Abortion

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“One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.”
~ Napoléon Bonaparte

I am opposed to abortions. However, like John Kerry, I am also against forcing other people to go along with my "religious" beliefs. To me the choice is not between abortion and no abortion. It is between legal abortion and illegal abortion. The lives destroyed by illegal abortion probably outweigh the lives destroyed by legal abortion. The only way out of this loggerhead is perfect contraception, to make abortion all but irrelevant.

Introduction

Synopsis

What we North Americans disagree on is how quickly those rights should be acquired. Some say at conception. Some say at birth. Some say at quickening. Some say gradually, proportional to development, weight, number of cells etc.

The problem is when and how do you assign human rights? Clearly 0 for separate sperm and egg, and full legal protection from murder after birth. But what about the period in between? I think they should be assigned gradually, in proportion to mass, but I recognise that is arbitrary, and many would insist on all or nothing. There are lots of plausible ways to do it.

The question can’t be answered by science. It is a social or legal question, similar to, but more serious than, at what age should you acquire the right to drive, leave home, give consent to sex, enter into contracts or vote.

There is no way to satisfy everyone. Since most people decide the abortion issue on purely religious grounds, there is no hope of compromise or logic persuading others.

I see only one way out, and unfortunately most Christians want to block this solution, namely perfected birth control. The only solution to the abortion conflict is to make abortion all but unnecessary.

Pro Life Position

The Catholic Church teaches that life begins at conception.

Yet both the egg and sperm are already alive. New life is not spontaneously generated at conception. All that happens is a new DNA combination comes into being. Both parts of it were alive to start.

The Bible has nothing to say on the matter of the joining of egg and sperm since its authors believed the male fertilised the female much as a farmer fertilizes and seeds a field. They had no knowledge of the role of the egg, or of the joining or sperm and egg which is the big controversy now. Traditionally, the church took the beginning of life to be quickening — when the baby could be first felt in the womb kicking.

Some Pro-Lifers feel so strongly about their view that they are willing to adopt vigilante justice and bomb abortion clinics killing patients, fetuses and doctors. Oddly these same people have no opinion about the murders going on in Iraq done in their name. It is only the murder of fetuses that matter. They seem to suffer from moral inconsistency.

Pro Choice Position

Clearly it is murder to kill a newborn child. Nearly all Pro-Choicers would consider it murder to kill a child in the process of birth. Many would consider it murder to kill a child that could have survived had it been given a C-Section and modern medical care.

Then there is a that big gray area is between. It is less desirable to kill a child at 6 months term than 1 second after fertilization. If abortion is to be done, it should be done as soon as possible. But how can one be perfectly ok, and the other murder? How can you logically have a sharp dividing line on a continuous process? The only logical place for a sharp line is conception, but even that is arbitrary in the total development cycle.

Pro-Lifers often like to characterise Pro-Choice as Pro-Abortion. This is not necessarily so. A Pro-Choicer may abhor abortion, and refrain from it under almost all circumstances, but feels he or she has no right to tell others how to deal with this morally ambiguous decision.

Pro-Lifers make no bones that their stand on abortion is determined not by logic, science or reason. It is based on faith. They think this gives them the right to impose their purely religious beliefs on others. Law has to be based on reason, even if is energised by religion-based morality. A purely religious argument rightly has no place in law, though of course people are free to lobby for whatever laws they want motivated by whatever religious beliefs charge them.

There were periods in US and Canadian history when abortions were illegal. The problem is it did almost nothing to stop abortions. It just pushed them underground. Instead of just the fetus dying, often both mother and fetus died from abortions performed is septic conditions by amateurs. Some Pro-Lifers rejoice in this, and want to return to these days when the punishment for terminating a pregnancy was a hideously painful death.

It is a balance, the additional adult lives lost from illegal abortions vs the fetal lives lost from legal abortion. It is hard to get objective statistics on the matter, especially when abortion is illegal, since doctors are not likely to honestly report the mayhem of an illegal abortion caused by a criminal activity. The social stigma is too great, even when it causes death.

Children who are unwanted live a hell undreampt of by those who grew up in loving families. Every child should have the right to be born into a natural or adopted family who wants and loves them. If we force women to carry children to term who don’t want them, we must protect those children from abuse from those mothers.

It seems so often the Pro-Lifers only care about the fetus until it is born, then suddenly lose interest in his or her welfare. Two thirds of women who have an abortion site the reason — the inability to afford a child. Women can’t raise kids without jobs or income. If you are seriously pro-life, you have to see to it mothers have access to the resources to raise kids. Yet usually pro-lifers are Republican who actively campaign to let the jobless starve to death and to let industry lay off at will.

The Standoff

Science

The conception of a human might be likened to the merger of two companies. Both companies are “alive” both before and after the moment of merger. The same people are involved. The same office buildings. There is no interruption in the flow of activity. Yet something novel emerges and the old separate identities pass away though it takes a while to see anything much different.

So all science can tell us is that the abortion issue is not a scientific question. Life does not begin. It is a continuos process. All that begins is a new DNA pattern.

