The 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade finds anti-abortion legal efforts in the ascendancy in many states. As reported in The New York Times on Saturday, the Republican blowout in the November elections has brought anti-abortion governors and legislators to power in large numbers. Legislation under consideration would continue shredding the old Roe trimester model by pushing back the deadline for a legal abortion as early as 20 weeks. And the permission granted by the Supreme Court in recent decades for states to impose their versions of informed consent is now being exploited by proposed legislation that would require women to watch an ultrasound before going ahead with an abortion.
Our legal stalemate about abortion is like a football game, with the two rival teams pushing each other back and forth across the 50-yard line and neither team able to win -- especially if winning is defined by either the total banning of abortion on the one side or its unhindered legalization and funding as a routine health care practice on the other. The pro-life and pro-choice establishments appear committed to the continuation of this game of smash-mouth abortion football until the end of time.
It is quite a spectacle, but the legal struggle is actually a distraction from the unresolved cultural and moral issues that have created it. Three of these may be worth reviewing as we do our annual marches in the street:
This collapse, which evolved gradually in western culture but accelerated dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, means that millions of men and women are having sex in all kinds of relational contexts on the assumption that they will be able to prevent or end pregnancy if such an accident should occur. But human fertility is not so easily thwarted. Therefore, our culture's sexual practices, to which we have been absolutely committed since the 1960s, appear to require routine access to abortion. We cannot address the abortion problem without addressing our national sexual ethic, which has evolved from the ancient tradition that sex belongs in marriage, to the briefly regnant social norm that sex belongs in committed relationships, to the current standard that sex belongs wherever I want it to belong.
There is a great ambivalence in all discussions of the contemporary abortion problem about the extent to which it is an issue of women's moral choices versus the responsibility of women and men as individuals, or women and men together, e.g., couples. I noticed this when I participated in the much-discussed "Open Hearts, Open Minds" conference on abortion at Princeton this fall. The classic pro-choice position emphasizes that "reproductive choice" related to the decision to carry a pregnancy to term solely rests with the woman. But this gain for women's autonomy is purchased, at least to a great extent, at the expense of men's responsibility for the children they help to conceive. And it contributes to a cultural climate in which sex is not a part of a mutual covenant between a man and a woman who both bear responsibility for its consequences, but instead the act of individual need-meeting moral agents whose interests and rights differ dramatically if sex should accidentally result in the conception of a child. This deepens the distrust between men and women in our culture.
This is a more subtle transition and extends back much further in western history. My claim here is that the western intellectual heritage -- I speak especially of historic Christianity and Judaism -- trained people for a very long time to orient their lives around living rightly, as right living was prescribed by their faith. There was a given moral framework to the universe and our responsibility was to fit our lives to that framework, which, of course, these faith traditions believed came from God.
It is quite a shift from that to the widely held contemporary belief that I create my own moral framework autonomously and that I have the right to the practice of whatever that moral framework leads me to choose to do. This then bumps up against everyone else's claim to the right to pursue whatever they believe their rights are based on their own personalized framework. Society becomes a chaotic collision of rights-claims, with everything ending up in court.
I called the entire abortion problem a tragedy at the Princeton conference, and I stand by it. I think our cultural moral confusions about sex, male-female relationships and rights are visited disproportionately upon the spirits and bodies of women, for only women get pregnant; and, of course, on the incipient unborn lives with which women's lives are intertwined and which so often do not see the light of day. Every woman looking up the phone number for the abortion clinic is a symbol of this tragedy.
These cultural problems will never be resolved by legislation. If abortion were to be banned in all 50 states tomorrow, and nothing else I have described were to change, there would still be hundreds of thousands of women seeking abortions each year in America. Abortion law is relevant. But the problems go deeper than the law, and therefore so must the solutions. Those seeking such solutions must work together across the old battle lines, because we need the best that each has to offer if we are to make any headway on this human crisis at all.
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Abortion debate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Rhetoric That Shaped The Abortion Debate : NPR
Ten Arguments For Abortion and Against Abortion
Roe v. Wade anniversary marked by vigils, demonstrations - CNN
2011 March for Life and Roe v. Wade Anniversary Rallies in ...
Boehner marks Roe v. Wade anniversary, highlights anti-abortion ...
The women I know who have had abortions have done so as a matter of responsibility, not convenience. Women have responsibilities to many people, including themselves and a potential child. I know of one situation in which an abusive husband wanted his wife pregnant so he could use the child--threatening to kidnap or kill it to keep his wife in line. I know of another woman who had an abortion in order to protect her lover's career and, yes, his children with his wife. And there was the husband who authorized a so-called late term abortion for his wife because the fetus had died in utero and she was too near death to make the decision for herself.
Reproductive rights are about taking responsibility.
While I think that women who are pregnant SHOULD talk to the father about this issue, and consider his opinion - he doesn't have to carry the child for 9 months, deal with the dietary, social, emotional, physical, and other issues women face during pregnancy. He can leave at any time - during or after pregnancy. Last time I checked - men don't have uteruses - and ultimately, the decision rests with women. No one should be forced to be a mother when they don't want to be one EVEN IF the father is willing to be financially or otherwise emotionally/physically supportive.
But pregnancy is not a walk in park. It is very hard on a womans body. Figure out a way for a pre-viabile fetus to continue gestation outside the mothers body and you could reduce the number of abortion to minisclue, medically related numbers. Until that happens, reducing access will just cause more death, because more and more of the women will also "be terminated"
It's true that we used to have a more fixed set of rules. Women were subservient to men, slavery was acceptable, all sex was reserved for marriage, etc. But I think people both inside the Judeo-Christian tradition would accept that we got some of that stuff wrong. We might disagree about how much of it was wrong. The one clear lesson we should get from this is that attributing morality to God does not mean one gets the content of morality correct.
That does meant that either one has to blindly submit to a fallible source of morality, or one needs to use ones autonomy to try to figure out what is right. But it is silly to confuse this with the idea that one believes that one makes things moral by deciding things are moral. Pro-choice people do not believe that forcing women to carry pregnancies to term is a valid moral position one can choose. They are just as much realists on morality. They disagree about the content.
And as for how much Bible God cares about children....what caring god would order the slaughter of innocent babies or pregnant women, as he does again and again? (2 Kings 15:16, Exodus 12:29-30, Numbers 31:17, Hosea 9:11-16, Hosea 13:16, Ezekiel 9:5-7, Isaiah 13:15-18)
“Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of”. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Again, I personally would want to know what she was and is thinking? What people, race does she think need to be controlled? Not one follow up question has ever been asked of her.
There was no golden age. Sex has always occurred before marriage. Women have always been put in situations where they have sought ways to end a pregnancy. We need to work on ways to make it safe for women to carry to term or to prevent pregnancy when they can't. We need to ensure that marriage is a sacrament again and not just a reason to blow your parent's retirement fund.
Tragic as it is, I and my children would give our lives to defend the right to abortion. For us it is the emblem of Freedom - the very thing Americans care fro most.
In addition, the stigma accruing to abortion has made it 'controversial' for medical schools to offer training in how to actually do D&C and suction procedures (since they are identical to those in elective abortions) and that impacts whether women who have miscarriages receive appropriate followup care that safeguards their health and fertility.
The thought also does tend to leap to mind -- if God/Nature set up the process so that naturally half or more of conceptions are discarded, just what is the basis for all the hysteria about choosing to deliberately discard a few more?