Abortion

The Full Explanation of and Solution to the “Abortion Debate/Issue”

Life and Antilife influence both of the traditionally identified sides of the American/Western abortion debate. Without understanding Antilife, the traditional conclusions of “selfish” or “ignorant”-slash-“religiously insane” remain the common answers to the other “side.” However, these conclusions fail.

Morally, socially, legally or otherwise, should the intentional termination of human pregnancy be condoned? The “Pro Life” argument goes as follows, to varying degrees: Once the choice has been made to conceive the child, it is an ending of life to terminate the pregnancy, thus akin to murder, even though it may be murder of a human who cannot yet be seen. Alternatively, the specifically (or admitted) religious “Pro Life” argument suggests that a deity, generally the Christian God, condemns abortion; this often (perhaps more often than not, or perhaps nearly always) underscores the core “Pro Life” argument.

The “Pro Choice” argument goes as follows, to varying degrees: A conceived child is part of a woman’s body, leaving it her choice to alter her body and terminate the child/pregnancy. The “Pro Life” argument tends to favor terminology referring to the post-conception contents of the woman’s body as a child, while the “Pro Choice” argument tends to avoid such.

The American media climate tends toward insubstantial voyeurism directed at the exchange of those offering fervent or pragmatic retellings of the traditional arguments discussed above.

The logical problems with the “Pro Life” arguments are:

1) A human embryo, prior to the development of a fetus, is a mixture of sperm and egg, being then formless and thoughtless. While it has the potential for life, it may or may not be life. To designate it definitively “life” and call the extraction of it from the woman’s body a murder is to designate menstruation, masturbatory emissions of sperm, or expired sperm in the testicles as death, murder, etcetera. Similarly, if dispelling the mixture of sperm and egg is murder, then any of the required chemical processes of building genetic components into child (from the sexual union of penis and vagina to the medical insertion of donor sperm via syringe) have a relation to murder. Menstruation, masturbation, sperm production and intercourse are, in fact, aspects of life, but stopping them is not a murder.

2) The Christian perspective against abortion is in error. The Christian Bible, in Exodus 21:22-23, commands that if fighting men harm a pregnant woman, and she has a miscarriage, the responsible man will pay a fine, but if the woman dies, he will be put to death. The Bible, therefore, offers a clear delineation of value between the life of a woman and the life, if any, inside her; the miscarriage is treated as a wounding of the woman, rather than the killing of a child. The passage also suggests, depending on translation, that if the child is “fully formed” the man may be put to death, which suggests that the Christian God would have little problem with abortion prior to the development of the fetus.

3) More commonly recognized problems with the traditional “Pro Life” argument are, if people are so passionately interested in protecting other peoples’ babies (to the point of extreme emotion, donating money and giving substantial time and effort to causes to protect said babies), why might they also be the same people who actively encourage, disregard or disacknowledge the killing of children of other nations and cultures, or the impoverishment and starvation of children in other and/or their own nation and culture? (An economic motivation will be discussed later, but it does not suffice to explain the motivations of most of those advocating the “Pro Life” argument.)

The logical problem with the “Pro Choice” argument is:

At some stage during the pregnancy, perhaps months away from the time traditionally required for the body or medical staff to induce birth, a child may be capable of surviving outside the womb with basic or advanced medical care, and therefore, warrants treatment equivalent to that provided a newborn. Conjoined with that fact is the fact that human infants cannot survive without external care immediately after (and generally for a long time after) birth. A 100%-of-the-time abortion policy based upon the infant’s need for the woman’s body is, therefore, equivalent to allowing mothers to kill children up until a certain age of independence (which would give rise to another debate as to the identification of said age), unless the only difference offered in support of maintaining the argument is the mere physical location of the child (i.e., inside the womb).

More interesting and useful than the problems with the original arguments, however, are the problems with the reactions of each “side” to one anothers’ arguments.

A “Pro Choice” argument which desires the allowance of only abortion of the embryo, but disallows abortion of the healthy fetus with heartbeat, human shape, sensory organs and brain activity, however tiny be said fetus—has no inherent logical flaw. However, outside the flat dimension of logic, the “Pro Choice” argument fails against the aspect of reality vigorously defended by the “Pro Life” argument: the fertilized egg is life in the same way that humanity’s ancestors, the early protein chains in the primordial soup, are life. Life is potential; life is chance; life is growth and change and dynamism, though not—necessarily or ever—an absolute promise of being a self aware, self-sustaining bipedal mammal. The core flaw of the “Pro Choice” argument is its attempt to disguise, subconsciously or consciously, the act of removing from future existence the nascent human, be it termed abortion, murder, or anything else. Genetic material in the form of unspent eggs or sperm tends farther away from life than does a fertilized egg, but a fertilized egg—the union of the species’ two sexes’ coding for expanding life—is the very stuff that human life is made of.

The reconciliation of this error is found in the acceptance of the act of abortion as an act of killing; allowing that abortion may represent a sliver of the pie chart which includes all possible definitions of “killing.” While Evil and Antilife stand against Life, death is life, is death is life. Mercy killing of the unwanted, unaffordable, sick or twisted fertilized egg, embryo or fetus, can be advocated for, just as the neoliberal would be more likely to excuse mercy killing of the suffering elder than would the typical “crazy red-state Pro-lifer.” The “Pro-choicer” would move closer to truth in accepting that the advocacy of abortion is one of the positive dealing of death, rather than dealing in the absolute and ludicrous claim that it is somehow not death. To do otherwise manifests the same fear of death (as part of the necessary cycle of renewal and growth of Life and Good) manifested by the “Pro-lifer” in other aspects. If a distinction cannot be drawn between the (possibly) positive death of (mercy?) abortion and the evil of murder, then the advocate on either side remains on an unreal plane, constrained by two-dimensional semantics.

Just as the envisioned “Pro Life” advocate may be a servant of evil through embracing the miserable enslavement of impoverished hordes unable to limit unsupportable offspring, the envisioned “Pro Choice” advocate may be a servant of evil through the selfish lifestyle of consumerism, capitalist career advancement, and lustful fulfillment without its associated rewards: the emergence and wonder of new life, which sustains and grows all that the advocate consumes and has come from.