Due to laws being passed in Alabama and Georgia and the like that greatly curtail the legality of abortion, discussion of the general topic seems much more common in recent days. Listening to NPR today, there was a piece on the debate on when human life begins, largely focusing on various religious views on the subject. My own views are pretty straightforward and are not religion based: human life begins at conception. Why? Because:
1) It’s obviously alive. Sperm is alive, egg is alive… fertilized egg is alive. At no point in the process is it non-alive, unless it has died.
2) Obviously it’s human. What, is it a Komodo dragon?
That said, the point at which a living human fertilized egg becomes something to give a damn about is a much trickier question. For those who believe that give-a-damn begins at conception… well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer. Others believe that *birth* is when human rights are magically bestowed upon what had previously been a simple expendable mass of tissue. This is much less sensible, because a fetus can be removed from the womb prior to birth and can survive.
My own view: I dunno. You terminate (for no medically necessary reason) a baby that’s seconds from birth… that to me is murder. But you take a Day After pill and the undifferentiated blastocyst gets flushed from the system… meh. But somewhere in between, things get fuzzy.
The pro life people almost invariably come at this from a religious angle, and that is a good way to irritate me. But their hardline view on “at conception” is consistent and a position worthy of respect. The pro abortion people, however, come at this from a non-religious position, which yo would *hope* means a scientific one. But it almost never is. Instead, it’s usually internally inconsistent and sometimes downright terrifying.
On the one hand, they tell us that this is all about “womens health” or “womens rights,” because the fetus is little more than a parasite which is threatening or even merely inconveniencing the mother. Yeah, ok, but… she remains inconvenienced *after* birth. The “parasite” remains every bit as dependent upon human assistance for the basic of life after birth as before. Even so, you can’t just toss a baby in the trash. Nor can someone wander through a neonatal unit and stab all the preemies and not get charged with something rather substantial. Not just the legal system, but actual humans look down on infanticide. Even if the infants not only weren’t actually born, but were not even due to be born for several months yet.
For a legal system to be a *good* legal system, it has to treat people consistently. What’s “murder” for one person is “murder” for another, if the circumstances are the same. But with the unborn, it’s different. If someone attacks a pregnant woman and intentionally assaults her unborn child with the intention of killing it, that’s murder or attempted murder. But if the mother gets an abortion… it’s not murder. And this disturbs the bejesus out of me: someone can decide that what is recognized as a human *isn’t* a human, and the legal system accepts that. I’m cool with the legal system accepting Person A intentionally killing Person B if it’s a matter of self defense or defense of another, but at no point does the legal system decide that it was ok for A to kill B because B wasn’t a human and did not deserve human rights.
The new laws that have been passed basically make abortion illegal except in the case of the mothers life being in medical risk due to the pregnancy. The people I’ve heard argue against these laws have often used a very similar argument… that these new laws will ban the “great majority” of abortions, thus openly accepting that abortions are not about the life of the mother, but because she simply wants it done. For those people who truly believe that even the smallest blastocyst is a human life worthy of protecting, the knowledge that some people can rather nonchalantly chose to murder their babies in the interest of convenience must be maddening.
The NPR piece ends with this:
“… they don’t see it as just property, and they don’t see it as fully human, but somewhere in between.”
Cuz, yeah, declaring someone to be somewhere between human and property… gosh, when has *that* ever been a bad thing?
I’ve posted much this sort of rambling incoherent post before, largely because the subject keeps coming up and keeps not being resolved. Seems to me that science can provide some solutions:
1) A modernized Norplant that not only can be easily implanted, it’s *mandatory.* It could be mandatory for all women who:
A) Are on government assistance, in jail, on parole, in the country illegally, etc.
B) Are over the age of 13 (or whatever) and have not yet passed Motherhood 101 and received their Parenting License. Sure, the idea of the government licensing people to be able to have babies is a fairly terrifying thought, but they want to license other Constitutional rights, so why not?
2) Perfect the artificial womb, and come up with a way to extract a fetus from a womb and implant it within the robo-womb. The procedure would have to be on par with an abortion in terms of safety and time consumed, but that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. I’m sure Bubbles Cortez would be perfectly happy to let the Green New Deal wait on hold while the resources for it are devoted to this project. Once the baby is extracted and implanted in the artificial uterus, adoption can begin. Fetuses that are sufficiently early on that they can be safely frozen can be put into long term storage for the day we need easily transported workers for the Off World Colonies, or for after some horrifying plague rubs out a large fraction of the population.