After seven years, I had more questions about how parts of what I'd believed could be true than I could answer, and I walked away from it. It's not important for this discussion why. I'm always happy to talk about that and explain it as best I can, but for now, I just want to make the point that I've been inside evangelical communities and inside an evangelical psychology myself. That's why I don't accept what a lot of people would have me believe about you--that you are filled with hate, that you are uneducated, that you ignore Christ's commands to care about the poor and sick and argue for restrictions to abortion and freedom to own guns. Believing something fundamentally different from the majority need not mean you are monstrous. For example, I now disagree with you when you say that homosexuality is a sin, but I don't accept that just because you believe it to be sinful, that means you hate homosexuals. I hope you'll afford me the same latitude as you read this, because I'm going to be arguing that something you fundamentally find to be monstrous should be legal.
I'm not out to change your mind about the big stuff, and I think we can coexist in society without agreeing on those fundamental questions much more readily than some would have us believe. The point of this post isn't to get you to believe that abortion is morally right. You don't need to believe that--even in cases of medical threat to life or rape or incest. It's not important that you change your mind about whether it's right. I only submit to you that there might be good reasons to grudgingly accept it as legal. At the very least, I hope to explain why someone might believe in abortion being legal without being a moral monster. Lately, I've seen some of you asking questions about how anyone could support abortion and not be evil. This has been especially prevalent since New York passed its abortion law allowing for late-term abortions when "there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health." I'd like to try to explain where I'm coming from enough that you can at least consider the possibility that being okay with abortion might not make me psychotic.
I believe most evangelicals are actually quite literate and reasonable. In a world where reading and reasoning skills are becoming weaker, it's possible evangelicals on the whole reason better than than the average American. So come, let us reason together about this one issue.
Precedent for accepting what is immoral as legal
Accepting the legality of what you view as sin might seem to violate the evangelical principle of not "compromising" to sin. But I think the notion of "no compromise" is really meant more for Christians in their own lives than what Christians are supposed to expect of the secular governments they are living under. The Christians who wrote the New Testament and the first three centuries of Christians who followed them couldn't have dreamed of being a politically relevant force in government one day. The attitude of Christians to government in the New Testament isn't always negative--Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 both call on Christians to be "subject" to human rulers--but there is an "otherness" when Christians of the first century talked about government. Government was one thing and Christian faith was another. So Christians really had no choice but to accept that the government would put rules in place it did not approve of. If Christianity was to change cultural practices, it would have to use a different form of influence. In fact, this is exactly what Christianity did up until the point when a Christian became emperor, and the nature of Christianity's relationship to the state changed forever in the West.
Even now, after Christianity has been politically significant for centuries, Christians have gradually come to accept that certain precepts important to Christians should not be enforced in laws for everyone. One example are laws prohibiting certain kinds of activities on Sundays. These used to be commonplace, but one hardly sees them now except in echoes, like liquor stores not being able to open until noon one day a week. A more telling example is the legal de-criminalization of homosexual acts. Until very recently, it was illegal for two grown people of the same sex to engage in consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. We have changed this, and although a majority of evangelicals still believe homosexuality is a sin, a much smaller number believe there is cause to outlaw it. That's because Western evangelicals understand the difference between what God wants and what is needed to live in an imperfect world alongside non-believers. It's something ardent believers in other parts of the world are still struggling to learn.
I can already hear evangelicals objecting to comparing what the law should be on liquor on Sundays or homosexual sex to abortion. Since abortion means murder to most evangelicals, they would see a reason to make a law for abortion where one isn't needed for other acts. There are some actions that Christians believe are sinful that they nevertheless think it alright to leave up to individual freedom to chose to do or not do. Abortion isn't one of them. That's fine at this point. If we leave this part of the discussion with just accepting the notion that some acts Christianity views as immoral ought to still be legal, then we can at least have a discussion.
So why should we accept abortion under the law?
