Reject magical thinking on abortion

The three most important words in any real policy debate are: “Compared to what?” In this case, the point of comparison is the ultimate one: death. What we ask of women who become pregnant because of a rape or sexual abuse is horrifying. But sometimes we have to ask horrifying things of people who don’t deserve to be in the situation they are in: The young men who fought and died at Gettysburg and Normandy were not, for the most part, lifelong soldiers who had spent their boyhoods training for war and dreaming of it. The women who take a heroic attitude toward their undesired pregnancies in these situations deserve the deepest kind of admiration. But, in any case, we do not put children to death because their fathers were criminals.

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Spiers’s argument is that we should permit putting children to death in order to spare their mothers from any moral or emotional discomfort associated with relinquishing those children for adoption. This is stupendously childish (if you will forgive the word) way of looking at the world. Killing people in order to prevent their suffering and to relieve ourselves of any lingering feeling of discomfort regarding our moral duty toward them puts human beings on the moral level of ailing pets. You could make precisely the same argument for euthanizing the poor or the disabled (as some share of abortion advocates have done since the beginning of the euthanasia movement), which is why the superstition of the “magic moment” is so rhetorically and politically important for the pro-abortion set.

Without the magic thinking, we would have to think about the thing straight on. Stripped of the superstition and the rhetorical human shields, Spiers’s argument is that we should allow children to be put to death because, if they are born and adopted, then their mothers will experience regret, whereas if they are exterminated, we can all pretend that nothing ever really happened. There is no abortion-rights regime without that kind of brutality.

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