I've written about this topic at least once before, when I was more or less at stage two of my opinion on it. The first time I was confronted by this idea, when I was more or less as a teenager going into my early twenties, I immediately leaned towards the pro-choice side. I did so due to a combination of not seeing the embryo as a morally valuable thing in and of itself, and of believing that it would be kafkaesque to force a woman to carry something in her body against her will for nine months, and to then be forced to undertake the birth itself as well as the subsequent recovery with all its potential long-lasting side effects. In many ways those instances aren't washed away clean, they still make the entire matter of abortion a delicate one. Still, I've now come to see even the pro-choice name as a euphemism, and furthermore, like all things, and especially like all things nowadays, to win or to lose a debate about this topic is often contingent on optics, it's more about how you come across rather than the substance of what you actually say. For the pro-life side it's all about, if you win, whether or not you came across as an evil tyrant, and if you lost, did you get stumped or did you fumble at your words. For the pro-choice side as I see it it's all about, if you win, whether or not you mostly appealed to stories, and if you lost, were you left wondering about the inherent value of an embryo.
But anyway, I guess I'm saying all this because I still consider it a delicate issue, and ultimately I have little to no emotional involvement in it, and also because I'm not so much claiming that abortion is immoral per se. Instead I'm just claiming that if you don't believe that it is, then you'll have a hard time convincing me of anything else.
“Abortion is the ultimate form of cheating, you're cheating nature itself. […] It is at our most challenging times that we must cheat our very hardest.” – Eric Cartman
The essence of my previous article, and the essence of many people's position on this subject, is that though strange, sometimes a pregnancy happens in such dire circumstances that maybe it would be better for the baby to never have been born at all. Therefore, an abortion might could be, not necessarily moral, but the less bad option. I could agree, anyone could, the pragmatic side of such a situation is sometimes all too obvious. But then again, if the solution to ending people's problems is to prevent them from being born in the first place then, yeah, I guess it works, but it's miles away from being a good thing. I suppose if you don't wanna worry about getting mugged then you could give all your money and possessions away, making it a pretty solid defense against any would-be muggers, but it's difficult to see how that's a proper solution. I guess this is all a roundabout way of saying that it seems universal that everyone sees abortion itself as a bad thing, as an undesirable thing, but that when trapped between a rock and a hard place, it just might be better than the alternative of being thrown into the world in dire circumstances, of being dealt a bad hand but still being forced to play it all the way to the river. Then again, as I've recently discovered, sometimes a 7-2 flops a full house anyway.
In other words, to make estimates about what the baby's life will be like, and concluding that it will likely be so bad that it's better to never be born, is a rather nasty thing to do. We wouldn't do it with anybody else, we wouldn't even do it with animals. In fact, people even often go out of their way to help wild animals survive a brutal monday, knowing very well they might not survive tuesday... Whatever it may be, we always operate under the belief that if you have made it into the world then you should hold on to it as hard as you can until the dying of the light. So why do so many people make an exception when it comes to a human life that still needs a couple of weeks before it can officially come into the world? One reason would be to greatly diminish the inherent value of the embryo to begin with, and the other would be to say that regardless of value, the mother still has the right to prevent her body from being used against her will.
The first option is one of those weird paradoxes almost. In a way it makes a ton of sense, in another way it don't many no sense at all... It makes some sense because, sure, an embryo isn't a “proper” human, it's not particularly sentient, it seemingly can't feel pain, at least not very early on, it has no brain, no heart, it can't speak, it can't dance, it can't sing, it doesn't have a name, a social security number, and so on. That being the case, if given the moral dilemma of awarding levels of humanity to an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a child, a teenager, an adult and an elder, you seem to be placing a safe bet if you award less humanity to the embryo. But that's the thing, because awarding levels of humanity seems to be, in and of itself, an immorality. At the end of the day, the inherent moral value of human life has to rest on what human life is and not on what each individual human life can do. Otherwise we seem to fall into a weird state of attributing moral value to each individual human life like we're all a bunch of Pokéman cards... Oh, you're a level ten effect-type fiend monster with 3500 attack and 3000 defense? Then you're cool, you have lots of value. But if you're a level three normal-type spellcaster with 600 attack and 1500 defense? Then you suck... I guess I can't resist being a bit flippant but it just seems obvious to me that the inherent value of human life cannot be based on traits, it must instead be based on a very simple yes-or-no. If human, then moral value exists, and as such it is very difficult to imagine a morally neutral abortion.
The second one has some logic to it. It's not difficult to have empathy towards the idea that someone would have something in their body and be subsequently forced to go through changes related to it, especially when a procedure exists to fix such a situation. Thing is, procedures and methods also exist to prevent any person from being in that situation to begin with. In this sense it seems intuitive to me that willingly consenting to an action implies consenting to the possible consequences of said action. You could reasonably engage in any given action and take every single precaution to prevent an undesirable result, true, but that's also why when you go bungee jumping they make you sign a piece of paper, I'd assume. Because life is apparently built in a such a way that a lot of things are a coin flip, and even if we are able to foresee and prevent most undesirable things, we are still every so often victims of circumstance. Should such a thing take place then the woman or the couple in question would have been felted by nature, well... join the club, I guess.
Another strange point that I have against it is the idea that the embryo is somehow an individual agent acting upon the world in such a way that we can only deem it to be immoral. It seems to hold the embryo in quite a high esteem as it pertains to “its” moral agency, and because the embryo is holding the woman hostage, we deem it to be an immoral action and therefore he can be eliminated, like when in military movies the sniper receives the go-ahead to take the shot. To me this just seems like madness, that a human life whose entire crime was being caused to exist is somehow being blamed for existing. Again, if you don't like the way nature runs things then go ahead and complain, knowing that I'll be ahead of you in the queue with my own list. But the idea that an embryo is somehow akin to a squatter at best or a kidnapper at worst is just strange to me.
