So long as the abortion debate is based on religious dogma we will never come to a resolution. Right now and for the last thirty years it has been dominated by Roman Catholic dogma related to conception. The Catholic position is that the soul begins at conception and that there is a divine command to procreate. This is why when Catholics have been able to influence the laws of the community; they have passed laws outlawing all forms of birth control. [For those Baptists, Bible Church members and other Protestants who see no moral problem with birth control, you need to be aware that the outlawing of abortion is but step One in taking this country back to the days, like in Boston as recently as the 1950,’s when it was a felony to sell condoms or instruct women in birth control.]
The mantra that life begins at conception is a distortion of the Catholic dogma of the soul beginning at conception. Life, as we know began billions of year ago and every living thing is but a continuation of that life, albeit in a very unique sense, as each of us is unique. But when we die, life is not destroyed, only one manifestation of life. So what science teaches is that at conception there is a joining to two streams of life, the male and female, to form a unique person and then at death that unique person ceases to exist. Faith might go further to explain how that person has a soul and the destiny of that soul but that’s not science speaking; that is faith.
So are we to say that what we have now in the abortion debate is essentially an irresolvable conflict between science and faith? Well, not really. There are a couple of dark corners that the anti-abortion group does not want to explore. Let’s assume that at conception a person – not a fetus with indefinite civil and legal right – is created, a person who has every right to expect the state to protect its life surely as any one of us expects to have police protection and a military to protect us from those who would do us harm. Isn’t that what the anti-abortion folks want to happen, that the state has a legal obligation to defend the life of that person in that woman’s womb from an abortionist.
If that is indeed the case, then it raises two questions: 1. Is the state also obligated to make sure that there is pre-natal care so that this person has the best chance of living a productive life, and 2. When is the state relieved of its obligation to defend this life against threats to its life? Let’s look at these two questions in a little more detail.
- Two of the major causes of premature births, retardation and infant mortality are maternal malnutrition and drug addiction. Surely, no one would suggest that a parent has fulfilled its duty to a child if it is denied, in those first nine months, a healthy intrauterine existence. There is conclusive medical evidence that those first nine months of our life is critical to cognitive development and life-long health. So, the question to the champions of the no-abortion society; is this: what are you willing to do to make sure that this new person, who you are saving from the abortionist’s suction tube, will be best prepared to enter into the world at birth as a healthy baby?
- The anti-abortion advocates pull at our heartstrings when they talk about their "defending the most defenseless in our society." And, surely, they are right, but how much "defense" can a new-born exert? When is this new creation...the uniquely new person...able to defend itself? Or put another way, if our legal obligation to that child is based on the Constitution’s mandate to "provide for the General Welfare," when will the state be relieved of its obligation? At what age can the state say, "We have brought you this far, young man, you are on your own from here on out?" Is it at three...at six...at ten? When is the cut-off date? This is not a philosophical discussion, because it is not unusual for children to be killed or abused in infancy. Post-partum depression is a common experience and all too often results in the death of an infant through either neglect or physical abuse and child abuse is not uncommon either.
So where does this get us? So long as the abortion issue can be kept on the faith level, this issue can be kept on the top burner, so to speak, and allowed to continue to be a source of division and conflict within our community, which is precisely where some well-intended people want it to remain. If, however, the issue is moved in a discussion of social responsibility, that is, of what obligation the state has to ALL of us from conception to death, we might find some more creative options than just beating each other over the head with posters and banners.
This holds promise because for all the screams that abortion is murder, there has been no serious effort on the part of even the most fervent anti-abortionist, to make abortion a capital offense. Nobody wants to send a young mother to jail for 25 to life for conspiring with a doctor to kill her baby. Nobody is willing to send a couple to jail because they took their 14-year old to get an abortion, and if they are not willing to imprison the parties that initiated the action, what principle of law or morality would suggest that the abortionist should be tried for murder? This is a dead-end street.
The other dead-end street is when the talk turns to exceptions. Some in the Pro-life community have no problem asking a woman to carry to term the child of a rapist or a young girl the child of her father, brother or uncle. Yet there are others who make this an exception. How, I don’t understand. The fetus is not guilty of rape or incest. This is totally irrational. One suspects, however, that what is surfacing here is the sanctity of "every single life" being trumped by the social stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births especially if that child is of mixed race...a serious social taboo.
But, back to the main theme of this article, I suspect the reason this aspect of the abortion debate has not occurred to the anti-abortion faction is because they ally themselves with the conservative political community that tends to think more in market economy terms than in mutual civic responsibility terms. After all, if you take seriously this idea of the state owing a person, even one still in the womb, certain rights other than not being killed by an abortionist, you end up talking about need not ability to pay as the way we determine how we distribute goods and services in America. We have, as the old retort to the preacher who calls into question cherished social norms; "You have stopped preaching and gone to meddling?"
Let’s be honest here, with a little shaving off the edges, the American system of distribution is simple: if you can afford to buy the necessities of life, you can live; if, however, you are so unfortunate as to not have the money to buy food, clothes and shelter, - or a family or friend to do it for you - you will die. The conservative faction has fought all ideas of mutual care – "providing for the General Welfare" – in the distribution of goods and services on the basis of need alone.
That is socialism or communism to them, anathema to market economists, and our political history is replete with instances in which they have fought against programs that take seriously the scourge of poverty. In fact, at the heart of the present debate on healthcare reform is really a discussion of how we can fix the market for healthcare that has made healthcare too expensive for all of us, not just those at the bottom of the income ladder. Will healthcare be made a right, along with the right to speak, assemble and petition the government, or will it remain simply another commodity available only to those who can afford to pay? What do we owe our fellow citizens besides saving them from the abortionist?
What is left to those persons serious about caring for our fellow citizens at the earliest stage of life and beyond is to mobilize our community to do a better job at preventing unwanted pregnancies through birth control training and making methods available and cheap. [Remember, it is only Catholic dogma that considers recreational sex or abstinence from sex in marriage a sin...an issue that has nothing to do with the abortion issues.] We can work together to make sure that pregnant women receive the best pre-natal care possible and that early childhood care is not allowed to take second fiddle to so many of the other things we spend our money for. Surely the person we save from the abortionist is worth enough food to keep hunger away and his mother pre-natal care so he does not have to be born with a cocaine addiction.
Everyone can agree that abortion has been a plague on mankind for all history. There are no pro-abortion groups. Nobody considers an abortion as a trip to Disneyland by another means. On this we all agree, though some would have us believe otherwise. But history clearly proves that we cannot legislate it out of existence.
The best we can do is use the power of persuasion and use this issue as a rallying point to mobilize public opinion along the lines of: "We cannot prevent all abortions, but we can work to make them as unnecessary as possible, and we can take the care of that un-aborted child as a sacred trust to make sure that it enters this world healthy and passes through those early childhood years to become a productive citizen.
Surely that person, whom we demonstrate to protect from the abortionist, is worth fighting for in the halls of Congress to make sure, for example, that the first three years and nine months of life are forty-five months of adequate healthcare, joy, good nutrition, growth and age-appropriate learning.