Note: This is a conceptual sequel to the article “Motives, Compassion, and Abortion.” -----
There is always more to a movement than its intellectual support. Underlying each cause are the motives which people have for supporting it. Mere intellectualism is never enough to drive a people in a particular direction: they must have some reasons for holding the worldviews to which they subscribe. This is as much true for those involved in the abortion debate as anywhere else: both pro-lifers and pro-choicers. For example, the mere insistence that an unborn child is “just a clump of cells” does not sufficiently explain the intensity of the commitment of many on the pro-choice side to their cause. There must be some other motive, something which impassions people and galvanizes their wills, to explain why a person may be so unwaveringly pro-life or so undauntedly pro-choice.
From the pro-life side, the reason given is the knowledge that the unborn child is still a human child, and that he or she must be given the same rights and protections as any other human being. Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have a variety of motives for supporting legal abortion, each of which would take the movement down a different path. Far from bolstering each other, these motives are often completely unrelated, and in some cases actually tend to contradict each other as to what the ultimate aims of the abortion lobby are.
Often cited as the main motivation for pro-choicers is that a woman ought to have control over her own body. Anyone who has ever sat through a debate on the subject knows that this argument is the “bread and butter” of the movement, and it is certainly a possible motive for being pro-choice. However, if you were to listen to the rest of the pro-choice rhetoric, you’d soon discover that this cannot be the sole, or even the primary, motive for the pro-choice movement as a whole. Perhaps it never was.
Most debates between pro-life and pro-choice advocates do involve a cursory exchange between the two about when life begins, as the pro-choicer may attempt to argue that human life doesn’t begin at conception. With the deprivation of this point in development as a start of human life, the pro-choicer is generally backed into picking some other arbitrary point during the child’s development after which to confer the full rights and status of humanity upon him or her. Often this after a certain amount of development has occurred: generally, pro-choicers try to push for some time after the second trimester (at the earliest), and more often after birth.
Unfortunately for the pro-choicers, the advent of ultrasound technology has effectively destroyed their arguments for anything so late. Some try instead to argue that humanity is conferred upon the detection of brain-waves, but again, this occurs approximately 40 days after conception—well before the end of the first trimester. This being far too early into the pregnancy to draw the line for most abortion lobbyist’s tastes, they thus must make some arbitrary choice as to when abortion should no longer be “ok.” Hence Senator Barbara Boxer’s statement that “I think when you bring your baby home…the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights [of any other human].”
Inevitably, the topic of the debate will then switch to other points of debate. This is especially true if the debate allows audience questions. It is at this time that the full variety of pro-choice motives are seen on display. Whether or not any progress is made in demonstrating that the fetus is not human, and thus that a woman undergoing an abortion is only exerting control over her own body rather than that of somebody else, a variety of new arguments in support of legal abortion are made. These arguments run the gauntlet, from questioning whether the world has enough resources to provide for the extra children to suggesting that abortion is the most merciful thing that can be done for a child who would be born with “defects” or into poverty.
The first problem with this arguments, of course, is that they are mostly not arguments for any sort of “choice” on the part of the woman. Rather, such arguments. If followed to their natural conclusions, would end with mandating abortion for women under a variety of situations. If it is “merciful” to kill the child, then why should the woman be given the choice to keep him alive? Such, at least, was the reasoning of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who said that “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it" [1]. She also proposed the American Baby Code, which states that “No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child… without a permit for parenthood" [2]. So much for leaving the choice up to the woman.
The fact that many of these argument are really arguments to mandate abortions for all women falling below a certain income level or who have had more than a certain number of children (as in China) aside, one has to wonder why pro-choicers seem to keep inventing new arguments to support their cause. It’s as if they know that the old arguments are insufficient, not only in the sense that they may be factually wrong, but in the sense that they are not enough to justify abortion even if they were right. How is can one explain that people will cite contradicting reasons for allowing abortions? One can either be for abortion because it ought to be a woman’s right or because abortion is the only merciful thing that can be done for a defective child. We need it either because we don’t have the resources to support one more child or because the child’s birth may threaten the life of the mother (in which case, we would have one less person using up the world’s resources). One cannot logically hold all of these views simultaneously, and yet pro-choicers often will use all of these and more to defend their stance on abortion. Apparently, the maxim, “Repeat a lie often enough, and you will begin to believe it,” is true even if the lie contradicts itself.
That all of these things are so frequently and so widely used by pro-choice advocates to support abortion suggests at least one of two things. The first is that the people using these arguments don’t actually believe them at all and really have some darker motives in mind. Such was certainly true in the case of Sanger, whose ultimate aim was to use abortion and birth control as a tool for eugenics to eliminate blacks, Catholics, and any other type of person who didn’t fit into her view of what an ideal society ought to be. Such is almost certainly true for many of the unmarried sexually active men who support abortion—for them it’s as much an economic issue as a social one.
The second thing which the use of this contradictory web of arguments may suggest is, as I mentioned earlier, that many on the pro-choice side aren’t themselves convinced that abortion is right. Many have had abortions, or convinced other to have abortions, and so for there is nothing wrong with abortion because there can’t be. It must be a right, and thus it has to be ok. For if it is otherwise, then they have killed their own children, and worse, it was a pre-meditated act. Even in the depths of despair, they know tat what they have done was wrong, and try as they might, they can’t explain it away as being completely out of their control. And that’s for the women who have actually had abortions. For those who have encouraged abortions, for those who have performed them, the guilt is even worse: there was no despair driving them to do it, no plea of temporary insanity can be made.
G.K. Chesterton once said that “Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.” Professor Budziszewski takes this a step farther, noting that “To avoid traveling the next dark stretch of the road, there is no alternative but to make peace with the Furies, and travel back on the stretch we have lately come” [3]. For some, the horror of taking responsibility for such acts is too great—they can’t turn back and face their guilt, and are forced to go forward.
-----
[1] Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.
[2] The American Baby Code, Article 4. http://www.abortionfacts.com/learn/sanger_and_planned_parenthood.asp
[3] “What We Can’t Not Know.” Budziszewski’s five Furies are the conscience’s response to guilty knowledge, and include remorse, and the needs to confess, to atone, for reconciliation, and for justification.
-----
Originally published on my
Equus Nom Veritas blog.
Tags: Culture-of-Life Culture Philosophy
