Is abortion sacred?

Partisans of either the “pro-life” or “pro-choice” positions on abortion will have us believe there is no middle ground between these poles. This is, of course, nonsense. For example, the “pro-choice” American libertarian scholar Murray Rothbard opposed the US Supreme Court’s “Roe Vs. Wade” decision. This effectively made abortion a right for Americans. Rothbard dissented on the grounds that it centralised decision making on an issue rightfully and best left to state and local jurisdictions. A “pro-life” colleague of Rothbard, Martin Anderson takes up the decentralist argument against Roe Vs. Wade here. The Rothbard / Anderson example shows that compromise here is possible.

What interests me is the amazing extent to which abortion has now been made sacred. To criticise abortion or people who have abortions is to expose oneself to all sorts of tut tutting and the moralistic tones of disapproval that, we are told, are supposed to be reserved for those who “fart in church”. Even learned Church leaders, from Churches doctrinally opposed to abortion, treat the consumers and suppliers of the abortion industry with kid gloves. Even attempts to deal pragmatically with the economic and military consequences of what amounts to a de facto small-l liberal population policy, of which abortion rights is certainly an inherent part, are inhibited by the sacred status of abortion.

This is by no means a local Australian or even western issue. That sanctified and august body, the United Nations, an outfit Roger Kimball calls a “saintly institution”, even believes it has the right to bring Poland into line for not following small-l liberal dogma.

To choose or not, or human life or not, are not the only dimensions in the debate. There is of course the pragmatic argument, that illegality leads to backyard butchers performing black market abortions, although there are grounds for considering this effect to have been exaggerated.

Supporters of the pro-choice dogma will no doubt charge that that they are being good little secular humanists and the anti-choice profaners are merely a bunch of recalcitrant Christian fundamentalists. This, of course, ignores the condemnations of abortion from most of the planet’s major religious traditions (apparently this form of multiculturalism can be ignored), the Hippocratic Oath and the fact that a strong secular case can be made as well. For example take the distinctly non-religious arguments presented by Libertarians For Life:-

1. Human offspring are human beings, persons from fertilization.
2. Abortion is homicide - the killing of one person by another.
3. There is never a right to kill an innocent person. Prenatally, we are all innocent persons.
4. A prenatal child has the right to be in the mother’s body. Parents have no right to evict their children from the crib or from the womb and let them die. Instead both parents, the father as well as the mother, owe them support and protection from harm.
5. No government, nor any individual, has a just power to legally depersonify any one of us, born or preborn.
6. The proper purpose of the law is to side with the innocent, not against them.

If you believe this Libertarian splinter group are too right wing for your tastes, consider George Orwell.  He considered his fellow leftists’ failure to take up the cause of unborn children, a betrayl of the leftist notion of protecting the weak and powerless. Orwell was particularly savage on the liberal notion that the pro-life position was solely rooted in religion faith. Indeed he regarded the pro-abortionists as the ones making a holy cause.

Orwell would have been interested in how language is used in our modern debate. On side speaks of the unborn child, whilst the pro-choice wing talks of the fetus. This ugly word has overtones of dehumanisation. Just as the humanity of wartime enemies is reduced to kulaks, jews, krauts, nips, reds, imperialists, so I can imagine Orwell seeing the use of the term fetus as dehumanising the losers in the abortion debate.

Perhaps the best way to gauge just how sacred abortion has become is to compare it to another controversial human activity, smoking. Almost everyone agrees that smoking is bad for your own health. There is also a massive government, public health and activist campaign, indeed social pressure, against so-called “second hand smoking”, despite the absence of any scientific case that second hand smoke is dangerous. It may be smelly, it may be rude, but as far as science can tell, it won’t kill anyone else.

The contrast between smoking and abortion is great. Yet no one questions the right of smokers to their choice. There is no pro-choice / pro-life debate here. Yet, unlike abortioners, we do not say smokers have a right to choose and leave them to their own ends. We do not accuse anti-smokers of engaging in a religious crusade to impose their values on others. Maybe we should treat smokers and anti-smokers this way, the point is we don’t. And for the most part it’s the same groups who treat abortioners’ choice as sacred who seem the least concerned with the rights of smokers. And the scientific case for the human life of an unborn child is vastly stronger than the ‘evidence’ for the dangers of second hand smoke.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, November 29, 2004 at 06:44 PM in Oh Tempora, Oh Mores
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