I know it seems like I spend an unhealthy amount of time worrying and arguing with people about whether women in the US should have the right to have an abortion, since I've never had one and probably never will. I just can't seem to walk away from this issue and say that it doesn't affect me so it's not my problem or my fight though, much as I might feel like that is exactly what a lot of the people speaking out on the other side should do. Maybe because I have daughters, or maybe because I do still have an operational uterus so there is always that slim chance that it could apply to me one day, and damn wouldn't it suck if the whole mess got decided in a way that limits my options while I was ignoring it.
Here in the US we have a really good thing going on the whole freedom front. Sure there have been a lot of encroachments over the years when people who've believed that to govern meant to dictate and control managed to get some legislative power, but the fresh start we got has given us a pretty unique take on the rights of individuals. If we ever get to a point where we get it through everyone's thick skulls that each individual is exactly the same as every other individual in the amount of freedom they are supposed to have then we'll be pretty impressive. Unfortunately we aren't quite there yet, because we've still got some antiquated notions about some people being more "peopleish" than others to get past.
That's the idea that I'm back here spouting off about abortion because of. What's really bugging me about this whole debate is that it boils down to everybody is equal, unless you are a woman and you happen to get pregnant. At that moment, laws prohibiting abortion cast women into a role of being less than a free and independent person because she also happens to be a convenient carrying case for another potential person. Then her right to only think about herself and act in her own best interests is thrown out the window in order to protect the best interests of the person who has taken up residence inside of her body. The idea of that goes against every single law that we have on the books concerning the interactions between individuals. Pro-life supporters speechify about how every single individual is guaranteed the right to a life, but the reality is that under none of our laws is anyone guaranteed that right if the cooperation of another person is required to achieve or sustain that life.
If you read the constitution and examine all the parts where individuals are mentioned, you'll see that we are given rights to be treated a certain way by our government, and certain responsibilities to live up to in how we behave towards our government and it's representatives. Absolutely no mention is made about what we can expect from or owe to each other. As far as the creators of our government were concerned that really wasn't their business. A process for creating laws to punish unwanted behaviors was created, and that is what government has done since. No matter how many laws have been passed in the interim by government at any level, almost none of them penalizes not giving a fuck about your fellow citizens in a way that applies to every individual, man, woman, and child. The only power granted to government that implies a legislators role is to shape the morality of our society is the power to act in the interest of the General Welfare, but that means to create laws and policies that are beneficial to citizens generally, not individually. It cannot be construed as an interest in ensuring every life conceived results in a life born and lived for a while because there isn't a clear benefit that our society as a whole derives from that. Will all the pregnancies resulting in births be good for us overall or bad? No way to tell- we can't even say definitively that all the babies the have been born are more good than bad for our society.
All of the laws that pertain to preserving the right of individuals to life apply equally to all citizens. No one, from the smallest child to the oldest adult, can choose to kill another person just because they want to. Every person who does so has committed the crime of murder. Whether our government, through the use of our criminal justice system, chooses to hold that person responsible and punish them for that crime is up to the people who act as representatives of our government, and a lot of different defenses for having committed murder are recognized as being either justifiable or not worth prosecuting. If a two year old child shoots his mother in a Walmart he is not going to be charged and imprisoned for a crime, but the mother's death will still be considered a homicide. If a man with the mental capacity of a five year old rapes a woman he may be found not guilty by reason of diminished capacity and released into the care of someone who is tasked with making sure he doesn't end up in a situation that might lead to him doing it again to someone else, but the woman is still a victim of rape. If a woman shoots her husband to stop him from beating their child to death she might be judged not guilty because she was defending the life of another person, but it doesn't change the fact that she knowingly murdered her husband. Just because an action has a victim doesn't automatically mean that the person who took that action is judged a criminal in a court of law. Adversely, we have a concept known as a "victimless crime" where a person is punished for a behavior that is viewed as having a negative impact on the general welfare of all the people in our society even if no specific individuals suffered as a result of the actions the criminal took.
We recognize that there are situations where it is justifiable for one individual to inflict harm upon or even end the life of another without there being a need or reason for government to prohibit or punish that act. Some things are recognized as being so "sacred," so integral to an individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that a person is authorized to take whatever action they see fit in order to protect them. Castle Laws, Stand Your Ground Laws, and the like even go so far as to extend this protection to objects such as a house, a car, or a spot of ground in a public place. The individual right of each person to do whatever the hell they want within the confines of their own personal space is held as supreme over any other right.
