As much as I disagree with them, I can respect people who believe from true religious or philosophical conviction that human life begins at conception and therefore that all abortions – the key word being all – should be prohibited as the moral equivalent of murder.
What I can’t stand are those people – particularly politicians – who claim the “pro-life” mantle but position themselves as “moderates” by advocating for certain “exceptions” to abortion bans, typically in the case of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger.
Could there be anything more hypocritical and nonsensical than this? If a fetus is a human being with all the rights enjoyed by human beings, if abortion is murder – or maybe just seriously immoral – how is it any less murder or immoral to terminate the life of a human being just because his father is a rapist or because she is the result of incest? Would they kill a 2-year-old toddler because his father was a rapist or her parents siblings? No, of course not. So where’s the logic in an “exception” for rape or incest?
Well, surely we can agree on an exception allowing an abortion to save the life of the mother, can’t we? Isn’t that justified as self-defense?
No, it’s not. You have the right to kill someone if they are doing something, even inadvertently, that threatens to result in your death or grave bodily injury. You do not have the right to kill someone whose mere existence threatens you. If a fetus is a human being, it is a also an innocent one incapable of doing anything to harm you.
To take our toddler example again, suppose you were presented a 25-year-old woman and a 2-year-old child and told that if the toddler lived, the woman would certainly die. Would you - would any of us - think it would be OK to kill the toddler? No – we would throw our hands up and say this is up to God (or fate, or nature) to sort out. Even if you were told that if you did not kill the toddler, both the toddler and the woman would die – who among us could still choose to kill the toddler? So much for the doctrine of self-defense as an excuse for another “exception.”
(The above example, by the way, is one reason I would argue the pro-choice position is more logical. Presented with the same scenario but substituting a 6-week-old fetus for a 2-year-old child, the vast majority of people would say without a second’s thought that an abortion would be moral. What that tells me is that a fetus, whatever else it is, however cherished and valuable it might be, is not a human being with all the rights of a human being.)
Aside from the philosophical disjointedness of the “exceptions” argument, consider the merely practical problems. If you allow an exception for rape, what’s to prevent a woman from saying her pregnancy resulted from rape even if it didn’t so she can get an abortion? Well, then you have to restrict abortion to “legitimate” rapes. That’s what the House Republicans tried to do the other night by including language in their anti-abortion bill that would have required a woman to report her rape to police before she could get an abortion. That's when the whole thing blew up in their faces. (And even if you force a woman to go to the police, what’s stopping her from lying just to get an abortion? “I don’t know, I didn’t see him, it was dark.” Are we going to force women to prove their claims of rape? Give them polygraphs? Where does it end?)
Needless to say, you run into the same problem with incest. (Let’s be honest, first, and note that most incest is also rape.) You’ll need to define incest. Brother-sister, father-daughter – OK, that’s easy enough. What about first cousins? Is that OK? (Full disclosure: one set of my great-grandparents were first cousins.) Are we going to require DNA tests to prove there's be incestuous sex?
Setting aside the philosophical problems with using self-defense as a justification for an “exception” allowing abortion to save the life of the mother, here’s a little conundrum for you: every single woman who gets pregnant has put her life in danger. While death in childbirth in the U.S. is rare, it happens – about 650 women a year die from childbirth or other complications of pregnancy, according to the CDC . http://www.cdc.gov/...
So, who decides what constitutes “enough” of a threat to the mother’s life to justify an abortion? How much is enough? A 5 percent chance of dying, a 10 percent chance? How do we determine the percentage in each case? A panel of doctors? What kind of panel of doctors? Can they all be pro-choice doctors? Do we have to have a panel made up equally of pro-choice and pro-life doctors? Should the panel include non-physicians? Who? If we decide the threshold is, say, a 5 percent chance of dying to get the OK for an abortion, who tells the woman with only a 1-in-25 percent chance of dying that sorry, she’s going to have to take that chance?
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
An earlier diarist on this site noted that there is “no middle ground” in the abortion debate, and he was absolutely right. I noted before that though I disagreed, I had respect for those who sincerely opposed all abortions – that’s a tough position to take if it’s your wife, your daughter, your mother who might die – but those who claim to be “pro-life” and then blithely support “exceptions” are hypocrites and charlatans of the first order.
It bugs the hell out of me, too, that these mountebank politicians continue to get away with this "exceptions" game and no one calls them on it. The media are lazy about this because, after all, abortion rights were “settled” long ago with Roe v. Wade. I’d like to see this raised in every “town hall” hosted by every “pro-life moderate.”