So, surprisingly, it turns out many of my Fellowphants have strong opinions on abortion, and really I don't care what your opinions are but you should all hear mine because it's awesome. Plus, since this is the biggest topic in the controversial opinions thread, I'd like to give it its own space to let down its hair, scratch its balls, and sprawl out on the sofa.
So, full disclosure, I am a liberal, pro-choice Democrat who sometimes donates to both Planned Parenthood and NARAL. However, my feeling that abortion should be legal is mostly couched in pragmatism and as such I can pretty easily understand why a lot of people disagree. It's one of those issues that's fundamentally based upon drawing an arbitrary line over top of a continuous process -- the mysterious process by which something that is not a separate living thing turns into something that is.Originally posted by an old joke
And it is arbitrary. You or I might prefer one particular dividing line or another, but a quick survey of the history of this question shows how many different moments have been selected:
- Fertilization: Pro-life advocates in the US typically argue that once sperm meets egg, it's now a child whose human rights should be respected
- Implantation: It's the normal medical definition for the beginning of pregnancy, since half or more of fertilized eggs never implant at all
- Forty days: Traditional Jewish law considered there not to be an actual recognizable fetus with limbs prior to that date, and thus that damage to it does not constitute injury of a living thing
- The end of the first trimester: The US Supreme Court, in decisions like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, has established that the government has more legitimate business limiting abortion with each trimester
- Quickening: In English common law, procuring an abortion after the first fetal movements were detected (usually in the second trimester) was a crime, whereas no crime existed if a woman terminated a pregnancy before that
- Viability: This is a big one nowadays, since well before full-term, babies can potentially survive with medical treatment. Of course, this is not a clear division either, since viability depends on the amount of medical care received and is a matter of probability
- The end of the second trimester: Again, established by the Supreme Court, and abortions in the third trimester are typically very hard to get in the United States (even in the case of medical need)
- Birth: Clearly at least in US law once an infant draws breath it cannot be "aborted"; killing it constitutes murder. Few people in the West would advocate that infanticide is a legitimate means of family planning, but in many if not most pre-modern cultures it was practiced fairly routinely
- Well after birth: In some traditional societies, it's normal to wait to name a child until it is a few years old, due to high infant mortality rates. Arguably, in these societies, children aren't really considered fully "human" until they're walking and talking
People have struggled with the abortion issue for centuries or longer, and the lack of any consensus on when a few cells turns into an actual child illustrates something -- it's a continuous process. That being the case, whether or not it's morally right to abort obviously is not a binary question, and the rightness of it decreases as time passes. While some of the more militant pro-life activists out there argue that discarding fertilized eggs leftover from fertility treatments constitutes "murder", most of us wouldn't agree. (However, here in the US, the theoretical risk that birth control pills and emergency contraception could, in very rare cases, cause a fertilized egg to fail to implant has led to efforts to restrict access to those things -- probably with the effect of increasing the likelihood of later, even less moral abortions.)
Almost all advocates for abortion rights that I've ever talked to will agree that there's more reason to limit abortion in the third trimester, and a lot of pretty staunchly pro-choice people really have no problem with laws banning them except when necessary to protect the mother's health. Similarly, pro-life advocates have made the most concentrated efforts at banning late-term (so-called "partial birth") abortions. So whether you say "it's a child, not a choice" or "get your laws out of my uterus", both sides pretty much agree on this point.
It's inescapable. There's a clear difference between a single cell and a viable child a day from being born, but there's no dividing line to let us know how to treat it at all the points in between. Activists on either side may not want to admit it, but inevitably, the abortion issue boils down to muddy uncertainties and the weighing of conflicting rights. Even the staunchest advocates for one side or another implicitly agree that abortion becomes less acceptable as the pregnancy progresses.