Now, in all these things we do have the situation of a pregnancy that resulted from a blatant breach of consent. This being the case it is quite a delicate situation and one in which the bodily autonomy argument is the strongest. But it seems to me we are still talking about an innocent human life who is paying the price for the sins of his would-be biological father. It makes little to no sense that one life, a life of someone who hasn't even had time yet to commit any evil deeds, is being made to pay for someone else's evil. But then you might say the woman is the one who has to pay, at least for nine months, which I suppose is in some measure true. So whether or not she should do that I don't know, I might appeal to my lack of emotion on the subject and say that no, she shouldn't. But on the other hand it is still intuitive to me that the an innocent being in all of this is the one who's being made to pay. At the center of it all the bodily autonomy argument seems to hinge on, one, a series of contingencies on the efficacy of contraception, which could well make the idea of abortion obsolete not very long from now, and two, the factual truth that human reproduction is a bit inconvenient and it lasts nine months. But if the stork method was true, would proponents of the bodily autonomy argument defend that it is still permissible for the woman to pick up a repeater and shoot down the stork before it perches on the window sill?...
Here I might make a slight sidenote and say that my sneaking suspicion, especially after hearing reports of women who undertook an abortion, is that a lot of the time it's not really about seeing the embryo as morally worthless, nor is it about bodily autonomy. It seems to me that a lot of time the real reason is a combination of not wanting to or not being prepared to become a parent, and furthermore, it's about having a deep-rooted feeling that the longer the pregnancy goes on the less inclined she'll be to have an abortion, and then after the baby is born, giving him or her up for adoption might prove an impossible task. In essence then abortion is used as the ultimate CTRL+Z as it undoes the whole situation almost magically, and lets you restart from your last save file. In other words, it really is kind of a cheat-cheat.
For me anyway it seems clear that in deontological terms, taking abortion as an action in and of itself leads us to conclude that it is categorically immoral. If you were given a list of ten names of pregnant women, one of which seeks an abortion while the other nine seek an ultrasound, and if you were forced to schedule one of those women up for an abortion randomly, I wager you'd refuse to do it. If the reasoning behind that is based on the harm principle then who are you harming if the thing isn't a proper human life and can't feel pain? If you're harming the woman then how so? By taking away something she likes or owns? In that case you could offer restitution as you would if you had accidentally spilled coffee over that woman's laptop. But we don't see unborn human lives like that, or at least I hope we don't, and whatever restitution you offered you'd be below the perhaps archaic level of blood money because apparently the “thing” wasn't even alive to begin with.
On the other hand, in consequentialist terms, it seems to me that the strength of the pro-abortion side of the argument hinges on telling very dramatic stories, which I'm sure sadly exist and I can even agree that maybe the woman in question made the less bad choice. Then again it still doesn't change the facts on the ground that, in typical Thunderdome fashion, two people entered, one person left... Regardless, I'd say that the pro-life side of the argument can likewise ask some difficult questions. If the couple want a baby girl, can they abort if they find out they're having a boy, or vice-versa? If the couple find out their baby will be born with Down Syndrome, can they abort then as carefree as they like? If the couple want to collect abortions like they collect Pokéman cards, can they keep aborting time and time again? It seems to me that if the embryo has no value in and of itself, then it really wouldn't matter why anyone would choose to have an abortion. It would be quite equivalent to a haircut, which anyone can have, for any reason, at any moment, without any justification and obviously, with impunity. And if the only go-to defense is to bring up difficult stories, then does that mean they only support abortion in precisely those cases?...
So where does that leave us? I don't know about you but as for me I can't see how an abortion could ever be a morally neutral thing. It seems intuitive that most of us see the contents of a pregnant woman's belly as morally valuable, as something that regardless of belief we might label as holy, and an abortion therefore as unholy, even if only in a poetic sense. We would all surrender our seat in the bus to a pregnant woman, and if that woman told us she's on her way to an abortion clinic we would likely feel very strange but we'd surrender our seat anyway. And it's not because of her comfort, or whether or not she wants to bring new life into world, or even if she sees it as life or not... At the end of the day it's all about the “thing” in and of itself, with the pronoun here being truly strange to use because if the beginning of life is an it, then every single one of us was an it at some point, and it was morally permissible for us to be eliminated, even if we already existed. Maybe we were a little different, a little small, a little strange, a little quiet, a little distracted, but essentially we were already there. And if you have a friend who was born fairly premature, as I do because he won't shut up about it, it is indeed strange to think of how there was a time in his life when he was alive in this world, and yet a very equivalent baby isn't considered a life as long as he or she resides in the mother's womb, and the mother resides within certain contingent lines only visible on a map.
And so to loop back around, and to criticize my own previous thoughts, it seems to me now that abortion is either immoral or merciful, but even if it is merciful it is still immoral. And as far as rhetoric and even psychology go, I've reached a point where the title of this very article makes a lot of sense to me. Because if you think that ending an innocent human life, often for vapid worldly reasons, is not a big deal at all, then I fail to see how you could get mad at me for accidentally spilling coffee over your laptop. In other words, if there's somehow justification for the fundamental immoral action of all actions, then I think anything else can be justified one way or another.
If abortion is permissible then everything else is.
Comments
Post a Comment