Chad at CCK may have the unfortunate habit of calling everyone who ever disagrees with him wacky, but that doesn't stop him from posing a good question now and then.
I think the wacky right needs to decide whether abortion is murder or it isn't. They want to use the rhetoric to motivate people to go to the polls and cast ballots for the John Thunes of the world, but they won't actually put it into action and attempt to prosecute women or doctors who have abortions.
Chad quotes Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly to this effect:
If your position is that fetuses are persons and abortion should be outlawed, then intentionally destroying a fetus is murder and should be punished like murder. If your position is that fetuses aren't persons, then there's no compelling reason that destroying them should be a crime at all. Fish or cut bait.
That's a good point. I reply as follows:
First, the ambiguity regarding abortion is shared by both sides and by the public generally. President Clinton wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. But if the fetus is not a person, and abortion is as safe as pro-choice advocates keep telling us, then why should it be rare? Can't women decide for themselves how frequently they should use it, without the President trying to butt in? Many states allow double murder charges when a pregnant women is killed. How does that make sense, if there is only one person dead? Support for abortion falls off precipitously when the reasons for abortion are that the parents wanted a boy, or it was an inconvenient moment in one's career. Why is there such discomfort about abortion, if the fetus is no more than unwanted tissue?
Second, in politics the perfect is often the enemy of the obtainable good. Abraham Lincoln thought slavery was wrong in all circumstances, but in 1860 he did not campaign on immediate abolition. If he had done so, he would have lost. He sought the best obtainable compromise. As Kevin Drum and Chad recognize, calling abortion murder won't help the pro-life cause. Assume for a moment that some but not all abortions are in fact murder. If ending the cause of the former is advanced by not using the word murder at all, well, I'm with Lincoln. Moreover, despite what Drum says, we do treat one homicide differently from another. Everyone recognizes that abortion is a sui generis problem, and that may be a legitimate reason for treating it very differently.
Third, the trimester regime in Roe, though it denied personhood to the unborn at every point, clearly recognized that abortion is more problematic as the fetus develops. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a Democrat in good standing if ever there was one) said that certain late term abortions amounted to infanticide. I ask Chad and Drum, in the unlikely event he is reading this, whether this is not obviously true? If a child is killed minutes after birth, is this murder or not? I assume Chad will agree that it is. If so, then what if that same "organism" is killed a few hours or days earlier, by crushing her skull with forceps just before it leaves the birth canal? Maybe Chad is alright with that. I'm with Pat Moynihan. But just because that's true, it doesn't necessarily follow that abortion is murder at any point in the pregnancy. There might be an earlier point at which it makes sense to draw the line. Many pro-choice advocates reflexively mention the point at which the unborn becomes viable outside the womb. Until we get that straight, it is difficult to talk in terms of murder.
I have blogged on this topic recently, and suggested a compromise. I am not hopeful that it will be achieved. As long as Roe stands, the issue is frozen. If it were put back in the hands of legislatures, I suspect that eventually a compromise would be reached that would protect both reproductive rights and the inalienable rights of all existing human beings.
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