We quickly changed the event title to September Forum. But by the time we changed it, for dozens of people my name was connected to the subject. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to become an impromptu speaker when Planned Parenthood, who we had finally persuaded to come, backed out literally five minutes before the forum began.
Luckily, I’d been thinking a great deal about the issue of abortion as the forum approached. And one thing I was prepared to speak about was how to speak about abortion.
Each time I mentioned to someone that our next topic would be abortion, there was a widening of the eyes accompanied by a comment along the lines of: “Wow. You are very brave.”
One woman asked, “What are you going to do to keep it civil? I mean, what are you going to do? When someone says the phrase ‘baby killer,’ for example?”
I was optimistic—our first forum, on the topic of concealed carry of firearms, had gone swimmingly. Still, the woman had a point. I wanted to do a lot of hand-holding with this particular subject and make sure it went well. What a triumph that would be: if we could have a real dialogue on abortion, we could have a good dialogue about anything.
Setting the tone
As the forum began, I took the floor for the little speech I had been planning on giving. I started by congratulating everyone. “Sitting down with strangers to talk about politics is a brave thing to do, especially with a topic like abortion. Abortion is personal, even if you’ve had no experience with it yourself. Talking about abortion makes us feel vulnerable. And that takes courage. So, congratulations.”
I could see friendliness in the eyes of the audience. I sensed warmth radiating from them as I spoke, and I was grateful for it.
I next read a quote I’d found in Parker J. Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy, a book I’d been devouring lately:
Hearing each other’s stories, which are often stories of heartbreak, can create an unexpected bond between so-called pro-life and pro-choice people… The more you know about another person’s story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.
Abortion is one of the many issues that generate what some people have called the “politics of rage.” And yet rage is simply one of the masks that heartbreak wears. When we share the sources of our pain with each other…we have a chance to open our hearts and connect across some of our great divides.
I stated the goal of the evening: to have a respectful, thoughtful conversation about abortion. “We will all need to do some letting go this evening. Letting go of wanting to win; letting go of wanting to be heard.”
I urged the group to embrace listening—“There are many other places where we can be heard on this issue.” I shared with them my own mantra: My goal is not to convert, but to understand. My goal is not to be heard, but to listen.
I concluded: “If, at the end of the evening, we’ve listened to each other, then we will have succeeded.”
As I took my seat, the group broke into immediate, enthusiastic applause. That was the moment I knew the forum would be a success. We were all in it together. We all wanted this, this conversation that has been so missing for so long.
Background on abortion
Before I continue with my story about the abortion forum, I want to give some background on abortion. This is background that I learned before, during, and after the forum, and that often surprised me, as someone who had never thought much about abortion before.
Surprise #1: The staggering rate of abortion in the United States
Over one million abortions happen in the United States per year, and around 30% of American women will have an abortion by the time they’re 45. Nineteen percent of all pregnancies end in abortion (excluding miscarriages). (Source: Guttmacher Institute; I highly recommend checking out the link for more stats. The link and statistic has been updated since this post was first written in 2011, when the reported rate was 22%.)
Surprise #2: It’s not mainly poor, irresponsible teen mothers.
Wikipedia has a great breakdown of stats, including reasons women report for having abortions. The following data is from 1987-1988. Among the primary reasons women cited for choosing abortion, the majority include “Want to postpone childbearing” (25%), “Too young” (12%), “Cannot afford a baby” (21%), or “Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy” (14%).
BUT, the Guttmacher Institute (cited above) states that only “Eighteen percent of U.S. women obtaining abortions are teenagers…Women in their 20s account for more than half of all abortions.” The article also states that 61% of women who choose abortion already have at least one child.
Although not all women who choose abortion are teenagers, there still is irresponsibility involved in many pregnancies that end in abortion. Again from Guttmacher: “Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently.” Perhaps as a result of such inconsistent use of birth control, “Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.”
In other words, poverty and irresponsibility and youth are all frequently tied to abortion, but a variety of demographics of women choose abortion, including a majority who are already mothers and who are beyond their teen years.
