Two ‘Rights’ Are Coming Out All Wrong
I am a very lucky woman. I’ve never been faced with a pregnancy conceived by force, or one fated for serious illness. I’ve only had to “think” about having an abortion.
Once when I was younger, I feared I was pregnant and knew I wasn’t ready for a baby. I blithely assumed that abortion would be the best way out. Luckily, it wasn’t necessary.
Then, six years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its “Webster” decision permitting states more leeway in restricting access to abortions, I thought about abortion in different circumstances. I was a member of the editorial board in another capacity, and unknown to my colleagues, delighted to be in the early stages of a third pregnancy.
As the board debated the decision and argued about when life begins, I recall thinking privately that the life inside of me had not yet begun. He/she was developing, yes, but would not be truly alive and independent, would not be a whole person, until the birth.
I know now that this kind of talk drives pro-life people crazy. And I don’t blame them. For my two examples illustrate how those in the abortion-rights camp may be viewed: as advocating just another medical procedure, divorced from responsibility or consequence, reflecting the women’s nonchalance about what is growing inside her.
You see, I am also lucky to be in a job that educates. Ever since I wrote a column a month ago in which I professed to be searching for a middle ground in the national abortion debate, lots of folks have tried to educate me.
Some have criticized my thinking for being hopelessly hypocritical. (How can you be against the death penalty and for abortion?) Some insinuated I was just plain hopeless.
But in letters and conversations, other readers have genuinely sought to take up the challenge and seek to explain what, from their viewpoint, was missing from my argument.
Putting it simply: the child.
The Rev. John W. Gouldrick of Philadelphia wrote in a letter published a few weeks ago that my attempt to find common ground will never go anywhere because I failed “to admit to the driving force behind the anti-abortion movement: the value and worth of the unborn child.” It was, he said, “like addressing an audience with your eyes raised to the ceiling. Lots of words get spoken, but no contact is made.”
In as elegant and justified a criticism as I’ve received, Rev. Gouldrick helped me understand why the two sides in the public debate on abortion persist in talking past each other. Those who call themselves pro-choice assume only the woman’s perspective; pro-lifers, only the child’s.
It is woman and fetus vs. mother and child - as if two blind men were separately describing an elephant.
An example: With newly educated eyes, I read the latest press release from the Clara Bell Duvall Education Fund, established to educate medical students to “appreciate that abortion is a routine part of reproductive health care.”
I agree that abortion is a legal medical procedure sometimes necessary to save a women’s physical or emotional life. Yet I can imagine how one could read those words and deduce: Abortion is portrayed here as no more significant than a tooth extraction.
No woman I know who’s terminated a pregnancy treated it as if it were a toothache, but rarely is that acknowledged in the public rhetoric of either the pro-choice or pro-life movement. So afraid of losing legislative ground, the lobbyists and zealots prove that fear often deprives us of honest conversation.
This nation needs that conversation as desperately as ever, not only because the current political atmosphere breeds extremism, but because a rapidly changing medical world is challenging our assumptions.
Who can say now when life begins? Before ultrasounds and high-tech equipment, the answer was far simpler. The fetus either was considered a human from the time of conception, or from the moment she was born and able to breathe, cry and kick on her own.
And now? Modern medicine provides a window into the womb, and through it we see a fetus that is both parasite and person, prompting technical, ethical and moral questions of viability. How early in pre-natal development can a baby live outside the womb? With machines? With what quality of life?
Who gets to decide?
In grappling with these perplexing questions, I think the model of “Roe v. Wade” provides a guidepost, in its assumption that woman and fetus, mother and child, have competing rights. Pro-lifers say that an unborn child, a fetus, has a right to be born. Pro-choicers say that a woman has a right not necessarily to be irresponsible or selfish, but to chose when and whether to have a child, knowing that a pregnancy can be forced, dangerous or yes, even horribly inconvenient.
“Roe” works like a sliding scale. The woman’s right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy dominates when that pregnancy is young and the fetus unable to survive alone. As the fetus develops and viability grows, the woman’s right to terminate recedes.
I realize that this model is somewhat arbitrary. Who can say for certain that a 12-week-old fetus is this, a 22-week-old fetus is that? Those who consider the categories absurd can fall back to the simpler, cleaner definition - conception or delivery.
I, for one, cannot. There “is” a distinction between a pregnancy at the first trimester, the second and third - and it’s not just the nausea. What’s growing inside moves and strengthens over time, acquires unique characteristics, gradually approaching his or her potential but never realizing it until birth.
This is why I can support the right to an abortion but oppose state-sanctioned death in capital punishment. I simply don’t believe that a first trimester abortion is the taking of actualized human life.
But as I said before, I am lucky. I haven’t had to counsel a rape victim or a woman told that a pregnancy could be fatal; nor have I guided a mother who chose to relinquish her child for adoption.
I know there are principled people on both sides of this debate who do not hate or kill or wish to destroy life, and I think they need to hire a translator and talk to each other. Meanwhile, those who lobby for either woman or child must understand that no one has a lock on the truth.
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