Frameshop: My Abortion Troll

A few years ago I was inspired by a visit to an online anti-abortion forum to pen a troll to try to get anti-abortion activists to think more seriously about the woman part of the abortion equation. To that end, I pretended to take an ultra-hard, secular anti-abortion position so that they would have nothing to push against in the abortion stand, and would hopefully have to address the civil rights and humanitarian issues I raise. I don’t recall it meeting with any notable success, but I was cleaning out the old aluminum platter and ran across it again. I have never published it here because, it doesn’t actually reflect my views on abortion. I do not believe that a developing fetus has any ethical significance until it has the neurological equipment to experience pain, and even then its rights are severely limited until it is viable apart from the mother. But, despite the rather vociferous characterization of abortion as bait for the fundies, it does actually reflect some of my feelings about an ultimate way for our society to abandon the endless cultural tug-of-war over a fairly crude reproductive technology. Ultimately, the only way for America to heal the rift is to make abortion an obsolete technique, and that it will take both technological innovation and a new social compact with women to make that happen. Hopefully, you might find it as thought-provoking as I intended.

I get so tired of people pussy-footing around the only real issue regarding abortion – murder. Not "taking a viable life", not "deciding to end a pregnancy"; Abortion is murder. A life begins at conception and is terminated prematurely by an abortionist. Eventually, both the doctor who carries out the hit and the woman who contracts for it should be treated no differently than any other murderers; including death penalty eligibility. God and the Bible have nothing to do with it. One need not believe in God to hold that human life and its preservation is the highest of moral values. I myself am an atheist.

Nor is there is any reason for making an exception to the ban on murder for cases of rape or incest. The resultant child is not morally culpable for the bad acts that gave it life. That would be like allowing murder given other conditions that are beyond the victim’s control. Imagine if, as a society, we allowed people to be murdered because they were black, or Jewish, or gay. That would be evil indeed. The only exception to a ban on murder of the unborn can be when the life of the mother is threatened in the opinion of a doctor. A universally recognized exception to the prohibition against killing is in the defense of one’s own life.

Abortion is a horrible blunt instrument of death that we have become accustomed to using in making reproductive decisions. Given the advanced state of medical science and reproductive technology, it is time to put down our cruder instruments as unfit for a civilized and scientific age. But as we put away the barbarous tools of the past, we also must ensure that women do not lose their freedom and equality as we eliminate this reproductive technology. Abortion is unfortunately a necessary choice for some women. Imagine, if you can, being a young single woman, having no functional family for support, dependent upon an hourly job with few if any benefits. You become pregnant despite birth control and the father refuses support for you or your child. You have few choices. If you have the child you will most likely be fired because of time away from work and lose any benefits you have, including health care . You could end up trapped in welfare, descend into poverty and homelessness. Because of how society has structured the choices available to women in these circumstances it is understandable that many would choose to have an abortion. We can and must fix that.

Women have more freedom than ever in the history of humankind to control the timing and conditions of their reproduction. They can choose from a wide selection of birth control technologies. Such freedom is wonderful for women and I fully endorse it. I do not want women subjugated or made into brood-mares. But given all the options women now have and our vast wealth as a nation, we can build a system of reproductive support and healthcare in which women need not use abortion. In those cases where technology fails and a contraceptive does not work, or, tragically, a woman is inseminated against her will, there is no excuse to commit murder. A just society would protect the unborn, find the child a loving home or seriously (not stintingly) assist that women in raising the child, and/or compensate the woman for her legitimate losses of time and opportunity in creation of a new citizen. There must be a social safety net under non-lethal reproductive choices if society is to fairly discard this outdated and brutal, but currently useful, technology.

Given the will and the leadership, we could provide a workable system of social supports that allow women to safeguard their futures without resorting to killing their children. If we are going to ask women to sacrifice so that society may abandon the murderous tool of abortion, we must help them financially and legally. Once the pro-life movement realizes that women are not always ‘at fault’ when unplanned and unwanted pregnancies occur, once it is purged of its well deserved reputation for anti-woman bias and once they begin lobbying in favor of options for women, rather than restrictions solely, then we may finally be able to wash the blood off our hands and put down the abortionist’s tools forever. It will take more than finger pointing, invocations of God and self-righteous indignation to fix a problem than is so deeply divisive. It will take compromise and wise policy choices to allow women to let go of the option of killing. But do it we must, and we must do it with fairness and respect for women, or abortion will simply slip underground and be more dangerous for women while continuing to murder our future.