If there's one thing those seven years as an evangelical instilled in me, it's an appreciation for the three-point sermon. So I'll follow suit and give three reasons why I think abortion should be legal. There is no hymn at the end to summarize the points, though, so feel free to leave immediately after and go get coffee or barbeque, depending on which kind of evangelical you are.
1. The Bible doesn't overtly outlaw abortion, but you see it there. The Constitution doesn't overtly guarantee the right to privacy, but it's there, too.
I'm not going to make the argument that the Bible isn't really anti-abortion. You've all read the Bible. You can make your own minds up about what it says and doesn't say. But one thing that would be pretty hard to argue it does say is that abortion is a sin. At least, it doesn't say that overtly. There's some stuff in Psalms where a poet speaks in the voice of God and says He knew the listener in the womb. There are punishments for harming a pregnant woman. From these and other passages, most evangelicals argue that even if the Bible doesn't say "Thou shalt not commit abortion," it's a pretty obvious implication of what is there.
Some have argued the opposite and said that the Bible doesn't prohibit abortion. The argument comes down to three things: 1) The Bible never mentions abortion, even though it existed, at least in rough fashion, when the Bible was being written; 2) A passage in Numbers 5:11-31 forces wives suspected by their husbands of having become pregnant with another man to submit to a "purity test"; if they failed the test, God would kill the baby, suggesting God did not believe infants had an unalienable right to life; 3) The general way in which Old Testament law treats children as property for which the parents should be compensated rather than as having their own self-worth. (See Exodus 21:22-25).
You don't have to side with those who think the Bible isn't anti-abortion. The early Christian church was condemning abortion fairly early in its history, so I'm fine with the assertion that it's a traditional Christian stance, whether it's overt in the Bible or no. But then, in accepting that something could be more implied than stated in the Bible but still be mandatory to follow for Christians, you are accepting the principle that some things can be an obvious implication of a text without being explicitly stated in the text.
This matters, because a big argument against the right to abortion is that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion, nor the right to privacy upon which earlier decisions established that right (update: this was what the majority argued in its decision today, June 24th 2022). But if you're the sort of reader who feels that even if something isn't explicitly stated, it ought to be treated the same as an explicit statement if you can't follow the explicit statements without the follow-on implication, then you have to take the right to privacy more seriously that that. Many of the guaranteed rights in the Constitution don't make sense without a corollary right to privacy. That means that the government has to have an overwhelming and compelling reason to interfere with your right to do whatever the hell you want to do.
Many of the societies that were either mentioned in the Bible or that came into contact with those societies practiced infanticide. I'm not talking about the ritual sacrifice of children to appease gods, although that also happened; I'm talking about communities deciding not to put resources into a child they thought to be too weak to thrive. The first society Christianity lived in, that of the Roman Empire, practiced infanticide of the weak. Scholars differ on how widespread the practice was, but it's clear it wasn't unknown. The very myth the Romans told themselves about how Rome came about involved a pair of children who were abandoned at birth.
Christians--to their everlasting credit--helped to outlaw the practice when they came to power in Rome. There are also many examples of Christians rescuing babies. But still, although the practice was probably well-known, there is no clear condemnation of it in Christian literature until the Didache in the 2nd Century.
Many of the societies that were either mentioned in the Bible or that came into contact with those societies practiced infanticide. I'm not talking about the ritual sacrifice of children to appease gods, although that also happened; I'm talking about communities deciding not to put resources into a child they thought to be too weak to thrive. The first society Christianity lived in, that of the Roman Empire, practiced infanticide of the weak. Scholars differ on how widespread the practice was, but it's clear it wasn't unknown. The very myth the Romans told themselves about how Rome came about involved a pair of children who were abandoned at birth.
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Does that mean, then, that the Bible doesn't condemn infanticide, just because it isn't in the New Testament? (There is one famous mention of it in Psalms, one that approves of infanticide of one's enemies, but let's lay that to the side for now.) Of course it doesn't mean that. Christians opposed infanticide from very early on because they couldn't make sense of what was explicit in their faith unless infanticide was also an explicit sin.
