Now, I had not been thinking about abortion at all. I had not thought about it for years. I had what W. H. Auden called in another context a "rehearsed response." You mentioned abortion and I would say, "Oh yeah, that's a fundamental part of women's liberation," and that was the end of it.
But then I started hearing about "late abortion." The simple "fact" that the infant had been born, proponents suggest, should not get in the way of mercifully saving him or her from a life hardly worth living. At the same time, the parents are saved from the financial and emotional burden of caring for an imperfect child.
And then I heard the head of the Reproductive Freedom Rights unit of the ACLU saying - this was at the same time as the Baby Jane Doe story was developing on Long Island - at a forum, "I don't know what all this fuss is about. Dealing with these handicapped infants is really an extension of women's reproductive freedom rights, women's right to control their own bodies."
That stopped me. It seemed to me we were not talking about Roe v. Wade.These infants were born. And having been born, as persons under the Constitution, they were entitled to at least the same rights as people on death row - due process, equal protection of the law. So for the first time, I began to pay attention to the "slippery slope" warnings of pro-lifers I read about or had seen on television. Because abortion had become legal and easily available, that argument ran - as you well know - infanticide would eventually become openly permissible, to be followed by euthanasia for infirm, expensive senior citizens.
And then in the New York Review of Books , I saw the respected, though not by me, Australian bio-ethicist Peter Singer boldly assert that the slope was not slippery at all, but rather a logical throughway once you got on to it. This is what he said - and I've heard this in variant forms from many, many people who consider themselves compassionate, concerned with the pow erless and all that.
Singer: "The pro-life groups were right about one thing, the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make much of a moral difference. We cannot coherently hold it is alright to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however," said Singer, "is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth." Which, of course, the majority of the Court had already done in Roe v. Wade."
If someone who is pro-choice is to be logically consistent, Singer is absolutely right: There is no fundamental difference in person-hood between the baby in the womb, and the baby outside of the womb. During the Roe vs. Wade trial, attorneys for the right to choose (to kill a baby), held up posters seeking to make the case that what was growing in the womb may not be truly human yet; maybe they were just going through different evolutionary stages (this is real, I'm not making this up). But now, we know better (we really always have, but we will seek to rationalize anything we do): What is growing in the womb of the mother is actually a human being. If what is growing in the womb is a human being and has all the characteristics of a human being, then it deserves the protections that we give all human beings in the society.
I don't have space (or time) to dig much further now, but there is so much more that could be said. For starters, check out this link with pro-life responses to pro-death (choice) arguments. Notice that not one of the responses references a religious text (the Bible or anything else) to make the case. Reason is overwhelmingly on the side of the pro-life cause, so be confident in your stand!
Tomorrow, we deal with what abortion actually is (medically speaking) and with the specific objection that a woman should have the right to choose...
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