Abortion. I had to come to it eventually. And I hate, in a sense, to address it. It is one of the few hot topics that stir people up, surpassing gun control, if not race. It is a dreadful topic, but, like most general topics, I’ve given more than a decade of thought to it, and I’ve arrived at certain inevitable conclusions. There are, in fact, conclusions that can be reached in this argument, and distinctions between the two sides of the debate.

I was raised in a liberal family that considered themselves independents and voted, on rare occasions, for Republicans -- but was overwhelmingly Democratic. Embracing social activism in my teens, I favored abortion rights to a radical extent. Growing out of that position has been a long process, but my background is of relevance here, and so I disclose it.

I preface myself by saying that I have little tolerance for radicals on either side of this issue, though my sympathies have, somewhat against my will, swayed towards anti-abortionists, although I do not always agree with them and rarely agree with them. The reason my sympathizes have swayed towards anti-abortionists, even when I do not agree with them, is that those against abortion hold their position on moral grounds: they are horrified by the approximately 43 million dead fetuses caused by abortion since Roe v. Wade; they base their beliefs on the sanctity of life. I have respect for the religious radicalism that often accompanies such positions; though such views are not necessarily my own, I may disagree with someone, but it is hard not to admire, whatever one’s views, their consistency, as they see it, and their willingness to express such views, if not outright fight against what they regard as institutionalized killing. The sanctity of life must be counter-balanced with concern for quality of life, in this case of the mother and the potential child; the argument over the right to die, if nothing else, has shown us that.

Anti-abortionists are deeply-feeling crusaders for rights in a way that pro-abortionists are not. Pro-abortionists not only lack the religious background to their sentiments that anti-abortionists possess, but pro-abortionists lack real moral conviction. This is visible in every pro-abortionist offered to the public in the vitriolic debates on the topic, seen regularly on almost every political show. Pro-abortionists come off as special interest representatives, arguing their position less out of moral feeling than supporting government-sponsored rights for their constituency: women, rather than children. Pro-abortionists have moral conviction, but this moral conviction is of an entirely different sort: it is the moral conviction of labor unions arguing for more or less wages and free time, the moral tone of such modern social advocates that see morality in a broad, all-inclusive sense. A woman’s right to do a particular medical procedure with her body cannot compare as a moral issue with those trying to stop or limit what they see as the death of millions of lives. I happen to agree with this sense of morality, and hasten to add that a lack of a narrower, deeper morality does not invalidate an argumentative position -- but this difference in tone is important to note as we discuss the argumentative matters at hand.

The analogy to the argument over slavery must be made, and I think that abortion is, in fact, the slavery-like polemic of our times. Abortion too has ancient roots: the Romans, for example, found it detestable, keeping condemned pregnant women alive until they gave birth before they were executed on the grounds that the unborn child did not deserve death for the actions of its mother. (Fathers, of course, were not given this benefit.) At the same time, abortion existed, and drugs that induced it have been used since ancient times. Slavery was also defined as a battle over rights: the rights of a people, such as a state, to make its own laws versus the rights of the individual who may or may not happen by chance to be a slave. The danger of such issues is that they are resolved, and the wrath with which our ancestors are judged by our own values, which find slavery so abhorrent, should be a lesson to us. I would like to suggest that the parallel between abortion and slavery suggests the high stakes with which we are playing. Both with slavery and with abortion, compromise solutions that satisfy no one have so far been the rule of the day.

On the one hand, few people would really disagree that killing a fetus is a negative moral act, a very different action morally than, say, cutting one’s hair or doing something similar to one’s own body. On the other hand, few people would really disagree that killing a fetus is equitable to killing an adult, and a sliding scale exists between the couple of cells a fertilized egg represents and a child on its way out of the birth canal. Killing a fertilized egg is akin to killing a seed newly planted in soil. On the other hand, killing a child a week before it is born is akin to killing a child the moment after it is born. Negotiating the nine months or so between these two moments is the core of the abortion debate, responsibly argued -- but this debate has interesting implications on other matters as well.

One reasonable solution that has been proposed is viability -- the ability to exist independent of the mother. In a world of grocery stores, I can only find this humorous: we all depend on each other for our survival. Very few of us are viable, left to our own devices. We freak out when our air conditioning fails, let alone if we are left to gather food from the ground and the water. Even in hunting and gathering societies, individuals depend on each other for their survival. Even if we explain viability as the ability to breathe rather than to find sustenance, the criteria of viability would allow the execution, by another’s decision, of people on life support. It might also suggest that babies, once born, should not be aided with respirators and the like, but left to survive along the lines of Christian Scientists. Surely, viability is not the unproblematic solution it might first appear.