So when people argue now for things like a separation of church and state or a right to privacy, you can't just say those things aren't actually in the Constitution and so we don't have to consider them. Not unless you want to also get rid of many of the things you consider to be critical to your faith as well.
There's a guy I know--I won't say I know him well, but I worked with him once, and for some reason, he's kept me on as a Facebook friend in spite of my frequent posts about Korean pop music. He's had four children. When he and his wife had their first, they realized they both had a recessive gene for spinal muscular atrophy. It was just bad luck. They both needed to pass on that recessive gene for their kids to get it--meaning there was a one-in-four chance each child would get the disease, but their first child had it.
I want to say that from what I know, I think they're both amazing parents. They put all they had into their first child until she died. After their first child, they had a choice to make. Should they have more kids and risk passing on the disease to someone else?
They had three more kids, one of whom also got the disease. Again, they've put an amazing amount of effort into caring for her. I've seen people question his choices when he's posted about his life before; they feel that because he knew the risks with subsequent children, he should be blamed for bringing the second affected child into the world. They also feel that he bears some blame for knowingly causing high costs to society (presumably passed on to his insurance company and from there to everyone who subscribes to that insurance).
I don't agree. I think this person has a right to have as many kids as he wants. He certainly has proved that whatever happens, he'll do right by the kids he has. (He recently ran fifty miles as a fund-raiser to buy her a trail-capable wheelchair).
I feel nothing but admiration for them. I also never would have made that choice. This is one of those weird places in ethics where one cannot prescribe an action that is right for everyone. For me, I could not have knowingly had a child with the risks that high. I had a cousin with Klippel-Feil syndrome. Her life seemed miserable to me, in spite of the saintly efforts of dozens of people in her life. Over the course of her life, I'm sure society spent millions of dollars to keep her alive. In order, in other words, to keep the agony of her life going. I don't think I could knowingly create a life if I thought the odds were high I might cause that kind of pain for another human being. More than cause it--that I would create it ex nihilo.
I think it is wrong to have a child when there is a high risk of severe birth defects. That's why Mrs. Heretic and I aren't trying anymore, although we both wanted more. We're too old, and the odds of all kinds of things are elevated beyond what seems responsible.
But I also don't think it's wrong for my friend. That's because having those kids is an essential part of who my friend is. He proves this by how much love he shows all of his kids. To tell him he couldn't have kids because of the risks would be to keep him from being himself. It would be a crushing blow to his unalienable right to pursue his own happiness.
In a society like ours that has resource abundance, there doesn't seem to be any compelling social interest that would prohibit his right to have kids. But what if we were struggling to feed ourselves? In some ancient societies that practiced infanticide, concerns about being able to feed the society played a big part in the practice. In one case, the laws required fathers to bring newborns before the elders (not mothers, who would beg for the lives of their children and make the elders feel awkward). The elders had to rule whether the child was worthy of taking resources from the community based on the health of the child.
What if our society were to face resource scarcity again? Would there be a push to institute laws that restricted reproductive freedom? I'm not talking about forced abortions here. It could be much less overt than that. What if my friend and his wife had been required to have medical screenings for spinal muscular atrophy and other diseases and, when their link was discovered, had been legally prohibited from having children?
Society could, in fact, make a compelling case that it has an interest, enough of an interest to restrict reproductive autonomy. This is especially true when society all shares the costs of medical care.
2. A right to an abortion helps protect your right to reproductive freedom as well
There's a guy I know--I won't say I know him well, but I worked with him once, and for some reason, he's kept me on as a Facebook friend in spite of my frequent posts about Korean pop music. He's had four children. When he and his wife had their first, they realized they both had a recessive gene for spinal muscular atrophy. It was just bad luck. They both needed to pass on that recessive gene for their kids to get it--meaning there was a one-in-four chance each child would get the disease, but their first child had it.
