Abortion and Morality

It seems to me…

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”  ~ Margaret Sanger.

I began one of my posts with a quote by John William Warner: “I am pro-choice with limitations, pro-life with exceptions.”[i].  No, I do not like the idea of abortion any better than anyone else but acknowledge there are situations when it is the best of available undesirable options — some of those are obvious: rape, mother’s health…

Several people took exception to my comment.  This post is intended to slightly expand on one of the issues raised in the discussion following that posting.

Most people do not believe life begins at the moment of fertilization but there otherwise is little agreement as to when it actually occurs.  An implanted fertilized egg has a certain probability of developing but with in vitro fertilization, which has substantially less than 50 percent probability of success, unused eggs typically are discarded.  Does anyone consider an embryologist guilt of murder?  I prefer unused human eggs be donated to science for stem cell research to save many future lives.  One egg might die so countless others can live.

So the question comes down to when life begins and under what circumstances it is permissible to take a life.  What does it mean to be human?  To be a person?  Is it just a heartbeat?  The heart does not begin to beat until about the fifth week.  I tend to think consciousness/awareness/thought are more meaningful.  Though it’s hard to say when consciousness actually occurs, we know that a fetus has no measurable EEG activity in the brain until the second trimester.  In the U.S., 88 percent of abortions occur in the first trimester.

While the theory of recapitulation, a biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors, has been generally discredited; embryos do undergo a period where their morphology is strongly shaped by their phylogenetic position rather than by selective pressures so the theory still is considered plausible and applied by some researchers in fields like Behavioral Development.  Based on these vestiges of evolutionary development, there apparently are stages every human embryo undergoes within the womb.  The human embryo of viviparous mammals is not considered a fetus until the body structures are in a recognizable form, which for humans is not until after the end of the second month of gestation.  Maybe that is when “life” begins.

Since the initial male role is comparatively minuscule in the gestation process, this is an issue best left to the decision of women – it is their bodies – and men typically express their opinions only through typical male arrogance without fully accepting the woman’s perspective.  It is only following birth that the child is able to directly interact with individuals other than its mother.

I consider those who desire a totally ban on abortions to equally share the guilt of murder and maiming of young women as those performing back-alley abortions.  Only those of us old enough to remember what it was like prior to Roe vs. Wade, who knew women, some friends, who in desperation turned to those measures appreciate a ban’s full cost.

Banning abortion will not eliminate it – that is not human nature.  Remember that even now, it is estimated that about 68,000 women die annually resulting from unsafe abortion complications; between two million and seven million women each year survive unsafe abortion but sustain long-term damage or disease (incomplete abortion, infection [sepsis], hemorrhage, and injury to the internal organs, such as puncturing or tearing of the uterus).  Simply banning legal abortions will only increase the number of deaths and injuries.

That’s what I think, what about you?

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[i] Right To Life, https://lewbornmann.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/right-to-life/, 8 September 2011.