The issue of abortion also relates closely to the issue of race. According to Wikipedia: “In 2004, the rates of abortion by ethnicity in the U.S. were 50 abortions per 1,000 black women, 28 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women, and 11 abortions per 1,000 white women.”
Surprise #3: Abortion is legal nationwide.
I know, I know—that shouldn’t have been a surprise. I guess I was confused by all the controversy around abortion. Like I’ve said earlier in this blog, the past year has been a crash course in politics for me.
I figured that maybe abortion was legal in some areas but not others, or legal in some states but not others. In case you were as fuzzy as me: Ever since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973, abortion is legal nationwide. Many states have imposed restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent for abortions performed on women below the age of 18. But states are not allowed to outlaw abortion.
Planned Parenthood factoids
Many of these were surprises, as well.
- Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortions in the country. In 2009, PP performed 330,000 abortions, approximately a quarter of the abortions performed in the US per year.
- According to PP, abortions comprise only 3% of the services they offer. Other services include pap smears, cancer screenings, family planning, and contraceptives. Since abortions are undoubtedly among the most expensive services they offer, though, abortions must account for much more than 3% of the budget of PP.
- About a third of PP’s funding comes from the government, and only since 1970, when Nixon signed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act—with bipartisan support.
- PP has been around since 1916.
- By law, no government money can be used by PP for abortions. However, pro-life groups argue that the receipt of government funds “frees up” money within PP that can then be used for abortions. That is, because they can pay for pap smears, cancer screenings, etc. with government funds, they can use more money from their other funding sources for abortions. This is why pro-life groups advocate for cessation of government support for PP.
- One in ten PP clients receive abortions.
- Since many or most of PP’s services go to family planning and contraception, it’s been argued that PP is the largest preventer of abortions in the country.
(Sources: Wikipedia, Politifact, NPR’s Morning Edition)
One More Website
To close this background segment, I want to highlight a particularly interesting website I found: the excellently-written Why Pro-Life? Abortion Facts. Yes, this website is obviously biased, written as a toolbox for pro-life activists, and I’ve found a few things in it that offend me.
But it also contains well-written summaries of abortion law, as well as relentlessly well-argued responses to every possible question that might be lobbied at a pro-lifer (“Why don’t you hand out contraceptives if you really want to reduce abortion?” “If you’re really pro-life, why don’t you oppose the death penalty?”).
Especially to lefty or pro-choice readers, I recommend perusing this website to get a non-crazy, fact-based (for the most part), articulate pro-life perspective. Since I’ve been exposed more to pro-choice perspectives over the years, this website was especially intriguing for me.
My stance on abortion
So there I was at the Reach Out Wisconsin forum, scribbling frantically as the group listened to Pro-Life Wisconsin’s Steve Karlen talk. When Planned Parenthood had backed out, I had volunteered to give the “pro-choice” perspective in their stead. I had the duration of Steve’s talk to figure out what I was going to say.
Unfortunately for balance, I’m not entirely pro-choice myself. But I decided that that was okay. It’s ideal to have balanced speakers at our forums, but really the purpose is to foster conversation among attendees, not to witness a debate among speakers. Each speaker only speaks for 10-15 minutes anyway, after which we open the forum for discussion. If people in attendance craved a staunch pro-choice perspective, they were free to discuss that perspective among themselves afterward.
Below are the main points I presented, along with a few others that I wasn’t prepared enough to address until now.
1. Americans are ambivalent on abortion. It’s not accurate to divide us simply into pro-life and pro-choice.
Here are some interesting quotes from Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, published in 2007:
The majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that…[t]he majority of Democrats (70 percent), independents (66 percent), and even Republicans (62 percent) support some kind of compromise. Over 60 percent of white evangelicals and Catholics support some kind of “middle ground.”
The vast majority of Americans (85 percent) believe abortion should be permitted when the mother’s life is in danger, and three-fourths believe a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy if she is the victim of rape or incest. But nearly 90 percent support some restrictions on abortions, particularly in the last trimester.
That 66 percent of Americans support abortion rights in some form but 85 percent support imposing restrictions on it makes clear that we are not only looking at conflicts between Americans but conflicts within Americans. Americans are ambivalent about abortion.