I want to say that from what I know, I think they're both amazing parents. They put all they had into their first child until she died. After their first child, they had a choice to make. Should they have more kids and risk passing on the disease to someone else?
They had three more kids, one of whom also got the disease. Again, they've put an amazing amount of effort into caring for her. I've seen people question his choices when he's posted about his life before; they feel that because he knew the risks with subsequent children, he should be blamed for bringing the second affected child into the world. They also feel that he bears some blame for knowingly causing high costs to society (presumably passed on to his insurance company and from there to everyone who subscribes to that insurance).
I don't agree. I think this person has a right to have as many kids as he wants. He certainly has proved that whatever happens, he'll do right by the kids he has. (He recently ran fifty miles as a fund-raiser to buy her a trail-capable wheelchair).
I feel nothing but admiration for them. I also never would have made that choice. This is one of those weird places in ethics where one cannot prescribe an action that is right for everyone. For me, I could not have knowingly had a child with the risks that high. I had a cousin with Klippel-Feil syndrome. Her life seemed miserable to me, in spite of the saintly efforts of dozens of people in her life. Over the course of her life, I'm sure society spent millions of dollars to keep her alive. In order, in other words, to keep the agony of her life going. I don't think I could knowingly create a life if I thought the odds were high I might cause that kind of pain for another human being. More than cause it--that I would create it ex nihilo.
I think it is wrong to have a child when there is a high risk of severe birth defects. That's why Mrs. Heretic and I aren't trying anymore, although we both wanted more. We're too old, and the odds of all kinds of things are elevated beyond what seems responsible.
But I also don't think it's wrong for my friend. That's because having those kids is an essential part of who my friend is. He proves this by how much love he shows all of his kids. To tell him he couldn't have kids because of the risks would be to keep him from being himself. It would be a crushing blow to his unalienable right to pursue his own happiness.
In a society like ours that has resource abundance, there doesn't seem to be any compelling social interest that would prohibit his right to have kids. But what if we were struggling to feed ourselves? In some ancient societies that practiced infanticide, concerns about being able to feed the society played a big part in the practice. In one case, the laws required fathers to bring newborns before the elders (not mothers, who would beg for the lives of their children and make the elders feel awkward). The elders had to rule whether the child was worthy of taking resources from the community based on the health of the child.
What if our society were to face resource scarcity again? Would there be a push to institute laws that restricted reproductive freedom? I'm not talking about forced abortions here. It could be much less overt than that. What if my friend and his wife had been required to have medical screenings for spinal muscular atrophy and other diseases and, when their link was discovered, had been legally prohibited from having children?
Society could, in fact, make a compelling case that it has an interest, enough of an interest to restrict reproductive autonomy. This is especially true when society all shares the costs of medical care.
The only way to protect against this kind of an argument is to say that the Constitution guarantees an inordinate amount of reproductive freedom. A right to abortions would invoke a fairly "inordinate" amount of freedom, which means it would also protect your right to have children society might deem unwise or unwanted. The more society grants reproductive autonomy, including broad protections for abortion, the more your rights to make different decisions are protected.
Let's say you agree with point number two. People should be in charge of their reproductive health you say, and in 2019, they've got all kinds of choices about what kinds of contraceptives to use. But once they're pregnant, then the state has a right to compel them to have a baby. Freedom ends at conception, because nobody can really argue they didn't know the risks that came with sex. (I mean, you'd be surprised. A lot of people get surprised by their pregnancies. But let's accept the premise anyway.)
Okay, let's grant your wish. Reproductive freedom now ends at conception, because life begins at conception, and that fetus has an absolute right to life that is more important than the wishes of the mother.
Let us assume that the mother will not be terribly happy about having this child she doesn't want. Unhappiness has an effect on pregnancy. Can the state, out of concern for the health of the child, try to force happiness upon the mother? Can it force the mother to go to classes on how great it is to have a baby?
Can society force the mother to avoid cigarettes? How about alcohol? There have been a lot of cases discussed in the news recently about drug-addicted mothers with stillborn babies being charged with murder, but we need not go that far to see what implications might come from making abortion illegal.
