FREEDOM SERIES. PART 1: ABORTIONS
Killing a baby or a woman’s right to
decide ? Isn’t this a provokative question ? Type “abortions debate” in Google
and you will get 2,030,000 search results. Just read one page, which is from
the Wikipedia. It tells you about two major groups in the abortion debate. The Pro-choice movement, which generally
supports access to abortion and regards it as morally permissible, and the Pro-life movement, which generally
opposes access to abortion and regards it as morally wrong.
To stay prudent, I am listing three links
to the Wikipedia pages below this essay. All major arguments of both groups are discussed there. However, I going to stress the arguments of
pro-choice group. By asking two simple questions, I identified myself as its
supporter.
When does life begin ? It
depends what is meant by “life”. In my opinion, life begins at the moment of birth.
Who should decide ? The woman. Not her parents, boyfriend, husband, not the government,
not the church.
There is also one more very
important question, which is often overlooked because of the tension in the debate.
And that is, is there anything that can be
agreed on to make these hard
choices better ? I will cover this question as well.
The philosophical and ethical
arguments about abortion are extremely complex. Let me go straight to the main arguments
of the pro-life group and show the contra logic of the pro-choice group, which
I belong to.
The major pro-life argument states that abortion is
like killing a human being.”No one is allowed to kill a human being under any
law, so why is it permissible in this case?” they ask. The best answer I know
was given by Mary Anne
Warren, in her famous article arguing for the permissibility of abortion. Pro-life opposition to abortion is based on
the following logic:
- It is wrong to kill innocent
human beings.
- The embryo is an innocent human
being.
- Hence it is wrong to kill the
embryo.
Warren, however, thinks that 'human being' is used in
different senses in (1) and (2). In (1), 'human being' is used in a moral sense
to mean a 'person', a 'full-fledged member of the moral community'. In (2),
'human being' means 'biological human'. To help make a
distinction between 'person' and 'biological human', She thinks there is a series of properties that characterize a person:
- consciousness (of objects and events
external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to
feel pain
- reasoning (the developed
capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)
- self-motivated activity
(activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct
external control)
- the capacity to communicate, by whatever means,
messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an
indefinite number of possible subjects, but on indefinitely many
possible topics
- the presence of the
concept of self,
and self-awareness,
either individual or racial, or both
The embryo has at most one consciousness (and
this only after it becomes susceptible to pain—the
timing of which is disputed), and hence is not a person.
Even more than that Judith Jarvis
Thomson in her well-known article A Defense of
Abortion argues
that abortion is in some circumstances permissible even if the embryo
has a right to live. Her
central argument involves a thought experiment.
Imagine, Thomson says, that you wake up in bed next to a famous violinist. He
is unconscious with a fatal kidney ailment; and because only you happen to have
the right blood type to help, the Society of Music Lovers has kidnapped you and
plugged your circulatory system into his so that your kidneys can filter
poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is disconnected from you now,
he will die; but in nine months he will recover and can be safely disconnected.
Thomson
takes it that you may permissibly unplug yourself from the violinist even
though this will kill him. The right to life, Thomson says, does not entail the
right to use another person's body, and so in disconnecting the violinist you
do not violate his right to life but merely deprive him of something—the use of
your body—to which he has no right. Similarly, even if the embryo has a right
to life, it does not have a right to use the pregnant woman's body; and so
aborting the embryo is permissible in at least some circumstances.
Next is a thought that abortion deprives
the victim embryo of a
valuable future. However, this argument
seems really odd to me. With that kind of logic, every spermatozoon has a
future and using contraception can be considered murder. But we don’t really think that condoms are
weapons of mass murder, do we ?
Besides the ethical debate, there
are strong social reasons to allow the free choice of abortions, which do not
really have an answer from the opponent’s side.
Steven D.
Levitt and John Donohue in their famous book “Freakonomics” linked
legalization of abortion to the subsequent drop in crime. Abortion was
legalized in the US
in 1973 after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Case. Than beginning in 1991, the United States
experienced the sharpest drop in murder rates since the end of Prohibition in
1933. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalized and the
decline was substantial.
Lots of research and pro-life
activists argue that there is no relationship between the two events and cast doubt
on every single figure from Levitt’s research. It is obvious that numbers and
correlations can be viewed from a different prospective. But Levitt’s logi is
hardly disputable: unwanted children have an increased risk of
growing up to be criminals, and legalized abortion reduces the number of
unwanted children. Consequently, legalized abortion will lower crime in the future.
The second social argument is very
down-to-earth and quite simple. However, I believe it is the most powerful one.
If you make something illegal, it will never disappear. It will still exist
illegally.
It is easy to model the situation when
abortion is fordidden in one area of our global world. For instance, imagine abortion would be prohibited in Ukraine
. In such a situation, rich
women would go somewhere in Europe
and have it
there. Poor women, of course, couldn’t afford Swiss or Spanish clinics. They would
be forced to do abortions at home under unsafe conditions, paying a risk
premium to doctors, risking their own lives and future maternity.
I can’t understand what an
anti-abortion activist would do in order to address a such risk. As a matter of
fact, pro-life activists know it can not be fully answered.
Just to mention the medical
arguments, I would like to quote an extract from a Time magazine article, “The Grassroots Abortion War” by Nancy Gibbs (Thursday Feb 15 2007
issue):
Despite restricted access, abortion remains one
of the most common surgical procedures in the U.S. for women and, according to
the Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 0.3% of patients experience a complication
serious enough to require hospitalization. First-trimester abortions in
particular are considered extremely safe. After years of debate about breast
cancer and abortion, the U.S. National Cancer Institute in February 2003
gathered the world's leading experts to review the data and assess the risk.
They stated that their conclusion that "induced abortion is not associated
with an increase in breast cancer risk"was "well established,"
the institute's highest rating for research findings.
The same Time magazine quotes a nurse
who does abortions an every working day “Abortion is a reality.
For me, I feel it can be a lifesaving choice for a woman. But decreasing
abortion is a goal we all strive for."
The future solution to the abortion
debate is right there, described in the same Time article. It called Pregnancy
Support
Services
Center
. They are located all over US. They advertisement
says: “PREGNANT AND SCARED? 1-800-395-HELP. WE'RE HERE
24/7”. Currently a lot controversy exists about the work
of such centers. But nothing works perfectly from the very beginning. In this
case, it just needs a lot of social agreement to be improved.
In my view the best available option
for the abortion problem is a network of such help centers. Their mission would
be to help a woman face an unplanned pregnancy. The center must offer true and
fair information about reproductive options. Given a choice, a women has an
option to talk with representatives of both groups. And to be honest, I know
that pro-life activists will do a great job to try to save a life, like they
are doing it now in Asheville Pregnancy Support Services in Asheville
, North Carolina
,
one of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S.
The CEO of the center tells “When
we do the ultrasound, we ask the girl how she's feeling," I ask what she
would like to put on the picture for her baby book. One girl put ANGEL. Some
put the name they've picked out for the baby." She points to the
translucent image on the screen. "One put little
miracle!!!!"
I am absolutely
sure that if a pregnant woman does see an angel in the picture no anti-abortion
laws would be required. But if she does not see a miracle, it is her right to face
reality”.
Links to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_aspects_of_abortion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_aspects_of_the_abortion_debate
center of Vilnius under three types weather moods (gray, black and white):