2. There are some compelling arguments on the “absolutely pro-choice” side, though they’re not entirely what I believe.
One argument I mentioned at the forum was the stance I’ve seen on bumper stickers: “Keep abortion safe; keep it legal.” Stories of coat hangers in alleys, and stories I heard when I lived in Africa of aborted fetuses discovered in public toilets, terrify me. If abortion is illegal, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will still take place and will be more dangerous. There will always be women who, for myriad reasons, fear that their lives will be ruined by having a baby—and some will act on that fear.
3. I believe that an abortion is a tragedy*.
(* This is one of the views that has shifted for me by 2018. Perhaps due to increased comfort with the idea of abortion after thinking about it over the years, I no longer feel a strong sense of tragedy about early-term abortions, whereas in the following text, I don’t make that distinction. I suppose that for me, a fetus’ personhood doesn’t begin until sometime after the first couple months at least, and thus early abortions don’t strike me as particularly tragic. At the same time, I’m sure that even a very early abortion will feel tragic to many would-be mothers, and I have great compassion for that. It’s just a very personal decision.)
It annoys me to drive past billboards proclaiming “I could smile before I was born,” but I have to admit that I don’t entirely disagree with their message. A story from Drew Weston that I found especially compelling:
My wife and I experienced a late miscarriage, at around twenty weeks. We are, were, and remain firmly committed to the moral belief that a woman, and not the government, is the one who should make decisions about her body. But as most people who have had a miscarriage (or abortion) will understand, a miscarriage five months into the pregnancy was a deeply painful experience, particularly for my wife, as she had carried what she experienced as her baby everywhere for five months, both physically and emotionally.
So why did she experience a late miscarriage as so painful? Because no matter what she or we might believe about a woman’s right to choose, she experienced a person growing inside her. Was it a person the way our first child, then a toddler, was a person, and did we grieve for it the way we would have grieved if something had happened instead to our daughter? No… But the fact that the experience was painful—that emotionally it felt far closer to losing a baby than removing a benign growth—betrays our own conflicting networks regarding the human status of a fetus at five months.
Weston urges Democrats to be more honest about acknowledging the tragedy of abortion. It’s not accurate to imply that this issue is all about women’s rights and women’s bodies. It’s more honest to say that the issue is about both the right of the woman and the rights of the unborn, and that the two need to be balanced.
Jim Wallace, writer, theologian, and longtime critic of the Religious Right (and a man I greatly admire) believes in “protecting unborn life in every possible way, without criminalizing abortion.” Like Weston, Wallace has been critical of Democrats’ avoidance of the abortion issue. In April 2008 he said:
The number of unborn lives that are lost every year is alarming. It’s a moral tragedy. And I want Democrats to say it’s a tragedy, and to take it seriously. Whichever Democrat wins, Barack or Hillary, I’m going to work very hard to make abortion reduction a central Democratic Party plank in this election. It never has been before. Their plank is simply a woman’s right to choose. That’s not adequate.
The other day, a friend of mine described how as a young woman, a friend of hers, would refuse to use birth control and instead had had four abortions, about which she expressed no remorse. This was disturbing to my friend, and I believe it would be to many Americans regardless of stance on abortion.
One last note on the subject of “abortion as tragedy.” I want to clarify that while I feel that an abortion is a tragedy, I support campaigns to get away from shaming women who’ve had abortions—or the partners of those women. Abortions, like miscarriages, are far more common than anyone talks about, and they can be very traumatic for the woman as well as her partner.
I think of abortion as potentially a double tragedy: the death of the unborn, and the potential emotional trauma endured by the would-be parents. I don’t think it’s useful or accurate to brush aside the woman, or her partner, as simply a perpetrator or inflictor of tragedy—it’s more complicated than that.
4. I would support legal restrictions on many abortions, and at the very least I support “emotional hurdles” such as counseling before abortion.*
(* As of 2018, I recognize that I don’t know enough about “emotional hurdles” to endorse them—I suspect they’re used abusively in many areas that are trying to restrict abortions. It makes sense to ensure that a pregnant woman has thought through all the implications of an abortion, but if she’s certain she needs the procedure, it seems cruel to subject her to “counseling” or other deterrents.)
