Life Choices
The comment thread to a post from last week, "Conservative Liberalism," has morphed into an interesting debate on abortion rights and the discussion seems good enough to promote to a new level. Duffy, a principled pro-lifer, poses a tough moral question for those of us who favor choice. Why, he asks, if the mother has the right to abort a viable or potentially-viable foetus, should she not then also be permitted to kill a live infant already born? How do we draw the line between the "right to choose" and infanticide?
I'm swamped with work right now, so all I will do is repeat my reply from the comment field:
Duffy wrote: I believe it is moral to protect the rights of the unborn.
Rob replies: It is your privilege to believe as you please, and not my place to judge the rightness or wrongness of it. For what it's worth, this is what I believe:
Defining birth at conception reduces human life to a very basic organic process. People are more than a ball of cells. Humans gain their identiy, their dignity, and their right to moral consideration by their appearance in the world, and the beginnings of their interaction with parents and other people - that is, at birth. It is true that embryos left alone naturally develop into babies who are born, but while they are in the womb, they are still products of a natural process, not yet people. Those are my morals, and how I distinguish between abortion and infanticide. Your moralage may vary.
I'm not a woman and I don't have kids, so I can't speak with much authority on the subject, but it seems to me that if anyone in the world has a compelling interest in the life and health of her child, it's the mother. So when a mother makes the choice to abort, it strikes me as bizarre to suppose that it's a simple matter of casual convenience. The mother has a right to life as well: in her case, the life that she's already living. If the accident of conception during the natural act of sex produces a result that she, for whatever reason, finds intollerable, I am inclined to respect even the least of her motives, because the alternative is to ask her to raise a child she does not want (to the point that she is willing to defy millions of years of evolutionary logic in order to prevent). At best, I'd have to wonder what kind of mother she'd make under those circumstances anyway.
Finally, as a practical matter, women have engaged in abortion for as long as the biological knowledge and technology have existed. The urge not to procreate is as strong in some people as the urge to have kids. Whether that's moral or not is a matter of debate, but is seems evident that it is natural, at least for some people. If we turn women and their care providers into criminals, we're putting the real lives of actual, not potential, people in jeopardy and making our society less free. As a matter of my own morality, I don't care for that much.
Please understand I don't consider this a simple issue from either side. It's a matter of tolerance for each other's strongly-held views. I look around and note a lot of people who appear to be unfit parents, or whose lives were ruined by an unplanned pregnancy, but it would be barbaric to suggest that my view of abortion rights should apply to them and their decision to have their children rather than abort. If we live in a place that genuinely respects freedom of conscience, we have to accept limits to our ability to impose our morals - no matter how strongly felt - on others in private areas where society has no other stake.
Discuss as you see fit.
7:02:18 AM 
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