Compromise

1. improved birth control. With sufficiently good birth control, there should almost never be any need for abortion. Unfortunately the Pro-Lifers tend also to oppose birth control. Ironically they want to increase the demand for abortion. Similarly they often oppose sex education that teaches young people how to avoid pregnancy and disease. Statistics show that sex education delays the onset of active sex life. Pro-Lifers don’t care. They only care what they believe in their guts will happen, foolishly encouraging disease and unwanted pregnancy.
2. Banning third term abortions (in the last 13 weeks). The Pro-Lifers use a misleading term partial birth abortion which implies butchering a baby as it is being delivered. It merely means a abortion 13 weeks or later. A full term is 9 months or 39 weeks.
3. Banning abortions if the baby could have survived outside the womb if born by C-section. Gradually science will push this date back and back. Presumably there will be corresponding improvements to birth control. Eventually we will end up with all abortions banned, and perfect contraception so no baby will be conceived who was not at least wanted at the time.

6 weeks	2nd trimester	3rd trimester

When Does Life Start

What are the reasons every coupling does not result in a baby?

1. Conception fails to occur. The sperm does not get to the egg.
2. The egg fails to implant on the uterine wall.
3. The egg is genetically defective and fails to develop.

For chickens, we have a different answer. Life starts when the egg hatches, equivalent to birth. Very few people think of themselves as eaters of live chickens who eat eggs.

Life Begins Gradually

Personally, given nothing better to go on, I would interpolate linearly, drawing straight line, so that killing a fetus at the half way point, at 4.5 months should count as a crime 50% a serious as killing a newborn. Here is how you might graph my position. Months of pregnancy term run along the bottom as the x-axis. Percentage of severity of a murder runs along the left on the y-axis.

Pope Razinger considers any form of pregnancy termination at any stage as murder. You could graph his position like this:

A typical pro-choice civil libertarian advocate might have a graph like this:

There are an infinite number of ways of filling in the intermediates. People will never agree on how serious killing various ages of the unborn is because it is arbitrary and determined mostly by infinitely stubborn, irrational, arbitrary religious belief. There is no way rational argument will ever solve this. The only way out of this logjam that I can think of is to make abortion obsolete by developing near perfect birth control. The big problem with that solution is most religious people are also opposed to any form of birth control. Their religions evolved in times quite different from today. Today overpopulation threatens us far more than lack of fertility.

Hidden Agendas

• The person who kills mothers (and their unborn) who visit abortion clinics. Why are these bombers so concerned about murder via abortion and so unconcerned about war, pestilence, disease, famine…? Here is a guy motivate primarily by anger at people who disagree with him. He is not motivated by a desire to save lives; he wants to punish.
• The politician who is mostly worried his daughter’s unplanned pregnancy or an exposed illegal abortion would ruin his career.
• The sterile couple desperate for a baby.
• Someone who grew up Catholic and is very concerned about fitting in with the rest of the congregation.
• A scientist who studies population growth.
• A priest worrying about declining church attendance and wants his flock to have plenty of babies to keep the church (and the donations) going.
• A Puritan who wants people punished as much as possible for having sex.
• A person who grew up unwanted in the care of abusive parents.
• A young man without a job who likes sex, but in no way is ready to raise a family.
• Someone carrying a serious genetic defect.
• Someone who was just raped, and knows they can never love the child conceived during the rape. She knows she hates the rapist so much that she will not be able to stop herself from subtly tormenting the child to punish his father.
• Somebody who fetuses remind her of puppies.
• Somebody who fetuses remind him of alien maggots.
• A US soldier in Iraq who kills pregnant women and babies by the score, but opposes abortion back home.

Deciding how to treat abortion is not all that different from deciding how kind you should be to livestock. Most people feel no guilt at all about literally torturing chickens to produce eggs. If it is inconvenient to be kind, most humans can’t be bothered. If it is convenient, they are happy to be. So it seems to me the way out of the abortion controversy is to make it as convenient as possible to be kind to fetuses, namely fool-proof birth control, smoothing the way for all unwanted babies to discreetly find loving homes, universal health care for fetuses, whether the mother can afford it or not and pre-pregnancy screening for genetic defects.

Conclusion

• Pro-Lifers give on opposing birth control and sex education.
• Pro-Choicers give on allowing last trimester abortions.

An anti-abortion group OptionsBC.com even went so far as to place TV ads lying to the public by suggesting it would be safer to take a fetus to term than to have an abortion. I filed complaints with the TV station, the CRTC and the Advertising Standards Council. They responded with smarmy dissembling pretending they did not understand my objection. This issue brings out the worst in people. They get so morally indignant they feel justified in all manner of cheating, twisting, lying and even murdering.

You would think those who dislike abortion would seek a practical solution to actually reduce it — namely near perfect contraception. But ironically, those who claim to be most opposed to abortion, block the only practical solution.

“Any woman who does not give birth to as many children as she is capable is guilty of murder.”
~ St. Augustine

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