5. Like most Americans, I believe that abortion should be legal when the mother’s life is in danger. I am undecided, however, on cases of rape and incest.*
(* No longer undecided! Victims of rape and incest should absolutely be entitled to abortions! It’s interesting to me now, in 2018, that my aversion to abortions was strong enough not to feel this way at first.)
This indecision makes me different from 75% of Americans, who do believe that abortion should be legal in the cases of rape and incest. (It’s noteworthy that, according to Wikipedia, “In 2000, cases of rape or incest accounted for 1% of abortions.”)
I see compelling arguments on both sides of the rape and incest cases, and perhaps I’ll turn out to be more of a pro-lifer than a pro-choicer (if those are my only options). For allowing abortion in cases of rape and incest, here’s another quote from Drew Weston:
Perhaps the most fundamental right of a woman is to choose whose children she will bear. Yet in the Republican morality tale, if a woman is raped, she must have her rapist’s baby. She can give up the child—who is her own flesh and blood, mingled with the DNA of her rapist—or she can wake up every morning and see the eyes of her rapist in her child. Those are her two choices. Tell that to the father of a teenage girl in rural Virginia and see how he responds…
Here is another example: “[I]f a sixteen-year-old girl is molested by her father, she should be forced by the government to have his child…” Nothing could arouse more gut-level moral disgust than granting a man who molests his daughter the right to see her bear his grandchild.
And yet, in a small group conversation later in the forum, a man I talked with pointed out simply: “But it’s still a baby.” He described the case of a young woman who was held captive for many years by her father, who raped her and with whom she bore two children. Those are the children of incest… “But she loves those children very much,” this man said to me. I couldn’t help agreeing that he had a point.
And so, I’m officially out of the closet among my liberal brethren: I’m not 100% pro-choice. I think abortion should be allowed in some cases but restricted in others. I’m not alone—the majority of Americans believe something similar. The truth is that black-and-white thinking doesn’t apply to abortion; not all liberals are 100% pro-choice and not all conservatives are 100% pro-life. At the forum, I met Tea Partiers and Democrats alike who shared my views.
A New Conversation
The main message of this post is not my stance on abortion; the main message is that we need a better dialogue about abortion.
There’s a lot missing here. I’ve left out discussion on when “life” (really personhood) begins, as well as intimately connected topics like contraception, sexuality, and sex education, not to mention faith. I’ve also left out a description of Pro-Life Wisconsin’s main talking points.
There’s one more point I’d like to make about this forum. To our surprise, it was extremely difficult to find a pro-choice speaker who would attend. Planned Parenthood was only one of several pro-choice organizations that ultimately declined to speak, and at least some of these (polite) refusals were due to lack of trust: that pro-life groups such as Pro-Life Wisconsin would be truly respectful, and that we, a new and untested group, would be able to maintain a respectful tone among attendees.
It seems that, given the history of baggage around the issue of abortion, it’s hard for pro-choicers to imagine anything other than animosity around this topic.
And this mistrust isn’t groundless. Pro-choice advocates get yelled at at events, or their comments are videotaped, spliced, and taken out of context; they are bashed online and in the media; violence occasionally befalls abortion clinics. This kind of treatment has apparently taken its toll on the pro-choice advocates of Madison. As frustrated as I was that they wouldn’t come to the table, I’m working to extend compassion to them on this.
That said, I fervently hope that in the future this lack of trust will change. I’d like to see pro-life and pro-choice groups in dialogue (not debate) more often. In order for that to happen, olive branches will need to be extended, deep breaths will need to be taken, and hotheads in the rank-and-files will need to be talked to. The different sides may never agree, but they can be respectful and seek common ground.
When concluding my speech at the forum on abortion, I repeated what I’d said at the beginning: that while I’m undecided on some details, one thing I firmly believe is that we need to stop portraying abortion in black-and-white. Most Americans are moderate or ambivalent on the issue and support compromise. Both pro-life and pro-choice groups ought to recognize that. Therefore any group, on either side, thats uninterested in dialogue and compromise is not representing the majority…and is probably doing a disservice to their own cause.
