In my home state of Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence recently signed a new law adding some regulations to abortion providers. This law would forbid abortions motivated by race, sex or disability status. It also requires doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital (or at least have an agreement with someone who does). It also includes some strange things, like limiting the donation of fetal tissue and requiring that aborted or miscarried fetuses be cremated or interred. To me, a pro-life person, this law is a mixed bag. It’s great that they want to limit discrimination this way, but on the other hand, requiring cremation of fetuses is probably unconstitutional.
Regardless of the specifics of the law though, it got me thinking about the state of abortion politics in this day and age. As a young, female, atheist pro-lifer, I often find myself with little company among my mostly leftist peers. I was surprised to find out that actually, millennials are the most pro-life generation, according to this Gallup poll. I find this heartening, especially given that we are also the least religious generation. It seems then that more people are subscribing the the pro-life argument based on secular moral arguments.
We all agree that killing people is wrong. The difference between being pro-life and pro-choice is at what point you define a human to be a person. This can vary pretty hugely. For example, 20 percent of people don't think third-trimester abortions should be illegal, even though a baby born early in the third trimester has a 92 percent chance of living. Even a baby born halfway through the pregnancy has a decent chance of surviving (and about one third of people think abortions at that time should be legal). Clearly there are some people out there who think it's cool to kill a baby up until the point it actually pops out. Granted, most pro-choicers are not so extreme. Plenty of them limit the "abortion is OK" window to just the first trimester, before the fetus is reasonably close to being able to survive outside the womb.
Even so, what makes that cutoff significant? I'm not going to bore you with a developmental biology lecture (though I find it fascinating). If people actually cared about killing things with beating hearts that can feel pain, we'd all be vegetarians. What my point is, is that it is wrong to kill anything that is, or will become a person. A person who could contribute something to the legacy of humanity. A person who could enjoy their life. Sure, that person might just be a ball of cells right now; hell, it might just even be one cell, but barring unusual circumstances, it will become a fully-functioning human being.
Imagine if you have a patient who is in a coma. Sure, he's completely useless right now, he must be kept on a life support system, he's taxing on his family's emotions and pocketbooks. But if everyone knew that he would wake up in about nine months, it would be considered murder to cut the cord. I see little difference between that and an unborn baby.
But I don’t want to spend all of my time arguing for the pro-life viewpoint. Even though I personally believe that abortion is wrong, does that mean the view should be enforced on everyone? Statistics show that even when abortion is banned, about the same number of people get them. And when they are illegal, the abortions tend to be more dangerous for the woman involved.
Knowing this fact, I think that those of us in the pro-life movement, should be able to work together with pro-choice individuals on a goal we both want: lowering the number of unplanned pregnancies to start, as well as making the adoption process easier.
Speaking of adoption, there are at least 1 million couples in the country who are waiting to adopt a child. And since there are not even 100,000 children put up for adoption every year, babies should be placed quickly. But they often are not, due to systemic flaws in our adoption process.
With regard to the production of those children in the first place, the US has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies (and therefore abortions) in the western world. The best way to change that is by having better sex ed. I think that it's very important to teach people what their bodies are actually doing, and provide non-religious, objective information about sex. If we couple this with socially trying to decrease the stigma around frankly talking about sex, we should be able to make a dent in the unintended pregnancy count.
Neither side will ever completely win in the abortion debate. How about instead, we focus on working together in solving the practical issues of unintended pregnancies and adoptions, which we all can see need solving.
