Abortion may be the most polarizing issue in modern America. At times it seems half the country decries the women and doctors who participate in abortions as "baby killers," and the other half worries that the "Religious Right" will impose its views on them and try to govern the bodies of women.
With relatively few exceptions, those opposing abortion are good people with noble intentions, but at the end of the day they are also wrong.
Don't misunderstand, I sincerely hope as many women as possible opt to put their unexpected babies up for adoption or better yet raise them. However - temporarily setting aside whether an abortion is moral -- attempting to prohibit abortions would ultimately be futile.
There is just a sliver of middle ground in this debate. Most people who oppose abortion make exceptions in case of rape, incest or when the mother's life is endangered. But it seems most of the population continues to see this issue in almost pure black or white. Of course, no one defends killing a fetus once it's a person, so most people base their abortion position on when they consider a fetus to be a human being.
Folks on one end of the spectrum believe a child becomes a human being as soon as the sperm meets the egg. To them, abortion is murder. On the other extreme are those who don't consider a fetus a human being until birth and consider abortion solely the prerogative of the mother.
As Paul Campos, law professor at the University of Colorado, explains, this question is virtually impossible to answer definitively, "The concept of personhood is neither logical nor empirical: It is essentially a religious, or quasi-religious idea, based on one's fundamental (and therefore unverifiable) assumptions about the nature of the world."
For most of my life I was like the majority of Hoosiers in that I thought abortion was just plain wrong - "You can't kill it, it's a baby!" But as I grew older my perspective changed and what was once a black and white issue became increasingly gray - "But they can barely afford the three kids they have now!" Finally I considered a pragmatic angle and became convinced that an about face on abortion wouldn't succeed.
As for when a fetus becomes human, I think the concept of viability (i.e. when a fetus could survive a premature birth) is sensible, though unlike most, I don't base my position on what Campos called "personhood." Ultimately my opinion is based on the same pragmatic consideration that led me to go from pro-life to pro-choice in the first place. It's the same reason I think prohibiting abortion would be futile and I can sum it up in three words: "Back alley abortions."
If you're not familiar with this practice, consider yourself lucky. Without getting too graphic, the process typically involved disrupting the pregnancy with a straightened wire hanger. Numbers vary widely, but before abortion was legalized, some sources claim hundreds of women were killed from back alley abortions annually.
I'm very open-minded on this issue and to be fair, this argument isn't new. The fiercely pro-life Web site HYPERLINK "http://www.abortionfacts.com" www.abortionfacts.com spends almost 2,400 words trying to mitigate it. Yet to me, the ultimate conclusion is inescapable: legal or not, women who want an abortion will find someone to perform one, and they are better off with a real doctor in a clinic than a stranger in an alley.
Write to Jake at jymoore@bsu.edu
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