So, it has been 33 years since the Supreme Court decided the (in)famous case of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), where it decided the U.S. Constitution protects a woman's right to have an abortion. There are a million different things that could be said about the controversial decision, and the few that i'm going to say here are, i'm sure, fairly unoriginal.
First of all, i remember the first time i heard about abortion. It was sometime in elementary school. I can't exactly remember what grade i was in. The teacher presented the case without much bias, actually. Or, at the very least, not any bias that my young mind could detect. She presented the rhetoric, too. Those who opposed abortion were "pro-life," and those who supported abortion rights were "pro-choice." What a happy little world, i thought, where we can all be pro something. Back in the day, my undevelopled little mind saw the issue fairly simply: "i used to be a baby. why would you kill a baby? i'm pro-life!" Clearly, this is a huge oversimplification.
As time passed, my opinion would swing to the other side: a woman's right to decide what's going on in and with her body surely supercedes the "rights" of a few cells somewhere in her belly. But this, too, is an oversimplification.
So, where do i stand on the whole thing?
First, i think it's important to recognize that the issue is not cut and dry. It is not a simple issue to decide and i, personally, think that anyone who thinks otherwise is falling victim to the oversimplifications i, too, have fallen victim to. I think it's also important that, while many people on both sides of the debate have used the issue as a wedge, a political pawn, there are a great number of people on both sides that believe the way they do in good faith, and for very good and admirable reasons.
On the pro-life side, it seems clear to me that if you believe that life and the soul adhere at creation, then abortion is something to be opposed. I am not religious (i believe in the soul, although i shy away from using that word. i prefer "mind," which, for me, means about the same thing. For me, the mind, the ability to think, feel, reason, etc., on the level that humans do, is what sets us apart), but this view point does not strike me as immediately unreasonable. After all, even scientists can't tell us definitively when life begins. But this view need not be based in religion. The argument that the Constitution protects all Americans, and fetuses are Americans, so the Constitution protects them is, also, not immediately unreasonable.
On the pro-choice side, as i said earlier, it would be pretty much unfair to say that the rights of a single cell, or of two, four, eight, or sixteen cells, should override the right of a woman to decide whether or not to have a child. That argument satisfies me for cases where the abortion would happen on the day of conception, or two days later, or two weeks later. But things get tricky when you get closer and closer to the due date. Moreover, as Katherine pointed out to me, the right to an abortion ensures that a woman is able to choose if and when to have children, giving her more control over her destiny, career, sex life, and life in general which, in turn, means that she is more likely to be able to partake of the sorts of things that men take for granted.
But, of course, none of these interests can override the interest of protecting a sentient being's life. So the question becomes, again, when this amorphous blob of tissue becomes something more.
That is a question i cannot purport to answer.
What i can address is the rhetoric on each side. Pro-choice activists are not necessarily death mongers. They don't want to mandate abortions for everyone. They don't want to end the family. They simply want to protect the interests of potential mothers from legislation propogated largly by men who are, by definition, immune from the problem. Pro-choice activists see the balance as one of social progress for women against the rights of something that can't really be seen (in their opinion) as a person. Unsurprisingly, the balance comes out in favor of abortion rights.
Pro-life activists, similarly, are not necessarily anti-woman. They don't want women to continue to earn sub-par wages or to be locked out of high power or high paying positions. They're not necessarily bad people. They just see the issue as being between the rights of one person and another. One person just happens to be a fetus. Unsurprisingly, they believe that abortion is murder.
The point of all of this is to say that neither side is clearly wrong or clearly correct. As always, the resolution (and the right answer) probably lies somewhere in the middle. The biggest problem in this country today is nothing more than a failure to see eye to eye. Both sides of the aisle are to blame. It's easy to say that the fundamentalists are the only ones who are unwilling to compromise, but liberals have their own irrational moments, as well.
In the end, we're in this together, and we've gotta try to get along. Have your opinion, fight for it, challenge it, defend it. But try to understand the other side, too.
For my own part, i believe abortion is something a woman should be able to choose.
January 2006