My experience with this forum gives me hope. My comments were well-received, and it was thrilling to see that we did pull it off—that even on the issue of abortion, it was possible to have a friendly public discussion.
After I spoke, Scott turned everyone loose to mingle and continue the conversation, and the room broke into small groups of people talking animatedly. Many people, including conservatives, approached me to thank me for my courage in speaking.
As with the previous forum, we received a great deal of positive feedback. For me, one of the most heart-warming moments came from witnessing a Facebook exchange just after the forum. I had recently become Facebook friends with a Tea Partier named Todd, who has attended both of our forums and is a delight to talk to. After the abortion forum, Todd posted the following on his Facebook page with a link to our website:
I had a great time tonight with my conservative and new liberal friends at Reach Out Wisconsin. The liberal headcount was down this month, so if you are a lefty and free the 3rd Tuesday of each month, I encourage you to come out. Very friendly and respectful crowd.
In response, one of Todd’s Facebook friends quipped, “The head count was down because they came and listened last month…At least they tried…They as in ‘Libtards’ that is….So much for respect.”
I was more amused than offended to read this, but to my surprise, Todd didn’t let the comment slip by. “The object,” he responded, “is not just to listen, but for both sides to speak and try to understand as well. We refrain from name calling.”
She protested: “I see people comment on your posts using ‘libtard’ all the time…and other lovely names.”
But Todd stood firm: “I don’t use the term unless I am joking with you. There is plenty of name calling from both sides, but in this group we do things different.”
Katie, I love reading your writing SO much!
I think the real issue about abortion is when “life” begins. If life begins at conception, then abortion, during any part of gestation is murder. If one thinks that life begins when the baby leaves the birth canal, or c-section opening, then abortion is not the snuffing out of a life. Many believe that life as a person begins after conception but before the baby is born and starts to breath air. So answering this question is key to this whole issue. So, when do you believe life begins? If life starts in the womb, than who has the right to take it, except God himself?
In my post, I don’t address the question of when life begins, for two reasons. First, space: there’s just so much to write about abortion that I’ve become exhausted with what I’ve already written on my stance. Second, I think that my view on “When does life begin?” is somewhat implied.
That said, I agree that your question is one of the questions at the heart of the matter. I also like your phrase “life as a person,” because as someone said at the forum, this comes down to more of a philosophical than a scientific question. Science-oriented people can get distracted by the question “When does life begin?” because technically, a new human life does begin at conception. The real question is how much we value that new life—when “personhood” begins. As you described, to many people, a zygote doesn’t have as much “personhood” as a fetus, which in turn doesn’t have as
much as a late-term fetus or a baby.
Katie,
Interesting review of ideas and much appreciated. As someone who believes that abortion needs to be an option in many cases and women shouldn’t be shamed into it, yet agree that it is misused, I appreciate your back and forth and honestly about your ideas.
I find myself often infuriated by the conservative argument on these issues because it gets wrapped up in issues of health care and equality for women. Just the other day I heard the same old same old about birth control for women. Radio hosts (local morning hosts, not a political show) were debating the new change to health care laws that say health care should pay for birth control pills for women (no more copays). But they fervently agreed that ED is a medical condition and fully deserves to be covered. This kind of talk ignores facts about the pill being used by many women for medical purposes as well as the idea that women shoulder the responsibility for birth control even in the best of relationships.
I know that this is a different issue, but it gets tied up in similar arguments too often and inevitably I find myself fed up and feeling like I can’t be middle ground or else we’d lose all ground. I wish we could have an argument about abortion that didn’t have to get tangled up in these other issues.
My second issue is how do we protect a woman’s privacy and help her make an informed decision without making her feel like a criminal (think times of rape or incest or even an abusive partner)? I don’t know the answer but some of the restrictions on abortion get too close to this issue for my comfort. We need a way in this country to give women information to help them make a decision without further traumatizing them. Many of the restrictions (waiting periods, permission, required pamphlets etc.) start to feel like they are doing just that. There must be a better way.