What about coffee? Can society tell a mother not to drink coffee? What about making her take pre-natal vitamins and eat healthy? Can society, like most parents in the world I grew up in, make her eat all her vegetables before she has dessert? Can society make her go to a pre-natal yoga class?
How about this...say abortion is now illegal in the United States. A bustling abortion tourism to Europe begins. Does the U.S. start giving women mandatory pregnancy tests as they leave the country, and only allow them to go to countries where abortion is also illegal?
It gets a little scary once you decide that the life inside the womb has claims that are stronger than the life that possesses the womb. One can always make too much of a slippery slope argument, but in this case, I do think that once the state asserts control over a woman's body and what she can do to the things that reside within her own body, it can be very, very tricky to figure out where the state should stop. The state should be very slow indeed to interfere with the principle that people have a right to autonomy over their own bodies.
I think what maybe perplexes Christians the most about people like me who favor the legality of abortion is this: How I can support killing a living human being? Isn't it obvious that a fetus is alive?
My answer is that yes, a fetus is alive, following any biological definition of what life means. But it's a unique form of life, one that cannot live except through an exceptionally parasitic relationship with its host. It's a life whose right to live is necessarily in conflict with the right of another life to her own autonomy. This is one of those cases in society where we have two rights in conflict with one another.
For several decades now, our society has tried to find a compromise between those two principles that are in conflict with one another. We've said that women can have abortions, but for the most part, they need to be carried out by a certain point in the pregnancy. At six weeks, a fetus is not recognizably human. At twelve weeks, you might be able to tell it was human if you knew what you were looking for. At 24 weeks, anyone can tell it's a little human. More importantly, at 24 weeks, structures in the neocortex have formed, the ones that give us functions we tend to think of as uniquely human. I don't really accept that at six weeks, just because a fetus has human DNA, it's really "human" with all the rights a human possesses. But I accept that at 24 weeks, a baby is human.
Where in between should the cut-off be? And what about this new law in New York, the one that several people in my Facebook feed insist means being allowed to kill a baby moments before delivery?
I will admit that the New York law gives me pause. Like a lot of people who support abortion, I don't support abortion without limits. Christians are right that we have to cherish human life. I believe that includes mothers, and that cherishing the mother's life means not asserting control over her body without overwhelming necessity. But just as I don't think a fetus' right to life is absolute, I also don't think a woman's right to her own body is absolute. The New York law might not really say that a woman can kill the baby right before it's born, but figuring out what it really allows and doesn't allow will be tough work for judges.
If your concern is primarily with late-term abortions, you could at least rest easy knowing that 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester. Only slightly more than 1% are performed past 21 weeks. Much like anti-abortion activists point out that only a small number of abortions involve cases of rape or incest, I think I can make a case that late-stage abortions are rare. They ought to remain that way.
But returning to the question of parents who know their children will be born with extraordinary health issues, I think parents do deserve the right to make extraordinary decisions. I often hear the objection that parents should not play God, but parents already play God when they decide to create life. They have god-like power over their children for years. There is a reason Graham Greene called childhood "life under a dictatorship." With god-like power should come god-like ability to make decisions.
I know people who have had late-term abortions. The decision was devastating. They wanted kids badly. But the prognosis was grim. To them, they loved their children enough to make a painful decision. They loved the kids enough to take that responsibility on themselves. They made a hard choice in order to prevent almost certain and profound suffering. The only way I can even imagine making that decision is to try to multiply the experience of putting a dog down by...I don't know, some number I can't calculate. In one case, the couple was financially ruined by the surgery, which was not covered. They'd have been financially much better off having a baby that would have needed to live in an institute for most of its life. They had the spine to make another decision. I respect that as much as I respect my friend's decision to have his kids and live with the consequences.