Space does not get any more personal than the inside of one's own body. Freedom from unwanted intrusion into ones' own body is recognized for every single competent adult in the country without consultation with or permission from anyone else. Except for the freedom to insist that your body belongs to to you and you alone when it comes to pregnancy and abortion. Then all of a sudden, the rights of the unborn child must be considered, must be paramount, must be protected regardless of the wants or needs of the person whose body surrounds them. Suddenly there is a person that must be thought about whose rights are more important that anyone else's- at least for 240 days or so.
Does this really make sense and fit with the rest of our laws and policies concerning an individual's right to life? I honestly don't think that it does. To support that idea requires a suspension of disbelief more intense than is necessary to sit through any 1950's era Creature Feature screening. To believe this to be not only true but to be right means that you have to wholeheartedly and without a doubt believe that for exactly 240 days out of every person's life they are so special as to be exempt from not only the laws of our country but also the laws of nature. The moment they are delivered from the womb they revert back to being simply equal to everyone else, but until then they should be a protected class of citizens who are granted extra rights and have no responsibilities to anyone.
You may have noticed that I did refer to a fetus/unborn baby/whatever as a person in the last paragraph. I did that because for a lot of people whether or not life begins at conception, viability, birth or somewhere in between is the crux of the whole debate over whether abortion should be a legal medical option for pregnant women. I understand that for some people do honestly believe and strongly agree with the assertion that life begins at conception. Personally I don't necessarily agree with that belief, but the great thing about freedom is that I don't have to and neither them nor I can force the other person to change our minds. To me it doesn't matter whether life begins at conception and it is in fact a separate and distinct individual "living" and growing inside that womb. The fact that cannot be disputed and isn't up for debate is that the woman that womb is inside of is a person, and the womb in question is absolutely 100% a part of HER. Just as her leg, her brain, her heart and her blood are hers. The person inside of the womb may very well NEED to stay there in order to survive, but the woman that the womb lives inside of does not NEED anything from the child, or even from the womb itself. She derives absolutely no benefit whatsoever from having the womb unless she wants to grow a child inside of it, and draws no benefits and a great deal of risk from the process of a child growing inside of her if she chooses to allow that to happen.
The real crux of the debate is whether laws prohibiting abortion, either aimed at the woman seeking an abortion or the doctor performing it, are constitutional. Right off the bat these laws don't pass the sniff test because they cannot be said to apply to everyone equally. The argument that they do apply equally to all women, or all pregnant women, or all doctors who perform abortions doesn't hold water because that argument is trying to turn one piece of fruit in a basket into an apple so that it looks different than all the other oranges. The question isn't whether women have the right to have an abortion or whether doctors have the right to perform them, it is whether women have a duty to protect the life of anyone other than themselves. If women are judged as having the legal responsibility to do that for one person- the potential child within their womb, then why just that one person and not all people? Why just pregnant women and not all people being held legally responsible for acting in whatever way preserves the life of all other people for as long as humanly possible? This is the question that has to be answered, and it has to be answered in the same way that we answer the bigger question of whether we really want to legislate a moral obligation to do something for someone besides ourselves?
Any time government inserts itself into the personal lives and decisions of individual citizens, either by telling us that we cannot do something or by forcing us to do something, the slippery slope is brought up in the debate surrounding whether that intervention is warranted. Sometimes the dire eventualities predicted are reasonable and sometimes they are not, it all depends upon how similar the situations being described are. But definitely, to me, the question of whether or not a woman should have to get permission from the government to end a pregnancy, and whether or not she can be punished for ending one, is one that cannot be answered by asserting that the government has a duty to protect the life of her unborn child without beginning a slide down an incredibly slippery slope. That answer says to me that the role of our government is to protect and preserve the lives of every citizen even if it requires compelling other citizens to sacrifice of themselves in order to achieve that goal. If our very bodily organs and systems are deemed under the control of the government, either the federal or state, in order to meet the needs of another person then we're all looking at some very big problems in the future.
The relationship between mother and child is not special in that it is without comparison. Biologically it is one "person" who lacks something that another person has, and requires access to that thing in order to survive. A fetus must, at least for now, have a uterus to grow inside of, and that uterus must form a placenta to which the fetus can attach in order to draw nutrients from the blood of the person that uterus is a part of. Needing something that can only be found inside the body of another individual is not a life threatening medical condition that is exclusive to developing human babies. There are people all over the country who need blood, bone marrow, and organs in order to continue living. The procedures for collecting that blood, bone marrow, and several of those organs are no more invasive or life threatening to the potential donors than pregnancy, labor, and delivery are to women. Why force women to provide a path to life for fetuses because they are people who deserve a chance to live, and not force everyone to donate blood, bone marrow, and a lung/kidney/part of a liver to other people who need them because the recipients of those donations deserve a chance to keep living? Why not at the very least force everyone to release their organs for donation upon their deaths, when they will suffer no risks or consequences from doing so?
