Introducing Reason to the Abortion Debate

[hwyangel]

This abortion, this is death.

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[Kathy]

Another point that is debated is the exact time or stage of development when a fetus is officially considered a baby or person with rights like everyone else. This is mostly a semantic issue. There are different stages of development within a human lifetime from conception all the way through adulthood—zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, child, teenager, adult, senior citizen. These are just arbitrary labels that refer to the same entity at different times during his or her life. The terminology is not a relevant factor. Whether we consider a fetus to be a person has no bearing on whether it is one.

Of course it has a bearing. It misses the point of why human beings are important. It's not because they can solve quadratic equations or pave parking lots. It's because they are us, and because we have relationships with each other. (That's also why dogs and cats are better protected than, say, fleas or toads.) Embryos and fetuses are not capable of forming relationships with others, so they are only worth protecting if people want to protect them, and only as long as protecting them doesn't infringe on the rights of other people. The primary people who want to protect embryos and fetuses are the women whose bodies they are part of, and if those women don't care about their own particular embryos and fetuses, then their rights over their bodies must prevail over someone else's disinterested desire to protect embryonic and fetal tissue. That's because the right of bodily integrity is one of the primary and fundamental human rights, and because everyone's rights are endangered in a society which denies half its members that fundamental right for arbitrary religious reasons.

It is because we happen to be human. We don't include even other primates because we don't fall in love with them, want to have sex with them, want to adopt and breast-feed their infants, want to tie our lives to their future existence. We only do these things with each other, and no ethnic group has ever excluded any other ethnic group from these human practices. We have absolutely no trouble recognizing each other for our purposes. As far as abortion goes, the only challenge is to figure out how to convince pro-lifers to notice someone in the abortion debate ("Woman? What woman?") and realize that when they arbitrarily reject her rights in pursuit of an abstract religious theory, they risk having their own rights rejected for equally arbitrary and flimsy reasons as well.

[Kathy]

No discussion about abortion is complete without a large portion dedicated to the concept of human rights.

Correct. And the fact is that born persons, including children, have no right to use the body of anyone else to survive, so it makes no sense to give embryos and fetuses this right, even if they WERE persons--a right which they would immediately lose at birth.

[Kathy]

I could never advocate something that I not be willing to teach my children.

Fortunately, your children will make their own choices, as is their right.