Christians, I respect your choices. I respect your beliefs. But there are more people to respect in the world than Christians. I have seen too many posts about how anyone who favors a late-term abortion is a murderer. This represents an inability to put yourself in the position of someone else. There is more than one way to respect life. As a Christian, you probably believe that God intended every human life to exist, and even the most painful and medically challenging existence can glorify God. You have to accept that absent a belief in God, it's hard to accept that view of life. So those of us who don't believe in God but still want to cling to some belief in the sanctity of life have hard work to do figuring out what that means. We might come to different answers than you. But a difficult choice made with reflection is not the same as an amoral choice.
In political reality, we may see some swings in what is legal and not legal in America as far as abortion goes. We have a conservative court now, partly because many of you looked past your other misgivings about President Trump and decided picking the justices who decide on abortion cases was the most important issue in America. These justices might change the law. But it will eventually change back. While the law swings back and forth, we the people have to figure out some way of living with each other in spite of serious disagreements over this stuff.
To me, the tenuous compromise of the last few decades is about as good as we're going to get. Women should be able to get abortions in the first 16 weeks without question. Abortion opponents should be allowed to stand a safe distance away from a clinic and say that "all babies want to get borned." It is not too traumatic for women to hear opposing views as long as they are not physically threatened if they do not listen to the alternate views.
After 16 or 18 or 20 weeks or whatever, I'm okay with states limiting it, as long as they leave it open to the exceptions Roe v. Wade provided for. What those restrictions mean will be something we won't agree about. But I think the benefit of the doubt should always go to the principle of autonomy over one's own body, and the right of parents to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions involve a late-term abortion. If our society is going to be tolerant of parents who refuse vaccinations, a decision that has life-and-death implications for the already-born, I think we can also give a benefit of doubt to parents making decisions that only affect their own unborn children.
Whenever I point out that it's hard for me to accept the notion of a loving God who is also all-powerful but allows unspeakable evil to exist on the Earth, Christians often propose to me the notion that God had to allow evil in order to grant people free will. Christians will sometimes say that it was more beautiful for God to allow evil to exist, because that meant those who worship him and obey him did it freely. God didn't want robots, so he created people who can either love one another or commit genocide against each other. If you accept that, then I wonder whether you can't also accept that parents ought to have the free will to make choices you think are wrong. What makes the choice of my friend to have kids in spite of the risks and costs beautiful is that he chose it. What makes the decision of my aunt--whose wonderful life we just celebrated on Friday when she passed away just a few years after the daughter she spent her life taking care of went first--so beautiful is that she chose it. But their choice could not be beautiful in a world where there wasn't also a choice to have a late-term abortion for a child with severe birth defects. If there was no choice to do the wrong thing, as you would see it.
I don't expect I've changed all your minds about everything, and maybe not about much at all. But I also hope I made it clear that I respect you and that I value having you in our society. America doesn't always value human life as it should, or at least we don't value all life equally. I'm happy to have a voice that seeks to right that, even if I don't agree with all the reasons you have for valuing it.
There are many areas in which we have a common interest. We have a ton of problems in America, and we won't fix any of them if we're constantly in conflict. I think the compromise that's been in place is the best we can do to manage conflict. It preserves protections for your own practices should they become unpopular, it makes the life of a fetus gradually more protected the further along in a pregnancy it goes, and it also preserves a reasonable level of autonomy over one's own body for women while also acknowledging other rights. I won't say it's as good as we can get, but it is about as not-bad as we can get.
3. Taken to its logical conclusion, the notion that the state can compel women to carry children to term has some alarming side-effects
Let's say you agree with point number two. People should be in charge of their reproductive health you say, and in 2019, they've got all kinds of choices about what kinds of contraceptives to use. But once they're pregnant, then the state has a right to compel them to have a baby. Freedom ends at conception, because nobody can really argue they didn't know the risks that came with sex. (I mean, you'd be surprised. A lot of people get surprised by their pregnancies. But let's accept the premise anyway.)
Okay, let's grant your wish. Reproductive freedom now ends at conception, because life begins at conception, and that fetus has an absolute right to life that is more important than the wishes of the mother.
