Abortion as a Conflict of Extremes - Essay Example

I. Thesis This is about a conflict of extremes, of life in opposition to liberty. No right is more fundamental than the right to live. And the premature demise of a very young child is one of life’s most terrible misfortunes. To bring about such loss of life is an enormous error. And if killing infants or infanticide is a mortal sin, is the killing of a fetus who is about to be born any different? Nothing is more heartbreaking than a life devoid of liberty. A life in which an individual can be obliged into parenthood is merely such a life. Sexual harassment or rape is among the most intense refutation of liberty, and forcing a woman to bear a sexual harasser’s child is an attack on her core being. How dissimilar is it to coerce her to remain pregnant and eventually become a mother merely due to attempts at birth control by accident failed? From her perspective, the pregnancy is unwanted. From the point of the view of the unborn child, how the pregnancy comes about definitely makes no difference. If obliging a woman to go on with a pregnancy that will almost surely kill her is unacceptable, how different is it to force her to carry on with a pregnancy that will most likely abbreviate her life or a pregnancy that will make her life miserable? Of all the false notions concerned in the abortion debate, none is more relentless than the idea that science has not yet established when life starts. This mistaken belief is well-known but completely unbelievable. For centuries, biologists have already known that an unborn child is living for the duration of the pregnancy. It is the unavoidable conclusion of a principle as fundamental to “biology as gravity is to physics or the heliocentric solar system is to astronomy” (Marianna, 2002, 83). The main theological subject matter created by the abortion discourse focuses on the personhood of the unborn child. Evangelical Christians who are laboring for a legitimate human existence modification to prohibit abortion claim that the Bible preaches, namely, that the unborn child is a person and that abortion is undoubtedly an act of murder. According to Harold Brown, “The Bible prohibits the taking of innocent human life. If the developing fetus is shown to be a human being… (or) if human life has begun, then abortion is homicide and not permissible” (Segers, 1995, 102). Although the opening statement is apparently different, Brown’s argument is in fundamental accord with that of the statement of Pope Pius XII: “Innocent human life, in whatever condition it is found, is withdrawn, from the very first moment of its existence, from any direct deliberate attack” (ibid, 102). The narrative has merely restricted relevance to the present abortion discussion since it addresses with unintentional, not determined, pregnancy termination. All the same, the difference established between the protections accorded the woman and that of the fetus under conventional law is essential. The woman has absolute disposition as an individual under the agreement, unborn child has merely a relative disposition, definitely subordinate to that of the woman (Rubin, 1987). This means of access provides no sustenance to the equality discourse that presents equal spiritual and moral importance to woman and unborn child. II. Antithesis The social movement that became popularly known as the ‘pro-choice’ movement has its roots in the sixties as a free association of women’s movement. Ironically, the movement attained its most stunning triumph, the legitimization of abortion in the seventies, before pro-choice organizations transformed to be well established and organized, hence powerful (Tribe, 1992). Even though, as many have seen, a basic right of a woman is undoubtedly incriminated if she decides to terminate a pregnancy, what would be the reason the government shouldn’t be free to avoid abortion out of genuine concern for the damage each abortion automatically brings? Nevertheless, the Constitution occasionally allows government to restrict even the most fundamental rights and liberties. Numerous have been enlisted to give up their life in war. Others have been drafted in instances substantially less disastrous. Law enforcement, medical practitioners, and firefighters, for instance, will more often than not officially direct bystanders at an urgent situation to collaborate even at the perils of their lives. Apparently, abortion prohibitions might do insignificantly to save unborn children. Such prohibitions might instead compel distracted women into dangerous illegal abortions, in which the fetuses are not rescued and in which many women may die also. Or abortions can be deferred, with the outcome that several fetuses that are killed are more considerably developed than they would have been with no abortion prohibitions. Or possibly the prohibitions would have no relevant impact on behavior, particularly taking into account the increasing accessibility of drugs that induce premature abortion devoid of any need for option to a health care clinic or hospital. With such sophisticated procedures, abortion prohibitions might function primarily to disallow women a representational affirmation of their self-rule, while abandoning many women quite open to terminate unplanned life safely (Segers, 1995). However, taking into account the extent of a woman’s liberty which is weighed down when government prohibits her from terminating her unwanted pregnancy if that is her decision, merely one of the diverse interests that a government might bring into play can reasonably qualify as adequately compelling; the safeguarding of human life. To take priority over liberty as fundamental as a woman’s autonomy to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, not to bear a child, not to become a parent, organized social order should definitely provide a significant justification. Only the rescuing of life would appear to meet the criteria. Someone who dispute that a woman has no privilege to an abortion have maintained that even though a premature embryo is on no account a human life, not yet an individual or a person, the government may lawfully decide to safeguard that embryo from intentional destruction at any stage in its development in order that it will have a chance to become a person. Even though the woman was sexually harassed, some comment, planning to kill the embryo merely generates a second blameless victim. This premise, that the unborn child need not, at any rate, be taken into account as a person so as to surpass the presence of a woman’s right to end her pregnancy at will, was prominently expressed in a disrespectful aside by the former dean of Stanford Law School and a respected law intellectual, John Hart Ely. At some point in the 1973 attack on Roe v. Wade, Ely mentioned that even if dogs definitely are not humans under the perspective of the Fourteenth Amendment, a government most confidently may make it a transgression for an oppositionist to end the life of a dog without in so doing disallowing the shortening of the oppositionist’s First Amendment freedom of speech. Remembering that the Supreme Court had once endorsed an act of Congress establishing it an offense to burn up a draft card, Ely responded, “Come to think of it, draft cards aren’t persons either” (Rubin, 1987, 64). III. Synthesis Most people are divided by the abortion debate. There is something profoundly deceptive about debating the abortion issue only with respect to the conflict between pro-life and pro-choice groups, as still every individual could accurately be branded as belonging to one side or the other. For almost everyone, the most profound reality is that the conflict is an internal one. Barely any people who allow their selves to sense all of what is at risk in the abortion debate can prevent a deep sense of internal rift. Whatsoever an individual’s justification, whether it is that the decision should go to the woman or that she should be stopped from terminating the unborn child, it is difficult no to consider profoundly the weight of the opposing view. However, that claim to life, as many have seen, should consequently be counterbalanced by the possible evils, genuine, even though if not adequately defined, of government-administered fetus plants. Exploring directly the roots of people’s discomfort at such government interference in the removal and incubation of a fetus indicates that the fundamental disagreement would not harm life against freedom, the fetus against the mother, so much as it would harm life against the prevention of state involvement into life’s unknowns, life against the prevention of possibly outrageous state involvement into mechanisms people spontaneously feel should be further than the reach of the state. Something similar to dread should be felt by everyone concerned in the abortion debate that has not become numb to the fact of what is at risk. This sentiment may be less profound with abortions carried out in the premature phases of pregnancy, when the embryo is a miniscule, apparently indistinct, multicelled development without audibly human characteristics. But definitely by some stage in pregnancy, as immediately as abortion concerns a fetus that is perceptibly human in outline, or when it concerns an unborn child that one might perceive sensing pain and agony, few individuals can prevent the feeling of tragic decision that each abortion necessitate. Since time immemorial, abortion has never been the answer to anything that is unwanted. References Frohock, F. M. (1985). Abortion: A Case Study in Law and Morals. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Marianna, C. J. (2002). Abortion: A Collective Story. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rubin, E. R. (1987). Abortion, Politics and the Courts: Roe v. Wade and its Aftermath. New York: Greenwood Press. Segers, M. C. (1995). Abortion Politics in American States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Tribe, L. H. (1992). Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. New York: W.W. Norton. Read More