Conflicted On Abortion

I understand and respect both camps in the great abortion debate.

Pro-lifers really do believe life begins at conception. They aren’t, as the pro-choicers would have you believe, a bunch of misogynistic men plotting to subjugate women.

Pro-choicers believe that the fetus is not yet a person. They aren’t evil baby murderers as the pro-lifers would have us believe.

The crux of the issue is beyond compromise. If the fetus is an ensouled moral agent, abortion is murder. Period. If you believe that, you are bound to actively oppose murder, as it is the worst possible crime you can commit against another person - “you take away all that he has and all that he ever will have.”

If a fetus is not ensouled - or, for the many people on the pro-choice side who doubt the existence of any souls, if the fetus is not a moral agent, then a woman has as much right to an abortion as she does to remove a wart.

The problem with both positions is that there is no discoverable objective truth to be had. One can’t design a scientific test to measure the moment when a soul enters the body. Lacking any rational way to make a determination on the issue, one undertakes a grave risk.

If one, lacking any evidence comes down on the idea that a fetus has no personhood, and that belief is mistaken, one becomes complicit to murder.

If one, lacking any evidence, comes down on the side of personhood, and that belief is mistaken, one becomes complicit to a massive invasion of individual freedom and party to the creation of unwanted, unloved children.

Dangerous ground.

As our villainous minions know, your humble Smallholder likes to weigh evidence. My positions change as new information becomes available. The Maximum Leader, arrogating infallibility to himself, calls me squishy. I call willingness to correct course and accept new hypothesis the hallmark of adaptive intelligence. You say pa-tah-to, I say po-tay-toe.

Setting aside religion for a moment, Brian over at Memento Moron has posted an excellent essay assssing the difficulty of determining, sans scripture, when life begins.

There is no magic number and just about any position one takes - birth, viability, homunculousity, cell division, or conception has serious drawbacks. (By homunculousity I mean taking on human form a la Thomas Aquinas. I know it’s not a word. But as a German, my kultur compels me to create new words by mashing them together.)

The first trimester standard created by Roe is an arbitrary attempt to navigate these perilous waters. As such, it is unsatisfactory. Any arbitrary standard will be unsatisfactory, so perhaps one must realize that in public life an arbitrary standard has to be drawn.

If reason and science can’t draw a clear line, society is in the lurch. Some of my co-religionists would like to find a way out by imposing their biblical interpretation on others. I’m willing to grant that imposition is okay in this narrow case. Imposing your prayer in public schools is wrong and a violation of our social compact. But in this case, preventing what you perceive to be murder trumps societally-mandated respect for differing opinions. As an analogy, consider a person whose religion that requires virgin sacrifice. I’ll defend your right to believe in virgin sacrifice, oppose the use of government to promote your faith, and oppose you ever acting on that faith. Believe what you want, but society has claims on your actions.

That said, my co-religionists who believe the Bible clearly and unequivocally condemns abortion are wrong.

The Bible does not take a clear stand on abortion. Biblically based assaults on abortion are selective, based on unsupported judgment calls, and occasionally deceptive.

As our loyal minions know, your humble Smallholder is not a literalist. I have a healthy skepticism about how primary sources can be influenced by the cultural outlook of the author and, in the Bible’s case, by the motives of translators. I will, however, attempt to analyze the Bible literally, if only because most pro-lifers are literalists, holding that every word, jot, and tittle of the Bible is the absolutely true revealed word of God. On that basis, the concept that life begins at conception is untenable.

Wow. That last paragraph is quite inflammatory. I’ll defend it in my next abortion post. Hold off flaming me until then.

To summarize the problem:

Reason can’t be applied until the moral status of the fetus is ascertained.
Science is no definitive guide.
The Bible is no definitive guide.

What we have left is what the transcendentalists would call “inner light.” The internal sense of right and wrong that we have independently of reason.

My inner light recoils at the notion of abortion. I look at my children and realize that I could legally have prevented their existence and am repulsed. Abortion feels wrong in my gut.

Conflicted (or squishy, take your pick) child that I am, I have a hard time trusting this innate disgust. Sometimes the inner light’s moral sense can be applauded, as it ought to be for leading the transcendentalists to oppose slavery. But our internal feelings are so conditioned by the society in which we live that it is entirely possible for our moral sense to be overwhelmed by our learned mores. Many southerners were repulsed by black claims for legitimacy. I have yet to read a logical basis for discrimination against gays. All anti-gay activism ultimately boils down to the activists “inner light” screaming that fags are icky.

Operating solely by inner light is perilous.