On Abortion: Waxing Apathetic

I’m content with, or at least resigned to, copping out on the abortion issue.

In politics and theology I consider myself a “Christian progressive”, rejecting the notion you have to earn your way to heaven, principally by being lucky enough to be born into, and/or industrious enough to discover and clever enough to recognize, the one true religion.

I think if we need to be “saved from our sins”, a concept my inadequate brain has never fully grasped, such redemption was Christ’s gift to all, and not reserved for an elite minority.

I’m anti-war unless the very sovereignty of our nation and/or a NATO ally is legitimately threatened; against capital punishment and torture; for habeas corpus; wishy-washy on immigration (we’re all God’s children, is it their fault they were born on the wrong side of a border?); in favor of gay marriage, or at least a functional equivalent; for healthcare and other social programs that aid the least advantaged in our society; anxious about the damage we do to our environment…you get the idea.

Logically, shouldn’t I be pro-life?

Intuitively, abortion seems wrong.

But...

The trouble with the abortion issue, like the war in Iraq, is that every possible political option is fraught with peril. There simply isn’t anyplace on the policy spectrum where I can comfortably settle down.

Is a human life created the instant a determined sperm wiggles its way into the egg? Is use of a “morning after pill” that prevents a newly formed embryo from affixing to the uterus tantamount to murder?

Doesn’t it happen naturally, millions of times a year throughout the world? Should we be praying for the lives of those that, unbeknownst to anyone, failing to attach, were flushed post fertilization via an otherwise typical menstruation? Do such cases really qualify as tragedy? Isn’t that a random part of normal physiology, not directed by divine intervention, without any connection to a “soul”, however it may be defined?

How could these penetrated eggs be considered human lives, or, for that matter, as potential life distinctly different than the potential life made possible by those very egg and sperm that contained all the same DNA, yet were moments earlier separate entities?

Sure I'm glad my parents didn't abort me, but I'm equally thankful they didn't practice abstinence, or successfully employ contraceptives.

The Bible, true to form (for me, anyway), provides little clarity. I’ve spilled my seed on the on the ground, and elsewhere, so many times I should have been smote a long time ago.

On the one hand, I cannot consider a just-fertilized egg a human life, or a successful Plan B treatment a capital offense any more so than Onan's, or my own, open air discharges. On the other hand, apart from conception, where can we draw the line that legally defines human life yet is not arbitrary?

If I cannot decide for myself what constitutes a human life, how can I presume to define it for others?

Assume a picture of an egg minutes after fertilization. Then a picture of that egg one day later, another the next, and the next, and the next, for 40 weeks, culminating with a picture of a newborn eight pound crying baby. Imagine those photos as 280, 8” x 10” black and white glossies placed chronologically in a row on a sidewalk. Starting at the picture of the newborn, walk down the line, and stop at the image that does not qualify as a human life, and yet the photo next to it, shot a mere 24 hours later, does.

Where do you stop?

Let's say, for sake of argument, you find no place to objectively stop, so you walk all the way to the end, or, rather, the beginning: conception – whether defined as the point at which the embryo attaches to the uterine wall, or the moment of fertilization – the only, it so seems, non-arbitrary places to draw the line.

Where does that leave us? Is, as in Whoville, a person "a person no matter how small”?

Is abortion therefor murder in every situation? According to Planned Parenthood, one-third of women in America will have an abortion. Are they all murderers? Add in all the accomplices complicit or participatory with the decision and/or the act, how many among us are murderers? How many of your family members and friends? How many of my blogging buddies that are squandering perfectly good minutes readings this diary?

What if a fetus is badly deformed and there is great risk to the mother, can we abort? Who is the arbiter of risk? Who gets to decide the threshold? If there is a 75 percent chance the mother will die during childbirth, is abortion justified? What about 30 percent? Ten?  Can these risks even be accurately quantified? Isn’t all childbirth inherently risky?

Imagine your 14-year-old girl is raped by a blood relative, do you want the legislature to dictate whether or not you can use “emergency contraception”? I think I would want the option to make a quick trip to Walgreens, and if the pharmacist refused to dispense on religious grounds, I might punch him in the nose. Then, I would murder that relative (by now you have already deduced I'm not an especially good Christian).

I don’t want to decide what the standard should be. I don’t think I want the government to decide what the standard should be, beyond very broad guidelines.

If we leave it up to the pregnant female and doctor, isn’t that, heaven forbid, choice?

Still, the argument that abortion is protected by the Constitution is as hard for me to follow as the concept of original sin. Why shouldn’t it be legislated at the state level?

Of course that would cause abortion to be banned or severely restricted in some states, but whether or not that is the case is irrelevant to the question of constitutionality.

For sure, bad things would happen should Roe v. Wade perish, but so would good things, like fewer abortions (that would be good, right?).

There would be options, though less convenient. Well intentioned groups would arrange transportation for out of state abortions. Furthermore, if women, or girls, wish to avoid abortion, they have that power. As Garrison Keillor once put it: “If you didn’t want to go to the city, why’d you get on the train?”

Likely there would be “collateral damage”, and not just the botched abortions (some might be surprised, by the way, that there are such things as botched legal abortions).  

No doubt there would be appropriate exceptions for rape. Teenage irrational sexual exuberance that led to pregnancy (or even fear of it), would likely cause some frightened young ladies to remember the incident as date rape, and innocent, or at least not terribly heinous, men and boys might be unjustly incarcerated.

O’ what a tangled web we weave, when at first we practice to conceive.

Ultimately, it seems unavoidable there are instances where abortion must be allowed. Such cases should be adjudicated by doctor and patient, not judge and jury, should they not?

Even so, some level of statutory limits ought to, it stands to reason, be codified into law. That sounds a lot like what we’ve got.

I think it’s okay to be okay with that (sort of).