At PJ Media today, Daniel Glover – no, not that Danny Glover – discusses Christians’ agonies over whether, if abortion is to be outlawed, a mother who has an abortion should be punished under the law. In other words, he perpetuates the premise that abortion should be outlawed because abortion is murder, which God has forbidden. As you might expect, that leaves the readers unsatisfied and the division between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” unbridged.
Rather than perpetuate the sectarian divisions over abortion, why not take a deep breath and reflect on why we want to do what we want to do – whatever that might be.
The folks who want abortion to be legal at some stage of gestation have to answer some questions:
- Inasmuch as once born, the baby is recognized as a person with a right to life, why doesn’t he possess that right on the other side of the birth canal?
- If abortion is all right, why is execution for murder wrong? And why is it morally repugnant that Planned Parenthood sells body parts from aborted fetuses?
- Why doesn’t the baby’s father have any say in the matter, considering that if the baby were born, his father would incur legal obligations that would last eighteen years or longer?
There are others, of course, but those strike me as the big ones. For the pro-life crowd (of which I am one):
- Why do you want some or all abortions outlawed? What’s the moral / ethical basis? Can you defend it without recourse to religious proscriptions?
- How many criminals are involved in an outlawed abortion? Three, two, or one? If the answer is “It varies,” how would you arrive at the answer in a specific case? What are the appropriate penalties?
- How would you deal with the Fourth and Fifth Amendment issues involved? (Some early abortions are indistinguishable from a “menstrual extraction.”)
The cross-aisle shouting seldom attempts to answer any of the above questions. Instead, the issue tends to be framed along religious lines, which is why the pro-abortion crowd has succeeded in characterizing pro-lifers as “zealots” and “religious bigots.”
It might be the case that only non-verifiable, non-falsifiable bases exist for either position. But up to this point precious little effort has been put into trying to find secular ones. If we could arrive at moral / ethical premises on which both sides can agree, we might make progress.
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