The most notable thing about the abortion debate is that it’s not a debate at all! The definition of a debate is two sides arguing against each other. Eventually one side wins and the debate ends. But what we have here is two sides shouting past each other into a vacuum. Each focuses on just half of the issue while resolutely ignoring the other half. Consequently, no matter how long they go on shouting, nothing will ever be resolved. The whole thing is a total waste of everybody’s time and energy.
One side drones on endlessly about the unborn child’s right to life as if the mother were merely an incubator with no rights at all. The other is equally obsessed with women’s reproductive freedom as if the inconvenient unborn child somehow did not exist. Neither group of impassioned warriors is prepared for so much as a second to consider that there might be anything at all to be said for the other side of the matter. But the tragedy of an unwanted pregancy is that two people are involved, both have rights that would be considered inalienable in any other context, and those rights are in irreconcilable conflict. No matter what happens, whether an abortion takes place or whether it is prevented from taking place, at the end of the day someone’s “inalienable rights” will have been alienated. There is no third way and therefore no good answer to this situation, only a choice of bad ones.
This seems to be such a horifying prospect for many people that they can only cope with it through denial. That would explain why both sides feel obliged to ignore the other half of the abortion situation. All of us who are not psychopaths have a conscience which steers us toward doing the right thing. It is frequently overridden by greed or fear and can be distorted by ideology, but it cannot be permanently put to sleep. In our hearts we continue to wish to do right, and therefore we find it difficult to admit that sometimes there is no genuinely right answer to a situation in which we may find ourselves. We must either determine and then choose the lesser of two evils, or embark on a campaign of pretence to persuade ourselves that the side we prefer is unambiguously good and the other side unambiguously evil and wrong. And we must then screen out anyone who dares to argue the contrary and refuse to listen to them for a moment.
Another problem with seeking out the lesser evil is that you usually need to identify what this is on a case by case basis. An unwanted pregnancy is a very personal situation and probably each case will be different in subtle ways. There are no general rules. But you can’t make laws which work like that because the law has to be the same for everyone. So while an individual woman might make her decision by herself or after consultation with her doctor, pastor or friends, and on the basis of her unique situation, lawmakers need to establish general rules that are acceptable in their society. Otherwise no one would know if their behaviour was lawful or not.
The traditional way to solve this kind of problem is to have a general vote on it. The rationale behind this is not that the will of the people is always right, but that the will of the people is always ascertainable and what is right may not be ascertainable at all, especially if it varies from case to case and most of the population are determined in all cases to see only one side of the argument. In the USA, this kind of dispute about laws is usually settled at state rather than federal level. Consequently things that are controversial may be allowed in some states and forbidden in others, depending on how the state electorate votes. But until recently the Roe v. Wade decision apparently gave American women everywhere a constitutional right to abortion which I, as an interested foreigner looking in, find exceedingly odd.
The people who created the constitution were all well-to-do middle-aged men of the late 18th century (they were all white men too, though that’s not particularly relevant to this argument). Most of the subsequent amendments were drafted by men of the same kind as those who wrote the original document. It would be utterly ridiculous to suppose that any of these men intended to grant women the right to have abortions. Even if the right to an abortion were unquestioned in our own century (and it is not), it could not by any stretch of the imagination be what those 18th and 19th century men meant when they wrote about “privacy”. The Roe v. Wade decision took the form that it did because the balance of the Supreme Court (which was well to the Left at the time) believed that women should have these rights and chose to interpret (or misinterpret) the constitution accordingly. In short, it was a political decision disguised as a constitutional and legal one.
What they forgot is that two can play that game, and the balance of the Court could easily swing back the other way if a right-wing president happened to be in office at the time when some of the left-wing judges retired. And this did indeed happen under Trump. What the pro-abortion movement should have done, if they wanted a permanent change in the law, was to draft a constitutional amendment giving women the right to a medical abortion in a given set of circumstances and get it passed in the requisite number of state legislatures. Then it would have been permanent and no president could have reversed it. Instead, they cheated by taking a short cut and it hasn’t worked out well in the long term.
What will probably happen now is that states will decide individually whether to allow or forbid abortions. And since American women do unquestionably have a constitutional right to travel freely in their own country, pregnant women who cannot get an abortion in their own state will simply go to states like New York and California to have their abortions, much as Irish women used to cross over to England for the same purpose. It will be messy and make the USA a bit of a laughing stock internationally but it will work after a fashion, and eventually a nationwide consensus may be reached that will allow a more sensible solution. But that highly desirable conclusion will not be reached until the two sides are at least willing to admit each other’s existence and actually talk to each other.
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