The question then is one of weighing the rights of a potential mother to the rights of an unborn child at various stages of development. Here the slavery parallel is important. The abolition of slavery must be seen as extending human rights to those who did not yet possess them. Women, by comparison, have human rights and, even in the absence of certain rights in the past, were never treated as a class as identical to slaves. By comparison, unborn children are -- treated as the mother’s property, one can kill an unborn child with impunity. The course of history is on the side of the anti-abortionists. The great expanse of human rights, should it continue, will be applied to the unborn, and, in retrospect, anti-abortion crusaders are likely to be remembered in the future as we now do anti-slavery crusaders, who also occasionally killed in their cause -- a fact we now celebrate.

The hypocrisy of our own laws supports this view. Deliberately causing a woman to miscarry is treated as a crime, and our criminal law is rife with such instances in which, when it benefits a woman, an unborn child is seen as a child even while she has the right to abort that unborn child as if it were not a child. If we, as with various “solutions” to slavery, consider unborn children as a fraction of a person, 43 million abortions still equal a holocaust of some proportion. Fortunately, no one can make pro-abortion arguments on the basis of racial inferiority, simply a sort of age discrimination.

If carrying an unborn child to term did not involve a female carrier, the use of a womb, no one would defend abortion. As simple as this observation is, it carries profound meaning: the feminists defending abortion would be silent if men carried children or if unborn children did not require a female to carry them. In other words, their position is decidedly based upon self-interest rather than moral concerns. Importantly, the reverse is not true: if unborn children could be safely removed from mothers, without the scars that would concern feminists even if the procedure were 100% safe, and kept in artificial wombs with at least the same level of survival, anti-abortionists would still be concerned if such children were killed.

One of the most damnable facts of the abortion debate is that images of abortion are generally well suppressed from the public. The only people who will show such images are anti-abortion activist groups. The reason is that such images are horrifying: a fetus is unrecognizably human, and seeing it sliced to pieces, its brains sucked out, its body discarded as trash, is inevitably upsetting. The fact that such images are not played on television, which has shows showing operations in close-up, is evidence of the dominance of pro-abortion views, based on the questionable notion that the powerful nature of such images, as in a court of law, would unfairly bias the public against abortion, which the politically correct hegemony sees as a matter of female rights. More importantly, such images are not seen as commercially viable, since they would horrify viewers and outrage feminists. Of incredible importance is the fact that such photos are, after all, the truth: the media is not giving them to the public, leaving the transmission of facts to people who are often admitted zealots. That people other than anti-abortionists will not give the public these facts, and that pro-abortionists have suppressed such photos and information, is damning to the pro-abortion argument. If the feminist hegemony not so severe, this would not be the case: images of real people shot or cut to pieces or burning alive are perfectly acceptable if those people are Vietnamese killed by American troops; female victims of battery, rape, or murder; or blacks mutilated and lynched. As in court cases, brutal photos do cause an emotional effect that may hurt reason’s reign, but such photos are typically admitted into evidence if they inform those who sit in judgment about the nature of the crime, and the horrifying photos of abortion victims certainly would inform the public about the nature of abortion -- just as images of the abuse of slaves, from horrifying violence to horrible dilapidated schools, were used by anti-slavery advocates and are now preserved in museums.

In terms of the moral argument, anti-abortionists win decisively. But, as with slavery, practical considerations must also be weighed. Abortion will never be eliminated completely. Pro-abortionists are being rhetorical when they claim that all abortions would occur anyway, through bent clothes hangers and the like, should abortion become illegal. Yet a certain amount of abortions have always occurred and would continue to occur. Moreover, the split opinions of the public, slightly supporting abortion while opposing barbaric practices such as “partial birth abortion,” demonstrate a slavery-like ambivalence indicating that, as with slavery at earlier points, the matter is not yet “ripe”: abortion is almost universally recognized as containing a negative moral component, acknowledged in our own laws by making late-term abortions illegal or restricted, but most Americans simply cannot imagine eradicating legal abortion from our society. We have all known men and women who have gotten someone pregnant or become pregnant, yet have no desire to have children. We also know that we may impregnate or become pregnant ourselves, and whatever we may think about abortion intellectually, we fear that we may become trapped into the responsibilities of parenthood.

Should such practical considerations carry us away from a morally required position? I think they deserve consideration. A society unwilling to move on a moral issue is not able to do so. The same must be said of slavery, however, and we are left in a tricky situation. Any society has certain rights over its members, typically including the right to take away life itself. Again, this has tricky implications for slavery and, say, unjust incarceration or execution. Partially as a consequence, I increasingly admire anti-abortion activists who travel the nation educating people about abortion, using the photographs and facts suppressed by the rest of the media. Like many dealing with slavery centuries ago, I am increasingly sympathetic with those taking a stand that I have until now not yet been willing to take. At the same time, I cannot agree that a zygote is a child. Life does not begin at conception any more than it does in the generation of sperm or the releasing of an egg. We must accept, though using our own grey matter, that morality is a grey matter. Killing a zygote may have no discernable ethical implication, so similar is it to a microbe, so easily is it flushed without notice from the female body. On the other hand, killing a child lately, shortly prior to birth, may register as 98% or so of the moral crime of killing a newborn.