Let us assume that the mother will not be terribly happy about having this child she doesn't want. Unhappiness has an effect on pregnancy. Can the state, out of concern for the health of the child, try to force happiness upon the mother? Can it force the mother to go to classes on how great it is to have a baby?
Can society force the mother to avoid cigarettes? How about alcohol? There have been a lot of cases discussed in the news recently about drug-addicted mothers with stillborn babies being charged with murder, but we need not go that far to see what implications might come from making abortion illegal.
What about coffee? Can society tell a mother not to drink coffee? What about making her take pre-natal vitamins and eat healthy? Can society, like most parents in the world I grew up in, make her eat all her vegetables before she has dessert? Can society make her go to a pre-natal yoga class?
How about this...say abortion is now illegal in the United States. A bustling abortion tourism to Europe begins. Does the U.S. start giving women mandatory pregnancy tests as they leave the country, and only allow them to go to countries where abortion is also illegal?
It gets a little scary once you decide that the life inside the womb has claims that are stronger than the life that possesses the womb. One can always make too much of a slippery slope argument, but in this case, I do think that once the state asserts control over a woman's body and what she can do to the things that reside within her own body, it can be very, very tricky to figure out where the state should stop. The state should be very slow indeed to interfere with the principle that people have a right to autonomy over their own bodies.
The uncomfortable compromise should continue
I think what maybe perplexes Christians the most about people like me who favor the legality of abortion is this: How I can support killing a living human being? Isn't it obvious that a fetus is alive?
My answer is that yes, a fetus is alive, following any biological definition of what life means. But it's a unique form of life, one that cannot live except through an exceptionally parasitic relationship with its host. It's a life whose right to live is necessarily in conflict with the right of another life to her own autonomy. This is one of those cases in society where we have two rights in conflict with one another.
For several decades now, our society has tried to find a compromise between those two principles that are in conflict with one another. We've said that women can have abortions, but for the most part, they need to be carried out by a certain point in the pregnancy. At six weeks, a fetus is not recognizably human. At twelve weeks, you might be able to tell it was human if you knew what you were looking for. At 24 weeks, anyone can tell it's a little human. More importantly, at 24 weeks, structures in the neocortex have formed, the ones that give us functions we tend to think of as uniquely human. I don't really accept that at six weeks, just because a fetus has human DNA, it's really "human" with all the rights a human possesses. But I accept that at 24 weeks, a baby is human.
Where in between should the cut-off be? And what about this new law in New York, the one that several people in my Facebook feed insist means being allowed to kill a baby moments before delivery?
I will admit that the New York law gives me pause. Like a lot of people who support abortion, I don't support abortion without limits. Christians are right that we have to cherish human life. I believe that includes mothers, and that cherishing the mother's life means not asserting control over her body without overwhelming necessity. But just as I don't think a fetus' right to life is absolute, I also don't think a woman's right to her own body is absolute. The New York law might not really say that a woman can kill the baby right before it's born, but figuring out what it really allows and doesn't allow will be tough work for judges.
If your concern is primarily with late-term abortions, you could at least rest easy knowing that 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester. Only slightly more than 1% are performed past 21 weeks. Much like anti-abortion activists point out that only a small number of abortions involve cases of rape or incest, I think I can make a case that late-stage abortions are rare. They ought to remain that way.
But returning to the question of parents who know their children will be born with extraordinary health issues, I think parents do deserve the right to make extraordinary decisions. I often hear the objection that parents should not play God, but parents already play God when they decide to create life. They have god-like power over their children for years. There is a reason Graham Greene called childhood "life under a dictatorship." With god-like power should come god-like ability to make decisions.
