Backing up on abortion

Although I am a fiscal conservative and a strong supporter of the Bill of Rights—including the Second Amendment—I am socially fairly liberal, or at least moderate.  I support gay marriage, for example.  I have also always been a supporter of a woman’s right to choose when it comes to abortion, and I still am, but under circumstances that are far more limited than current practice. 

I have never been that comfortable with abortion except in cases of rape or incest.  Women are not brainless toys, and the idea that a woman could be swept off her feet and completely lose her self-control has always been ridiculous to me.  No one is that stupid.  If you get pregnant, it’s because you chose to have unprotected sex.  You should live with the consequences.  And the fathers should have a say, even though the embryo is housed in the mother's body, although that "say" should include a very heavy dose of co-responsibility.  Having said that, very early term abortions have never really bothered me, even when they are, in essence, used for birth control.

When abortion was legalized, I either did not see or did not hear arguments for a slippery slope.  I don’t recall any such arguments, and I’m not sure there were any.  Everyone’s idea of an abortion was abortion in the aftermath of regret for giving oneself away too easily, and those regrets come fast, long before a fetus even becomes a fetus.  Embryos just aren’t viable.

But it turns out there was a slippery slope.  My support for abortion “rights”--which I’ve always regarded as a misnomer, since abortion is not equivalent to, for example, free speech—took a huge hit when I started learning that some states allowed late-term abortions and I learned about partial-birth abortions.  From the very first time I heard of this procedure, I thought it was barbaric and that it was women choosing to take the irresponsibility of an unwanted pregnancy to an extreme.  I pretty much closed my ears to it, but the case of the doctor in Philadelphia, who “aborted” viable babies then snipped their spines to kill them, has made it impossible for me to maintain my willful ignorance.

As barbaric and gruesome as those practices are, however, what really brought this to a head for me is the fact that the head of Planned Parenthood, a woman, when asked what should happen to a viable baby who, through a botching of partial-birth abortion, was fully birthed, would not categorically state that, of course, the baby should not be killed.  Instead, she said that what happened to the baby should be between the woman and her doctor.

No.  It shouldn't.  Killing that baby is murder, pure and simple.

And if killing that baby is murder, so is killing a same-age baby who doesn’t manage to pop all the way out of the womb before being killed.  The anti-abortionists are right.  We are killing babies.  Not embryos.  Not fetuses.  Babies.

At about the same time I confronted this issue, a friend of mine on Facebook, who is the most progressive liberal I know, posted an article expressing outrage at sex-selection abortions in China.  Yes, this is outrageous.  Not the sex-selection abortion—that’s bad enough.  What’s outrageous is her hypocrisy.  Apparently only American women have the right to choose abortion, not Chinese women.  Some Chinese women probably want those girl babies, and some of them are probably coerced into abortion by their families.  This is wrong.  But male babies are highly valued by both men and women in China for cultural reasons.  Why should a Chinese woman have to have a baby she doesn’t want?  If an embryo or fetus is a potential beautiful, smart woman in China and should therefore be protected, why aren’t all embryos and fetuses seen for their potential rather than as abortable masses of tissue?

I personally am not swayed by the potentiality argument. I’m not bothered by the abortion of embryos, at least not for reasons of imagining them to become people they may never become even if they are born.  

But once a fetus is viable, it’s a baby.  We have to draw the line somewhere, and so far as I know, murder is still unacceptable in society.  Once the fetus is viable, it’s murder.  Other than banning abortion entirely, there is no other line that can be drawn.