With Senate Bill 395 the well-organized pro-life forces in the Michigan legislature hope to ban what they provocatively term “partial-birth abortion.” This procedure, properly called “Intact Dilation and Extraction,” is a drastic remedy used only rarely and in dire circumstances.
Proponents, motivated by religious fervor, readily admit that they are in fact uncompromisingly opposed to all abortion procedures for any reason. But since this extremist view is not shared by most people, their strategy has been to make incremental restrictions at the periphery.
Emotional rhetoric notwithstanding, there is no debate about whether a zygote-embryo-fetus is “human life.” It is, at every stage, both. But then so were the sperm and ovum from which it came. If destruction of all forms of human life were prohibited, we’d be prosecuting every doctor who ever removed an appendix.
Neither is the fact that the fertilized ovum is a unique whole, distinguishable from its mother, dispositive. If genetic distinctiveness were the criterion, termination of one of a pair of identical twins would be acceptable since the DNA line would still persist into the next generation in a brother or sister.
Nor are human lives intrinsically sacrosanct. Virtually everyone believes in self-defense, even when it is lethal. Most people will travel to the other side of the world to take the lives of total strangers who have been designated “the enemy” by their government. A substantial proportion actively supports executing some criminals.
Even the innocence of childhood is no sure protection. Our military recently slaughtered hundreds of Iraqi children – employing the euphemism “collateral damage” – without philosophical objection from advocates of SB 395.
Once we get beyond all the religious sophistry there are really only two relevant points vis-à-vis abortion restrictions.
The first is legal – defining the point in human gestation at which rights worthy of protection by the state inhere.
Advances in medical science have made people increasingly uncomfortable with the old “first breath” rule.
However, the “moment of conception” standard advocated by the pro-life community is also problematic, leading to such bizarre implications as legally transforming intra-uterine birth control devices into ipso facto murder weapons, and every fertile woman’s womb a potential crime scene every month.
It is worth noting that the “moment of conception” standard is relatively recent. The traditional Christian view traced the beginning of a new human being to a “moment of ensoulment,” said to occur sometime between the second and fifth month of pregnancy. It is in fact essentially this older doctrine that continues to be held by most people of faith in the world today since it is axiomatic to the idea of reincarnation.
Of course, an “ensoulment” standard is no less arbitrary than the “trimester” approach enunciated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.
And therein lies the problem.
Life is actually a continuum. While theologians may debate such arcane questions as when “ensoulment” occurs, this is of no help to the secular world since no such singular, scientifically-definable point exists.
That leads to the other relevant issue – which is political.
Because those with a pro-life philosophy currently dominate the Michigan legislature they may, barring a sustainable veto by the governor or overruling by the courts, succeed with SB 395.
But, in a free society all law ultimately rests upon the consent of the governed. So they will never be able to enact any anti-abortion law with which half the population disagrees. That’s why they continue to work at the margins.
They might be more effective if they expended their considerable energies advocating a standard based on viability.
The larger society would find this more compelling than either “moment of conception” or “first breath” precisely because it attempts to strike a balance between the rights of the pregnant woman and those of an offspring with the potential for self-sustaining existence apart from her.
Thus, a woman need not at any time be reduced to the status of an enslaved incubator. However, from the point of viability onward killing a “pre-born baby” in the process of ending a pregnancy would be regarded as using excessive force – a time-honored, common law concept.
Admittedly, “viability” is a subjective standard, as well – on a backward march through the stages of pregnancy in pace with the forward march of medical science. But it’s probably as close to consensus on a single standard as we’re likely to get.
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