Tuesday, August 5, 2008

The Issue of Abortion (part II)

Like I said in my previous post, this issue needs two different conversations about two very different kinds of abortion. One about early abortions, where the baby is completely undeveloped, and another about later term abortions, past about 15 weeks, where the baby has developed into everything that humans are. Today, I will adress the second of these two issues.
Two things must be conceded at the very beginning of the conversation. One is that regulating the procedures and medical care on someone's body is, indeed, invasive. Imagine how rediculous the idea would be if a baby was not involved. Telling someone, for instance, they may or may not be allowed to have a tooth pulled, or have some particular surgury. We would all be agreeing that this was both an invasion of privacy and an overstepping of enumerated power (remember the limited gov't post). The second thing is that the "right to privacy," the 'implicit right' that Roe vs. Wade was based upon, is NOT a bogus idea. The Constitution doesn't even pretend to spell out our rights. It spells out the government's rights. If you regularly say "Hey, the Constitution doesn't even give a right to privacy in the first place!" then you need to go and read the 9th amendment.
The reason having a conversation about lawful invasion of privacy is appropriate is because other rights are involved here. A living human baby is also part of the abortion question and, because of this, other people's rights are also in question. I understand this is where most of seem to disagree. But go and take a look at an ultrasound of a 20 week baby. Ask an OB-GYN whether a 18 week baby is really a baby. I understand you can make an objection about religion, but this is really only true for a brief time in the first term. Beyond this point, as Roe vs. Wade implied in their decision to NOT mandate 2nd and 3rd term abortions, we have a completely different set of arguments and reasoning. Even the law can recognize this when people are charged with double-murder because they kill a pregnant woman.
Many of the objections about making abortions outright illegal are early-term objections also. "What if a woman gets raped and then gets pregnant?" or "What if a parent is the father?" of even "What if we can't take care of a baby?" All of these objections are first term issues. Not a single one of them has a good reason why a second or third term abortion would be necessary.
You see, even if people are completely deviod of any religious understanding of a soul and have a "reasonable cause" to consider an abortion, even then we can see that waiting until a baby has developed into, indistputably, a human baby is both unnecesarry and cruel. Why is it that those who support the idea of an abortion want an abortion anytime? Why not, abortions in the first, say, 10 weeks and then after that, let's have the mother abandon maternal rights, the state remove the baby as soon as the baby could live on its own, and allow a couple who has been working for years to get pregnant have a chance to adopt the baby while it is still an infant? Why would abortion rights advocates not want something like this?
The reason is because they don't want what's best for the baby, like they say. They want it dead. There is a big difference between saying "we want what's best for both the mother and the baby" and saying "we want to be able to kill the baby and pretend it never happened." This is what 2nd and 3rd term abortions are really about. People want to "not be a mother." But they already ARE mothers. People don't want a baby. But the HAVE a baby. They don't want to not have to take care of it - they want it dead.
This is why this conversation needs to be split up. You may be able to reasonably argue that you want what is best for a child who was raped three days ago when you give her a "morning-after" pill, but to say this about a 26-week mother? This is ridiculous. There no other reason for allowing a 2nd and 3rd term abortion than to prefer a dead baby to an adopted baby. While you may not want a human baby inside of you, at 19 weeks, it is an objective, scientific reality.
While we must mingle religion with law, difficult situations, and discernment in first term abortions, this is not true at all for later term abortions. At that point, it has clearly become human. And at that point, -- "created human" -- it has attained certain unalienable rights. Like the Right to Life. And the government, after all, exists to protect exactly these rights.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Having worked in OB/GYN, I can tell you that an 18-week [i]fetus[/i] is nothing like a baby. Did you know that most abortions happen spontaneously? About half of all pregnancies are aborted. Does that mean that God doesn't want people to reproduce easily?

Will and Sena said...

And having 2 children - and watching 2 girls grow from conception to birth - I can tell you that they are quite like a baby. About as much as a child is like an adult. I never said there was no visible difference in appearance and physical developement - I said that they were both equally a living human being.
But that aside your comment about abortions..... you're making a comparison that is silly. You can't call any pregnancy that fails to produce a born child an abortion any more than you can call any death a murder. Saying that half of all pregnancies fail is totally different than saying that half of all pregnancies are aborted. That's implied in the very word "abort" - a terminate something before completion. This is very different from miscarraige.
Your objection is like saying that murder is not a crime because people die all the time.
And why would that imply to you that God doesn't want people to reproduce easily?