Coming To Terms With Abortion

posted at 1:10 am on May 31, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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With a Supreme Court vacancy, and a nomination battle under way, one of the most painful topics in American culture is once again in the spotlight: abortion. Looming at the intersection of individual liberty and the nation’s moral conscience, turning upon questions that mark the boundary between science and faith, heated in the crucible of a tyrannical exercise of raw judicial power made in the name of freedom, the abortion debate is a bleeding wound the American political system will never allow to heal. I’ve mentioned it in passing, during my brief time writing for the Green Room… but, like everyone else who makes a serious attempt to study and comment upon American life, I realized I needed to address it directly, and fully.

I’ve never been personally involved in the decision to abort a child. Most people haven’t, since there are roughly 1.2 million of the procedures performed each year, and over 300 million people live in the United States. Like many people of my generation, I also don’t have any children – there are only about 4 million live births in the United States each year. Compare 1.2 million abortions to 4 million live births annually, and you can see the dimensions of the abortion question. Compare either of those totals to the overall population, and you can see that quite a few of the people passionately assuming the pro-life or pro-choice stances don’t have any direct personal experience in the matter… a point I’ll return to in a moment.

My first experience with public debate was a speech class I took in college, during which I was assigned the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. I gave a very good speech, and was almost unanimously held to have crushed my debating opponent. I thought it was entirely a question of “a woman’s right to choose,” a decision in which no one but the woman had any legitimate influence. I was eighteen years old at the time.

Over the years, I came to realize that on the subject of abortion, half of America is eighteen years old.

It takes a certain maturity to understand that, in the vast majority of those 1.2 million annual abortions, the woman was not forced to conceive the child she’s choosing to eliminate. She had choices to make long before she headed for the abortion clinic. When the consequence of those choices became a viable human child, the issue became one of responsibility, more than choice. I understood that completely, on the day when I first held my infant niece. Maybe you have to hold a baby to understand it. Not enough of us get to hold babies, these days.

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans have come to consider themselves “pro-life,” but this is a matter of degree. You can add the poll numbers up a different way, and conclude that over sixty percent of Americans favor keeping abortion legal in some form or another. I don’t believe we would ever arrive at a national consensus that it should be eliminated completely. Speaking for myself, I always felt it should be available in the cases of rape, where the woman was made pregnant against her will; incest, where the woman was either forced to conceive, or is by definition mentally and emotionally incapable of being a mother, especially to a child all but guaranteed to have severe genetic defects; and the life of the mother. I would be awed and humbled to stand in the presence of a woman who insisted on carrying her child to term, even knowing it would probably cost her life, but I can’t agree that she should be compelled to do so. The conflicting opinions of the American people on the topic of abortion come, in part, from the difference between medically necessary, extreme cases, and the far greater number of abortions performed for the convenience of the mother – or the father. You can’t come up with a solid majority for outlawing abortion entirely, but a lot of people are growing uncomfortable with abortion on demand.

Much of the soft support for abortion comes from the essential immaturity of the electorate, who follow the path of least resistance when discussing an issue they’d rather not think about, and which probably doesn’t affect them personally. Abortion is part of a culture that works to prolong the adolescence of men and women until well into their forties. Having a baby is such a drag. It forces people to grow up and take responsibility for their actions. It compels carefree and hedonistic couples to confront the massive reality of their obligations to each other, and the life they have created. For many young mothers and would-be fathers, abortion is not a procedure designed to remove an unwanted fetus – it’s a procedure to restore a life of casual sex and self-indulgence, which went up in smoke when that home pregnancy test kit turned the wrong color. Young men who have never been involved in conception or abortion themselves find it easy to dismiss the entire issue by talking about “a woman’s right to choose,” which simultaneously allows them to sound enlightened, particularly in the campus environment many of them inhabit… and lets them off the hook for doing any serious thinking, or defending a morally serious but difficult position. When you force those young men to confront the question of whether elective abortions are wrong – rather than asking who should make the final decision about having one – the poll numbers shift. Saying you’re “pro-choice” is the quick and easy way for teenagers, of all ages, to sound fashionably liberal and dodge the more telling question, which is: what would you choose?

Of course, the abortion debate is horrendously deformed by Roe vs. Wade, an exercise of raw judicial power that short-circuited the national discussion, and left the pro-life side feeling marginalized and helpless. The absolute supremacy of “the right to privacy” inescapably reduces the value of life, for no one would argue that someone’s right to privacy allows them to murder a six-year old in the seclusion of their own home. Since no one would argue that privacy trumps life, the target of absolutely legalized abortion must not be alive. Further, Roe asserted that privacy trumps the potential of life, and since it does not exclusively address abortions directed at forced or life-threatening pregnancies, it ultimately asserts that convenience trumps the potential of life. The mother’s right to be free of the consequences of her actions takes absolutely priority over whatever the child would have done with his or her life. The consequences that flow from this judicial assertion, and the cultural influence of the immensely wealthy nationwide abortion industry it enabled, are profound and deep. Life, sex, and death are the only social forces more powerful than money. We are quick to denounce the unquenchable thirst for money as “greed,” but silent in the face of a reckless hunger for sex and death.

In the Sixties, it became fashionable for people to say it’s wrong to bring children into the terrible, spoiled world we inhabit. Those who oppose abortion on demand often say that each terminated pregnancy might have resulted in the next Michaelangelo, George Washington, or Jesus. The difference between those viewpoints is defined by faith in the possibility of excellence, and redemption, in each human life. One of the reasons I was eventually ready to identify myself as “pro-life” is that I think the world is better with more people in it. It’s not that any newborn child might be the savior of mankind… it’s that all of them are. If you think the world stinks, do something to make it better, and bring children into the world to help you. The good guys need reinforcements. The paralyzing fear of a dark future is a despicable, cowardly reason to deny the next generation their shot at making it brighter.

If we had the maturity, as a nation, to accept the burden of weighing freedom of choice against the right to life, we would strike down Roe vs. Wade and return the decision to the states. I have no doubt that many – perhaps even most – states would vote to keep abortion legal, many more would take action to restrict the availability of elective abortions, and a few would vote to outlaw the procedure completely. The people who passionately believe that abortion is murder would be free to move to states that have declared it illegal, where they would not be forced to watch as their tax money is used to support something they consider obscene. The people who desperately desire an abortion, and believe they have the right to make that choice, would face nothing worse than the inconvenience of traveling to a state where they can have the procedure. We are better off having a robust argument about abortion, than being mired in a bitter, vindictive squabble about whether we’re allowed to argue.

Once upon a time, when I was an eighteen-year-old student, I made a young lady cry because she thought her faith in the sanctity of life was no match for my debating skills. Now it’s twenty-five years later, and I can only hope that somehow, she reads this and realizes she won that debate, after all. Too many people who call themselves “pro-choice” view their objective as scoring victories against sanctimonious pro-lifers, and savoring their tears. The true losers in this debate did their weeping in private, after they realized something can be perfectly legal but horribly wrong… and sought to reverse a “mistake” that might have grown into someone beautiful, only to discover their second judgment was final, and would never grow into anyone at all.

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