Thanks for your posts and the dialogue.
It is more pleasant than I expected to read much of this post as we do have some values in common regarding this most important issue.
You stated that “the vast majority of Americans (85 percent) believe abortion should be permitted when the mother’s life is in danger”. Just what does that mean and in what circumstance would a mother’s “life” be in danger if she were to not abort her unborn child? My reading on this finds no such medical circumstance. Many in the pro choice arena put it a little differently. They say that abortion should be acceptable if it is done to protect the “health” of the mother. That is not the same as the “life” of the mother. In digging for clarication on this “health” issue, it has been
declared that all sorts of reasons fall into that category. Those include that giving birth to and raising the child will be a financial hardship all the way to having to care for a child will make them depressed. Is it right that this is used for justication for killing an unborn child, that we kill a child because it is inconvenient for the parents?
Earlier you referred to the pro life web site: http://www.whyprolife.com and I have been doing some reading there. You were correct in saying that it has a lot of well thought out information posted there. And I agree with you about how so many abortions are simply used as a method of birth control. That is so tragic, and many believe so wrong. It is indeed the modern holocaust of our civilization where a certain class of citizens, unborn babies in their mother’s womb, in the eyes of many, have no rights and can have their life snuffed out for any or no particular reason whatsoever. What should be the safest place for a baby has become one of the most dangerous.
I have often said that I am pro choice before conception and pro life after conception. Everyone has a choice about their behaviors before having sex. If that intercourse produces a child, then that child in the womb has the same right to life as a child out of the womb. Rape or incest is a separate issue. The justication for abortions given for those two cases are 0.3 % for rape and 0.03 % for incest. That amounts to 3 abortions out of every 10,000. So, in the rush to defend abortion for the hard cases and not restrict it in any way, it is now possible and even encouraged for women to use abortion as a method of birth control. That is not right. Does an unborn child, even if the result of rape or incest, not have the right to life?
Let me end with this. I believe that we were all created by God. Before we were born we did not exist. When our life began at inception in the womb, our soul was born. We are not a just body that happens to have a soul. We are a soul that lives in a body. We learn from the Bible that our souls will live forever, somewhere, even after our physical bodies perish. In light of this discussion on abortion let me ask the question, when are we most like God? It is when a man and women come together and through intercourse create a new life in the mother’s womb. That new life has a soul and it will live forever. So we do have the ability to be like God and create life, but we do not have the right to take that life, even in the womb. That too is being like God, but it is being disobedient for God tells us that we are not to murder. It is God who gives us life and it is He who has the right to take it. If we live long enough, we are going to die, so get ready.
katie i am LOVING your commitment to open communication with all the issues you present in your blog. thank you so much for sharing your intelligence and heart with the world in this way. it packs a wallop.
the discussion about abortion, more than any so far, shines a spotlight for me on all the ways i want to dig my heals in and not listen. it’s REALLY hard to open up those ‘i’m sure i’m right’ places within. i appreciate the challenge you are offering.
that said, i want to comment on bullet point #1. calling the abortion statistics ‘staggering’ feels like a judgement to me. there is an implication that a certain range is ‘okay’ and that there is a point of ‘too much’. i don’t get that. where does ‘too much’ start? if it’s okay to have one abortion, why isn’t it okay to one million?
i don’t have a moral quandary about when life begins, because life is limitless. life IS. we little humans couldn’t snuff out life if our lives depended on it. ha ha. so i feel like, if i’m going to support a woman’s right to chose, i will support 1,000 or 10,000,000 women’s right to chose. it’s all the same.
love.
I just wanted to chime in again on this topic, even though I had a chance to speak a bit at the discussion.
I think that one of the very tough issues with abortion is the ultimate question of “At what point does a person’s life start?” At whatever point we draw the line, I don’t think that it is possible to make a moral argument for allowing abortion past that line. (I do think that you can make a practical, political argument, but I’ll get to that later.) So, when does a person’s life begin? As I’ve argued before, I don’t think that this is a scientific question, but it is an important philosophical question.