The answer to those questions is that it is not the role of our government to force us to make moral decisions. It is neither the role of government to punish us for making immoral decisions no matter what rationale leads to those decisions. As private citizens we are not obligated to care about or extend any kind of aid to anyone, we get to be totally selfish if that's the way we want to be. Changing that because a portion of our population- even if that portion is a majority- feels that it's the moral thing to do and therefore ought to be the legal requirement edges really close to that line between being a democracy (or a democratic republic) and being a theocracy. It ought to go without saying that reinventing our government as a theocracy is a really bad idea for all but a very small handful of people, because in a theocracy only 1 religion gets to set all the rules according to their agreed upon interpretation of what the right way to live according to their religion, and everyone must conform explicitly to that interpretation and the laws that stem from it. I doubt that even Kirk Cameron could manage to avoid punishment for breaking some sort of a law if the leaders of his church became the government tomorrow. If you have ever felt burdened and treated unfairly because another person or your government has made you do something that you did not want to do that you did not see the necessity of being done, and if you are one of those people who feels a moral obligation to do whatever you can to ensure that our laws protect the unborn's right to life, then stop and think about the hypocrisy of your own thoughts and feelings in relation to what you're asking women be required to do.
Is there any justification for requiring women to carry a pregnancy to term outside of religion? In short, no, not unless you are going to require all people to do whatever they are able to give the gift of life to anyone they are physically capable of giving it to. The fact that pregnancy is a natural consequence of having unprotected sex goes out the window when you counter with the fact that there are natural and man made methods of relieving a woman from the burden of suffering that consequence. Most actions that humans take have a natural consequence, and we don't prohibit anyone from utilizing medicines, treatments, procedures, or taking other actions to avoid or counteract those consequences even if it means involving another person to assist them somehow. Playing with fire in an irresponsible manner doesn't preclude someone from being able to call upon the fire department to put out the fire and save them from a burning house. Sure, putting out the fire could be seen as necessary to protect the lives and property of innocent people around the wrongdoer, but the natural consequence would be to at least let them go ahead and die in the fire they started if they can't get themselves outside.
If carrying a pregnancy to term is punishment for bad behavior, then what behavior is it punishing- the sex, the fact that it was unprotected, the fact that it resulted in a pregnancy that was not actively being sought, or is it just the fact that a woman dares not to want to be pregnant and give birth to a child? Do a majority of the people want laws outlawing sex unless it is expressly intended to result in procreation? Do we want to hand over the authority to seek out and arrest people who are having sex for reasons other than procreation? Is the crime in having sex without preventing pregnancy through the use of effective birth control? Again, do we want to give government the authority to investigate who is adequately protecting themselves from pregnancy during every sexual encounter and to punish those who are not? If the thing we want to discourage by prohibiting it is getting pregnant without planning to then should every male and female who contribute to a pregnancy's existence be interrogated as to whether they intended for it to happen, and face charges if their interrogators don't believe that they did? Maybe women should begin being questioned monthly as soon as they begin menstruating as to whether they wish to become pregnant and have a child that month and then fined for every month that they answer negatively or be forcibly inseminated if they claim that they do wish to.
None of what I suggested above should ever be considered a legitimate role of government by anyone who honestly believes in the right to freedom that we are guaranteed by our constitution. Laws as intrusive as those I have described hypothetically would never be upheld as constitutional if they were written and enforced against someone like Thomas Jefferson or Mitt Romney, or even Sarah Palin. Anyone like those people, subjected to those types of laws would fight their way all the way to the Supreme Court to see that type of injustice stricken from the laws of our country, and they would win. Every single living person in our country is supposed to have the same assurance that their rights will be respected by our government, and that if it were them fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn laws like these they would also be assured a win.
Ultimately it does not matter whether a person is a person from the moment they are conceived or not. Our laws that govern the actions of people who are not actively acting as authorized representatives of our government aren't there to protect anyone from being unlucky and unable to live without someone else's help. The government can grant itself the authority to extend help to those in need whenever or wherever it is physically possible to do so, but it does not and cannot require a private citizen to take on that role for no other reason than because it is the nice or "morally right" thing to do. In the case of people who die as a result of their mother choosing to have them expelled from their womb they were just unlucky enough to have chosen the wrong womb to take up residence in. It's irrelevant whether the mother made a poor choice that resulted in their being able to be conceived and implant in her womb, the fact still remains that it is hers and she isn't obligated to share it with them just because they need her to. If there were a way for the rights of both people to be protected by virtue of the mother having the option to transfer the fetus to someone else then refusal on her part to do so might reasonably be punishable by law, but until that is an option the rights of the fetus cannot be judged as being more important than the right of the mother to say "No, I don't want another person in my body."
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