The tactics and rhetoric of the Pro-life and Pro-choice movements are both short-sighted and stupid. Pro-lifers want to impose their moral vision (which, while I think it is the correct view, I do not think that public policy in a democracy can be made by fiat) and also impose the costs of that policy on women. They do not examine the real social or economic costs to women of bearing or raising children they do not want. The tip of that iceberg is glimpsed in the recent discovery of strong correlations between the major dip in crime rates in the 1990s with the onset of legalized abortion in 1973.  The idea that the existing adoption system is adequate should we end legal abortion is facile and dead wrong. We must examine carefully what the cost will be to women and make solid political and legal commitments to cover those costs if we are serious about our convictions. Pro-lifers often insist that women are simply bad for choosing abortion. I don’t think that. I think society is bad for allowing so many women to make such a disastrously immoral choice. Moral decisions are always made in the context of the greater society. We only hold people strictly accountable for poor choices only when they had other viable choices, understood the consequences and decided wrongly anyway. Our society is like a person with diminished mental capacity concerning abortion. We demand that women be equals and we hold them to the same standards in economic competition, yet increasingly expect them to bear the entire cost of human biological imperatives. We treat the consequences of unwanted pregnancy solely as a personal matter, when if fact it is an issue of public policy and great social consequence. We are divided in our minds over whether abortion is killing or just another reproductive choice. Thus society gives women no clear moral guidance on the issue. Until we resolve these issues and do so equitably, holding women solely and fully accountable for poor moral choices is simply hypocritical and unjustly punitive. Thus, in the opening paragraph I qualified with ‘eventually’.

Pro-choice advocates are little better. They know that they cannot meet the charge of Pro-lifers that abortion is killing. They have become adept at spinning out barely plausible rhetoric to avoid, obscure or ignore this central moral issue; they know that by facing it squarely they have lost the moral high-ground. One thing is clear, abortion is killing. If you are Pro-choice, look deep in your heart and I know you find an acknowledgment that abortion ends a life. It doesn’t matter if that life is ‘potential’, or ‘unquickened’, or not yet really a child. These are excuses, sophistry, splitting linguistic hairs. No amount of equivocation or solemn invocation of rights can change this central fact. It is the one issue which Pro-choice advocates just can’t get around. Pro-choice therefore roots itself in the positive rights of women to chose their reproductive destiny. This is a rear-guard action in light of the conservative direction of the court system. Unfortunately, it has become rooted in American jurisprudence that citizens only have those rights which a court is willing to recognize. The court is stepping closer and closer to deciding that women don’t really have the rights outlined in Roe v Wade. I think what most Pro-choice advocates really want is to protect the gains in all fields of human endeavor that women have earned in recent decades. Thus Pro-choice advocates should be focused on securing for women the kind of social and political rights that will be needed when the end of legalized abortion finally comes. Perhaps they fear that doing so will signal that they have given up on the Roe battle-line. But I fear that they are going to lose that fight regardless of their commitment to Roe, simply because Roe is wrong and is bad law. When that day comes, and it will, what rights and protections will women have to compensate for the loss of this important, but morally problematic, reproductive technology?

The day Roe is overturned, the fight will revert to where it should have always stayed: the States and the political process. One size does not always fit all, and perhaps one abortion policy cannot fit all of a America. Many different solutions and many different compromises will bloom across the country. In the political tumult solutions will be created that everyone can finally live with. The loss of the right to abortion on demand as a Constitutional right will create the sort of compromise solutions involving support for the woman and the new child which I outlined earlier. The give and take of the political process is vastly preferable to the dogmatic, uncompromising, and unrealistic positions of the two camps now.

Abortion is death. It is also a key reproductive control technology without which women today would be much worse off. Both abortion opponents and women’s rights proponents must realize that society will not be able to dispose of this horrible tool until women are protected from the major setback to their freedom and economic status outlawing abortion would cause. Only when political compromises that protect women from the costs of unwanted pregnancy are in place can we fully and heartily acknowledge with one voice that abortion is murder. Then the mass murder of our children can finally stop.