One the one hand, we have Eddie’s view, which is reflected in most of the pro-life stances that I’ve encountered. This view simply states that life begins at conception. In his exploration of this issue, Eddie provides an argument for this based upon his personal religious views. I take no issue with what he says; I only want to emphasize that these views are deeply rooted in his personal religious beliefs. As such, I respect his belief, even though I don’t share it.
To argue the extreme counter-point, we need to approach the issue of the beginning of life outside of any religious framework. In this view, a fertilized egg is certainly alive, but it seems hard to argue that it is person (even though it has the potential to become one). At some point during the next 9 months, that single cell becomes a baby, and somewhere in the timeline there is a transition, but it isn’t clear at all how to draw the line.
To get a bit closer to this idea, I think we need to back up a bit and ask the question – why is human life special?
Specifically, given that we will swat and kill a mosquito without second thought, what is it that makes that life less valuable than the life of a human? What about the life of a cow, compared to a human life? Most people will eat a hamburger without a second thought, but how is the life of that animal any fundamentally different from a person’s life?
A classic argument is that animals don’t have souls, but this is again a religious argument. Absent that religious framework, we are left trying to identify some specific human trait, which will invariable lead back to some specific developmental stage.
Personally, this is where I struggle with abortion. In my personal view, a fertilized egg is not a person, but a 8 month old fetus is. I don’t know where to draw the line.
In the end, I think that we have to accept that the denition of the beginning of life is contentious, and there is no
clear, objective answer. Perhaps our understanding of the universe will change some day, and we can resolve this issue, but for now, I see this question as only a point of contention.
With that view, then, how do we, as a society, choose to frame our laws? For that matter, what is the point of laws, and how do we know where to draw the line about what should and should not be “legal”? I think that everyone can agree that if we make abortion illegal, women will still have abortions.
I’m running out of steam here. I have more to say, but it isn’t coming out easily, and I need to get home, so I’ll just wrap up.
I think in the end, one of the tough things about abortion is that although most people wish abortions never happened, I don’t think that it makes sense to try to eliminate abortions by making them illegal.
Instead, I think that we need to spend more time as a society talking about first of all how to prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening, followed by how we can provide more resources for women who are pregnant with an unwanted child. Abortion should always be the last and least desirable option.
Carolyn, thank you so much for your words. It means a lot to me to hear that this blog is helping others (not just me) open up their hearts in new ways. And knowing you to be someone especially wise in the ways of the heart, it’s especially meaningful to hear this from you!
I think you’re right that using “staggering” to describe the abortion rate implies judgment. But I also think I’m comfortable with that judgment. “Abortion as tragedy” is a fundamental value that I hold, though this value is not shared by everyone. But considering that value, the word “staggering” might make more sense. It’s not so much that, as you say, a certain abortion rate would be ‘okay’ and at some point the rate becomes ‘too much.’ Instead, I believe that as many abortions as possible should be avoided, but I recognize that sometimes abortion is the best option.
And about “when life begins”—as I tried to convey with the previous comment, I think a better phrase is “when personhood begins.” It’s true that I can’t snuff out Life…but I do have the power to end the current existence of another PERSON—through murder, or (maybe in the case of a potential person) through abortion. I hate to use “abortion” and “murder” in the same sentence; PLEASE forgive me everyone. I’m just trying to point out that the question isn’t whether we can snuff out life. The question is whether, and at what point, an abortion is the snuffng out of another person.
Katie,
Once again, well done at eloquently laying out your thoughts and arguments. I love your honesty and sincerity.
If I may, maybe I can spark thoughts for your next blog. As I read your thoughts and comments of other and the “right to life” and how valuable it is, I couldn’t help but think about the right to death.
I’ve found myself in conversations where an individual is closer to the pro life side of things and uses the right-to-life argument. Though sometimes that same person does not support the notion of “right to death.” I have a hard time wrapping my head around this dichotomy if the argument is based around rights.
Then I hear, “well, we shouldn’t play the roll of God.” However, I don’t think the right to life is playing God. And more so, that same person supports so much of western medicine that keeps us alive and healthy. I feel that’s a bit
hypocritical.
Just food for thought. I love reading your stuff!!