I know people who have had late-term abortions. The decision was devastating. They wanted kids badly. But the prognosis was grim. To them, they loved their children enough to make a painful decision. They loved the kids enough to take that responsibility on themselves. They made a hard choice in order to prevent almost certain and profound suffering. The only way I can even imagine making that decision is to try to multiply the experience of putting a dog down by...I don't know, some number I can't calculate. In one case, the couple was financially ruined by the surgery, which was not covered. They'd have been financially much better off having a baby that would have needed to live in an institute for most of its life. They had the spine to make another decision. I respect that as much as I respect my friend's decision to have his kids and live with the consequences.
Christians, I respect your choices. I respect your beliefs. But there are more people to respect in the world than Christians. I have seen too many posts about how anyone who favors a late-term abortion is a murderer. This represents an inability to put yourself in the position of someone else. There is more than one way to respect life. As a Christian, you probably believe that God intended every human life to exist, and even the most painful and medically challenging existence can glorify God. You have to accept that absent a belief in God, it's hard to accept that view of life. So those of us who don't believe in God but still want to cling to some belief in the sanctity of life have hard work to do figuring out what that means. We might come to different answers than you. But a difficult choice made with reflection is not the same as an amoral choice.
In political reality, we may see some swings in what is legal and not legal in America as far as abortion goes. We have a conservative court now, partly because many of you looked past your other misgivings about President Trump and decided picking the justices who decide on abortion cases was the most important issue in America. These justices might change the law. But it will eventually change back. While the law swings back and forth, we the people have to figure out some way of living with each other in spite of serious disagreements over this stuff.
To me, the tenuous compromise of the last few decades is about as good as we're going to get. Women should be able to get abortions in the first 16 weeks without question. Abortion opponents should be allowed to stand a safe distance away from a clinic and say that "all babies want to get borned." It is not too traumatic for women to hear opposing views as long as they are not physically threatened if they do not listen to the alternate views.
After 16 or 18 or 20 weeks or whatever, I'm okay with states limiting it, as long as they leave it open to the exceptions Roe v. Wade provided for. What those restrictions mean will be something we won't agree about. But I think the benefit of the doubt should always go to the principle of autonomy over one's own body, and the right of parents to make decisions for their kids, even if those decisions involve a late-term abortion. If our society is going to be tolerant of parents who refuse vaccinations, a decision that has life-and-death implications for the already-born, I think we can also give a benefit of doubt to parents making decisions that only affect their own unborn children.
Whenever I point out that it's hard for me to accept the notion of a loving God who is also all-powerful but allows unspeakable evil to exist on the Earth, Christians often propose to me the notion that God had to allow evil in order to grant people free will. Christians will sometimes say that it was more beautiful for God to allow evil to exist, because that meant those who worship him and obey him did it freely. God didn't want robots, so he created people who can either love one another or commit genocide against each other. If you accept that, then I wonder whether you can't also accept that parents ought to have the free will to make choices you think are wrong. What makes the choice of my friend to have kids in spite of the risks and costs beautiful is that he chose it. What makes the decision of my aunt--whose wonderful life we just celebrated on Friday when she passed away just a few years after the daughter she spent her life taking care of went first--so beautiful is that she chose it. But their choice could not be beautiful in a world where there wasn't also a choice to have a late-term abortion for a child with severe birth defects. If there was no choice to do the wrong thing, as you would see it.
I don't expect I've changed all your minds about everything, and maybe not about much at all. But I also hope I made it clear that I respect you and that I value having you in our society. America doesn't always value human life as it should, or at least we don't value all life equally. I'm happy to have a voice that seeks to right that, even if I don't agree with all the reasons you have for valuing it.
There are many areas in which we have a common interest. We have a ton of problems in America, and we won't fix any of them if we're constantly in conflict. I think the compromise that's been in place is the best we can do to manage conflict. It preserves protections for your own practices should they become unpopular, it makes the life of a fetus gradually more protected the further along in a pregnancy it goes, and it also preserves a reasonable level of autonomy over one's own body for women while also acknowledging other rights. I won't say it's as good as we can get, but it is about as not-bad as we can get.
I love you Yakie
ReplyDeleteDrunk texting my mother, then drunk commenting on my blog. Love you, too.
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