First, let’s get this out of the way. The two polar positions on abortion are irreconcilable.
Well-meaning people on both sides see this differently. While the respective positions cannot be reconciled, we can reconcile our politics with each other. No, I am not talking about some amoral, insipid, putting aside of our convictions. I am telling you, we conservatives, Republicans, and libertarians are being tricked into clashing every four years, at presidential election time, and we do not have to let ourselves be divided and picked off. We had better figure out how to reconcile our politics, or we all lose.
It is time to first lay out plainly what those irreconcilable positions are. Then, I will suggest to you how the irreconcilable positions do not have to abort our efforts to elect a president who will govern within the bounds of the Constitution.
Pro-choice
The foundation of the pro-choice position is that conception produces some interesting cells, but not a human being. Conception produces a fertilized egg, but such cells are no more human than, say, a fingernail clipping. It, too, is human tissue, but there is nothing magical, or spiritual, or “human” about the human tissue produced immediately after conception. It is a zygote, not a person. Therefore, killing this tissue is not murder any more than getting a manicure. Sure, you have lost some of your tissue, but nothing “human”—at least yet. There is nothing of any value to balance against the right of the mother to exercise dominion over her own body.
Pro-life
The pro-life position is unambiguous: conception creates a human being. It is not up to us, or even within our capability to reason our way to pinpointing when this new human somehow develops sufficiently to gain our attention as a “person,” meriting legal rights like the rest of us. Conception differs from letting your fingernails grow in that your fingernails do not result in new people. The “zygote” does result in a new person, and is, indeed, a new person,immediately, regardless of whether this tiny person “looks” and “acts” grown up, or exhibits even child-like behavior that we can discern. Thus, this position can conclude only that abortion is homicide. None of the traditional legal justifications for homicide rise to the level of a defense; therefore, abortion is the unlawful killing of a human being—murder. The mother’s circumstances cannot alter that awful fact; therefore, the mother’s wishes do not out-balance the life of the new human.
Those are blunt, short statements of each of the most opposite positions. It does not matter for this purpose how you react to either position-statement above. What matters is that the two positions are the natural conclusions of their respective—and opposite—starting assumptions. If you believe that the conceived human zygote is not a person, then clip it out and no harm is done. If you believe that a human comes into being at the moment of conception, that same tissue removal is a murder.
The prevailing, really uncomfortable, somewhere-between position that is Roe v Wade
The prevailing way of thinking holds the vague notion that at some point these developing tissues “become human.” At that point, or maybe incrementally at different developmental stages, the tissues deserve levels of legal status and protection, culminating with the tissues being granted personhood at birth. That is Roe v Wade, with the justices’ trimester breakdown balancing the mother’s choices against levels of “humanness” in the life stages of the person growing inside. The new human life is not sacrosanct throughout the 9 months; neither is the mother’s dominion over her body sacrosanct over the entire 9 months. I say again: that is Roe v Wade.
That may be your own view. Most of us do not like to think about this at all. But, we have to, if for no other reason than because people who despise liberty are using this uncomfortable issue to beat us at the polls.
If you are forced to think about it, almost all of us are pro-life—at some point. You react that that? Try this experiment on yourself? Is it murder to kill a two-year old? Of course. A two-month old? Yes. A two-week old? A two-day old? What about a baby two hours old? Would a post-birth abortion of a two hour old baby be murder? What about at two-minutes after birth? Two seconds after birth? Is it murder for a stressed-out college student to dump her newborn into a trash chute? Most of us would squirm, but say, “Yes, that is murder.”
Now, what about two minutes before birth? Would that be murder? Two days before birth? Two weeks? Two months? You see where I am going with this. I dare say that the most firmly pro-choice among us picks some point along that timeline and says,”OK, stop here!”
People between the “fingernail clipping” and “moment of conception” positions are—of necessity—pretty vague about where that point is that the fingernail clipping took on humanity. Where you are along that continuum depends on many things. Some value what we think of as intelligence as the defining human characteristic. Some look for signs of the emotions that we think of as making us human: love, laughter, signs from the child of a growing sense of self. Many of us have either had abortions, or have been the inseminating cause behind an abortion, and perhaps might not even know. Many can recall a time in life when having a baby would have been a major hindrance. Those experiences influence how far we are willing to go holding abortion to be legal. For some, the personal liberty of the mother is paramount, pushing that lawful abortion closer and closer to birth.
If you are not squirming by now, you are not human. Ha. I say all of the above not indict anyone, and not to try to write some exhaustive piece on abortion; nor am I trying to sway you either way, or to any point along that conception-to-birth continuum. All of the above is just a short summary of the issue—an issue being used brutally but effectively by the Democrat Party to fragment the Republican Party at every national election, especially the presidential election.
And, this is even more true when the Republican Party advances a candidate who is pro-life.
Everything written so far explores the clear underlying logic of the two most polar positions, and the third, more ambiguous, less clear position that is Roe v Wade. The purpose of this exercise is to emphasize to you that the positions are not reconcilable. However, they need not split the Republican cause.
In the next post: Reconciling by De-nationalizing Abortion
