I overheard an argument a few days ago (the monday after Roe was overturned) that I’ve heard many times before, but hadn’t thought too much about.

In the debate over abortion, the argument was made that those who oppose abortion probably have no intention of helping the mother who would want to abort the baby.

I’ve heard this before, and considered it a non-sequitur. Today I was thinking a little more about it.

The basic idea, as I’ve understood it, is that a mother wanting to abort a child obviously doesn’t want the child. I think the argument concludes that the basic reason would be she is unable to support the child financially. It could also be for other reasons: perhaps she considers raising a child to be something she just doesn’t want, or isn’t ready for… or it would be in the way of her career, etc., but it seems inherent in argument at hand that the issue is the probably poverty of the child, if allowed to live.

Now I really, at least I hope, understand as much as possible what the arguments are in favor of abortion.

There is no escaping the fact that the ramifications of an unwanted pregnancy will fall heavily on the woman. That biological reality simply can’t be escaped. I have heard some complain that if men were on the hook as much as women, then they’d be in favor of abortion more too. I actually would support a mandatory ‘shackling’ of men to the children they father. Use paternity tests and hold the father’s accountable, at least financially. But I also have to acknowledge that the kind of man that would skip out on a woman after impregnating her will probably not be any better at upholding his end of the care either. So, given that unwanted pregnancies do happen, why should the women be left with all the consequences? I don’t think they should, but the reality is, they would.  

I get that the consequences of a deceptive or silly or drunken hookup are indeed, VERY serious. After all, giving life to a human ought to be the product of love and commitment. Herein lies part of the problem: the idea today, promoted in large part by feminists, is one that has told women that they too can take part in the kind of sex that men enjoy, and that would bring real equality. 50 years later, I’m pretty sure that’s not true. It seems like many women don’t enjoy meaningless hookups as much as the men, and for good anthropological reasons. But they are also kind of counter-intuitive if one take the typical feminist approach. According to this, marriage is a patriarchal construct meant to hold women down. Of course, there is also the belief that men are all rapey and toxic…. which makes one wonder how rapey types decided on marriage as the way to keep women down…. It seems pretty obvious that marriage is the best arrangement for both men and women, AND….. this is super important… the children that will be gotten. Marriage is a societal agreement that sanctifies the long-term bond between man and woman, but is also instituted to keep them together for the good of the offspring they raise, precisely so that the dude doesn’t take off and leave his kids without provision. This of course has happened for a long time, but the basic intent is to foster long-term pair bonding, FOR the health of the children. Take away the children, and the institution makes less sense… it’s not senseLESS, but the point is for raising families.

So when a women finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, I can totally get why she would want the option to escape those consequences. This would perhaps lead to the first rebuttal point in regards to the argument above:  

1) The pro-choice position is that abortion is wrong because its killing an innocent life

The non-sequitur is that it is irrelevant to the argument for not aborting, which is that it is a human life. The pro-life side thinks it’s wrong to kill an innocent life. Killing an innocent life isn’t rendered ok because the life is unwanted.  

This maybe leads to the second objection that many on the pro-choice side have: a fetus isn’t a baby. So terminating the pregnancy isn’t murder.  

This of course gets harder to defend the longer the fetus is in gestation. We end up with some magic thinking that converts the non-human into a human the moments it exits the woman’s body. Coming from the Biblical perspective, there are several verses that talk about life being known while the person was still in the womb, so most christians work from that perspective, and grant that the unborn baby is still a baby… a life… and therefore worth not killing.

From the pro-choice side, as long as abortion is safe, legal, rare, and…. early enough, it looks less like terminating a pregnancy is taking a life. I can certainly understand that in the case of an unwanted pregnancy, ending the pregnancy as early as possible, will perhaps give one more peace of mind that it wasn’t really a life… yet. In working backwards from exiting the birth canal to conception, certainly those first few days won’t look much like a life, and it you don’t get too philosophical about it, it may come across as perfectly reasonable to terminate it. I’m not sure I would feel too much consternation over an unwanted pregnancy being ended when it was only days in. Of course most women don’t know about a pregnancy until they’ve missed a period, so they are unlikely to catch it so early. I won’t weigh in on whether I think it’s right, but I can at least understand terminating earlier than later.

Enter the “Shout your abortion” crowd. This kind of thinking is really off-putting for a lot of people. No one ought to be joyfully terminating a life, and the idea of killing a life up until it exits the woman’s body is reprehensible. But I believe that, unable to really combat the philosophical argument about the fetus being a human life, some have just decided: Screw it! Sure it’s a human life, but I don’t care, it’s violating my right over my body so it’s ok to kill it.

I’m going to just leave that alone and let them hang themselves with their own proclamations. Such views don’t need to be condemned, they condemn themselves.

From my perspective, I believe it’s a human life, but I can get why, as long as it’s early enough, that fact will carry less weight.

The classic objection to pro-life absolutists are: what about in the cases of rape or danger to the life of the mother?

I know there are plenty of stories of people out there living their lives, and they were those cases. They were children born out of rape, or perhaps the mother died. The absolutist would say that it really doesn’t matter, because innocent life is still innocent life and it would be wrong to take it.

In the case of a mom OR baby when only one gets out alive… I personally would give the preference to the mom. I would never sacrifice my wife for the baby. That’s me, I know others would disagree.

In the case of rape… I too would allow it. This isn’t a case of bad judgment on the young woman’s part, she is being made to bear the consequences of someone else’s decision. So I wouldn’t condemn her for wanting to end the pregnancy.

But returning to the original objection- those who oppose abortion probably have no intention of helping the mother who would want to abort the baby:

2) Death is better than poverty

One further discussion I’ve heard centers around the idea of, let’s say- the probability that the child will grow up in poverty. If I’ve understood the underlying argument, it’s that aborting the baby is ok because otherwise it will grow up to be poor. That would seem on its face to say that death is better than poverty. Of course, saying it out loud like THAT ought to throw up red flags, since it’s unlikely most people would think that it’s ok to kill poor people simply because they’re poor. If that were the case, then what other societal groups would be ok to kill? Disabled? Old people? Certainly the homeless would be prime candidates to get rid of under that thinking…  

3) Who is responsible for actions?

But this underlying idea that the pro-life person needs to be responsible for the life of the child if they don’t want it killed struck me as odd. I don’t think that follows either. The couple who gets pregnant, even if they didn’t want to, is still the responsible party. Is it my responsibility to ensure that those who would be forced to suffer the consequences of their actions, don’t? No one else is responsible for alleviating the consequences of your actions.

Pushback: if you cut off the option for abortion, which would be my avenue for alleviating it myself, then yeah, you are.  

I thought here of transferring the logic to another scenario. For example, imagine I owed a lot of money, and that debt hanging over me will hamper me for a long time to come. One way of alleviating that would be to knock off a liquor store. But the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t mean that since that avenue for alleviating my indebtedness is closed, the responsibility transfer to someone else.  

This is of course preposterous.  

These are some of the thoughts I have rattling around in my head for a while. I’m sure I’ve missed some angles, but that’s where I am at the moment.