A few days ago I posted an email from a reader questioning me on abortion. I wrote a response to this reader's views. That reader, Mark Anderson (who gives me permission to use his name), now has a rejoinder. I'll post this reply and then have a few words to say.
Mr. Schaff,
Thank you for saying my response to your post "Who's Imposing" was respectful.
I must say I found most of your response to be trivial. When I made the
statement that very few conservative authors referred to the woman who has to carry the fetus to term, I should have added that when they do refer to them it's in a way that trivializes both the woman and her decision. It's much more complex than "wanting to be free of dirty diapers" and I believe you know it. If you refer to books such as "The Choices We Made", in which women and men talk about the abortions that they were involved in both before and after abortion was legal, you see that's it's never a trite decision. Anecdotally I'm sure you can find a woman somewhere who may fit your description but like the infamous "welfare queen", it's more a politically expedient myth than fact. A woman's right to choose, is the law of the land. To make abortion illegal is to take that right away from women. The state would thus be in control of that woman's body in a way that to me still seems analogous to slavery. If abortion were made illegal, they would still be performed and at nearly the same levels. The procedures would be less safe and would endanger women's health
and lives. If made illegal how would you sentence the women, doctors, boyfriends, parents? Would you have a war on abortion like the drug war or would the moral position of illegality be enough for you? Would you push for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion nationwide? Several states had made abortion legal
before "Roe vs. Wade". Legal in blue states, illegal in red? These are serious
questions that rarely see the light of discourse. The reason I wrote your site is that it seems much more, shall I say reasonable and serious than most political
blogging sites that hardly ever rise above "gottcha politics".
Sincerely,
Mark Anderson
A quick word on slavery. Mr. Anderson and I simply have a disagreement on the status of the unborn. He apparently gives it no status, while I call it rights bearing humanity. I don't think it is slavery when the state says, "Don't kill that human," any more than it was slavery yesterday when the Aberdeen police force told me to quit driving so fast. They have taken $100 from me for breaking the law. Is that slavery? No, it's enforcing public order. Is is slavery if the state says, "Don't kill your unborn child"? No, it's respecting natural human rights. What I meant to trivialize was not the abortion decision but the slavery analogy. Mr. Anderson also seems to subscribe to legal positivism. If the law says it, it must be just. I think one should have a decent respect for the law (more than my lead foot would suggest), but I recognize that the law and morality are not always the same. The law once allowed real slavery: one human could legally own another. That didn't make it just. The law presently allows abortion, but that doesn't make it just. Besides, in this post I linked to a Stuart Taylor article about the shoddy legal thinking of Roe. Finally, I have no doubt that many, and probably most, women (and men) seeking abortion experience serious emotional strain. In fact there has been much documentation of post-traumatic stress associated with abortion and post-abortion counseling if offered by the Catholic Church through Project Rachel. Yet this experience confounds the pro-choice argument. Why is it such a difficult decision? If this is nothing but a mass of cells with no moral standing, why is an abortion any different from, say, getting a mole removed? It too is a mass of cells with no moral standing. But that's just it. The human moral conscience revolts at abortion because even the most pro-abortion extremist understands that left to its own designs that "mass of cells" will be a bouncing baby in a short while. There is a recognition that separate life is ended in an abortion. It is a very small step to understand that it is human life. I'll say it again: precisely because abortion is an awesome moral decision that implicates the natural right to life it is justly a public, not a purely private, question. I think to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right is an abuse of the language of the Constitution and the natural rights theory of the Declaration of Independence.
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