John Burd
1224
Answered
at 12:38am on February 25th, 2008
First, thank you. It is a pleasure to debate with such a worthy opponent.
I agree with the foundation on which you build your argument: The fetus is entirely, completely dependent on his/her mother as it lives, grows, and eats. I cannot agree with the conclusion your argument comes to, however. You state that “a fetus is ‘less than’ a human being… as it depends only on others to survive.†Put another way, it seems that the criterion by which you judge whether or not someone is human is this: do they depend only on others to survive? If this is, in fact, the criterion on which you are basing humanity, then I don’t understand why a fetus is a non-person, while a newborn is a person. A newborn, too, depends only on others to survive. Granted, a newborn is no longer contained within his/her mother’s womb. But that does not change this fact: A newborn is completely, entirely dependent on others. Left alone, a baby might last a couple days before he or she died of malnutrition, dehydration, exposure, what have you.
You state that the elderly, disabled, etc., are not less human. But the reason you’ve given for that position is essentially this: “The elderly are not less human because they are not. That is a completely different thing.†My question, then, is, Why is it a completely different thing?
As for the elastic argument: I wasn’t arguing (or at least I was not trying to argue) that the laws themselves are elastic. I was simply pointing out that the argument you had employed against restrictions on abortion could be similarly employed against any law.
It is true that everyone has a choice whether or not to obey any law, and that there are consequences for making the choice not to obey. It is similarly true that no law enjoys 100% compliance.
Here is why I don’t think those facts are persuasive arguments against laws restricting abortion: While it is clear that no law is obeyed 100% of the time, it is equally clear that, speaking generally, a law prohibiting a practice will tend to reduce that practice. So, while I’ll grant that abortion would not disappear if it was outlawed, I’m not convinced that outlawing abortion would have no effect whatsoever on the number of abortions.
I’m equally willing to agree with the contention that, should abortion become illegal, abortions in general would become more dangerous for women. Here is why I don’t find that a persuasive argument: The pro-life side of the debate equates fetal life with the life of the mother. No matter how “safe†abortion is made, it is fatal to one of the parties involved. To me, it’s similar to arguing that women should have the right to take their two-year-old to a doctor’s office and have them put to sleep, and if we make that illegal, women who want their two-year-olds gone will have to do it themselves or hire someone who might botch the job. The reason I see it as similar is because I see a fetus as being just as human as a two-year-old. Which brings us back around to the first debate: Is a fetus “less than†a human person?
As to the dependence point, it’s really only a tangential argument – certainly not one I would wish to base the entire debate upon. But it’s worth noting that, while we may not be dependent on any one cashier to sell us the food we require, we nevertheless depend on finding someone who will. In that sense, I think, we remain dependent.
You make an interesting point when you ask whether a doctor who refuses an abortion breaks the interdependence chain on which we all rely. Granted, women do rely on doctors to perform abortions that they cannot perform themselves. But I would question whether they have a right to that reliance. A man may rely on a prostitute for certain things, but if the prostitute refuses him “service†because of laws against prostitution, I don’t believe society has an interest in providing him redress. Interesting thought, though.
I’ll agree that independence is one of the essential freedoms that our country has always sought to protect. But it is not the only freedom, and sometimes one freedom must yield to make way for another, greater freedom. In this case, pro-life people believe that an unborn child’s freedom to live without his/her life being taken outweighs a woman’s interest in freedom from pregnancy. Something I think the pro-life side of the debate fails to acknowledge as often as it should is the grave impingement on a woman’s freedom when she is required to carry a pregnancy against her will. This is, without a doubt, the factor that makes abortion such a difficult issue. Ultimately, people like myself believe that, while laws restricting abortion may be a radical limitation on women’s freedom, that limitation is justified and made necessary by society’s interest in protecting human life.
Finally, as to those pro-life persons who favor permitting abortions in cases of rape and incest, I guess they’re just trying to make exceptions for women who did not, by their own consenting behavior, put themselves in a situation in which they could become pregnant. The argument seems to be that women should not have to live with the consequences of acts over which they had no control. Ultimately, however, this strikes me as inconsistent with recognition of fetal life as human life: If a fetus is a person, it doesn’t matter how or why he/she came into being. We don’t draw those distinctions after birth, and a recognition of basic human rights indicates that we shouldn’t draw them before.