This presents the greatest problem we have. No simple date, such as three months after conception, may easily be used in this matter: we cannot convincingly say that killing a fetus when doing so is morally, say, 50% the moral crime of killing a newborn is illegal, while when doing so is morally, say, 49% is not. This is akin to establishing a voting age or age of consent: however necessary it may seem, it is a gesture undermined by its arbitrary nature.

Several implications arise from our considerations of abortion. Serious consideration of any issue, like tracking the contours of a complex image or mathematical set, leads to potentially far-reaching implications, other positions that we must take for consistency’s sake if we adopt various positions regarding our topic at hand; tracking such implications is an important part of tracking the various positions one may responsibly take regarding a given subject. As the universe is implicit in a single atom, everything affects everything else in moral discussions as well.

First, we must gleam from this examination that morality is not absolute. We should know this already. No situation is 100% morally clear, without remainder. Even killing an intruder threatening one’s family in one’s house, however right, is still the taking of a life. One does not know, with certainty, whether that threatening intruder would kill or even hurt anyone, nor whether there was any other method of eliminating or reducing that risk. In that situation, killing the intruder may well be morally requisite, not simply responsible. And most situations, which we face each day, are less morally clear than this. In bombing or invading a foreign nation, even if that nation is Nazi Germany, we must acknowledge that, no matter how requisite the bombing or invasion, the people killed, particularly those who are innocent or not directly involved in the target’s actions, represent a moral remainder. The situation goes back at least to Aeschylus, whose chorus in Agamemnon recalls Agamemnon’s decision to kill his own daughter for the state, supposedly allowing through the gods the wind to commence and the massive assembled Argive fleet to sail -- not to mention alleviating the discord from the troops. Agamemnon weighed his stately obligation over his parental obligation, but no matter how admirable, though mixed with magical concerns, his decision, a moral remainder must be acknowledged. In other words, one can kill a fetus and believe it the right decision, but one must recognize the moral remainder of such a decision. Similarly, though perhaps to a lesser extent, one can choose not to abort a fetus and recognize the moral consequence of potentially undermining one’s own life and bringing a new life into undesirable circumstances. Abortion is uniquely a situation requiring this morally complex thinking, but the polemic of the abortion debate uniquely occludes such complex thought.

The most shocking implication of the examination of abortion as an issue is that killing must also be weighed on a sliding scale. I mean this: to avoid this, one must adopt a horribly severe notion of the absolute wrongness of killing. Essentially, we have avoided dealing with the sliding moral scale of killing by adopting a tenuous black-and-white notion in which all human murder is equally wrong. Even war and self-defense are ambiguous, however. Abortion begs the matter of, to state it humorously but effectively, abortion after the fact. That is to say, we kill deformed, retarded, and incestuous unborn children but do not see the same criteria as even requiring mandatory sterilization, let alone murder, after birth. A responsible view of abortion requires us to establish a sliding scale of murder as well. A young fetus may be killable as a potential human, a growing seed, but this leads us to contemplate very young children as sprouts. The same adage said after a miscarriage or in deciding upon abortion, "we can always have another baby," applies to the death of newborns as well. Indeed, the sliding scale of human worth would need to apply throughout any human life, not only based upon age but based upon abilities and other social values. Certainly, the killing of an educated adult represents a greater cultural investment and contributor than the killing of a newborn. If we allow abortion, or recognize a sliding scale of moral consequence that affects the unborn affects the born as well.

We might create a system of relative value for each citizen, imposing greater or stiffer penalties based upon the person killed. Such a system may grant greater or lesser voting rights, position in lines, or even prices. Of course, the population would never go for it, and such a proposal, however noble, is at least as impractical as ending abortion, though for different reasons.

Abortion, while a great issue of our time, is not imponderable. While difficult, reaching conclusions on the topic is not as impossible, even in a time of controversy on the topic, as one might suspect. Ultimately, however, the conclusions one reaches are themselves not necessarily comfortable, as they have important and far-ranging implications.

I'm not a crazy, or at least not playing one for this particular essay. I'm just trying to communicate where I've gotten on this subject, intellectual work I mostly haven't enjoyed. I'm just doing my job here; I've no desire to be part of this particular didactic polemic.

This is all I have to say on the matter.

YOUR WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT

This column is right on time. I'll still make up the seven columns that I missed in 2002.

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