The Observer, April 27, 2007
Volume XXXIX, Issue 26
Free Speech Zone: Many uncertainties exist in abortion debate
The recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of a law banning partial-birth abortion and the debate that now ensues is a stark reminder of the prominence of the abortion issue in American political life. Last week's display on the KSL Oval by Case Right to Life illustrates how impassioned many college students are on both sides of this debate. The more one is engaged in this argument, the more one realizes the languishing intransigence of this seemingly futile debate. All logical, moral, and religious declarations have been exhausted, and very few minds have been changed for the effort. On the one hand, it is plainly incomprehensible to the pro-choice movement how opponents of abortion rights can ascribe consciousness and personhood to a fetus, let alone a just-fertilized microscopic collection of cells with only a slightly better than half chance of full and healthy development. On the other hand, the pro-life argument makes it such that the abortion debate is not purely a biological or political one, but an ethical and theological one.
To borrow a term from the pro-life movement, this is an issue of "personhood" and universal human value – a subject that comes up in the euthanasia debate as well. While the pro-life movement is extremely diverse, there is at its core a belief in the intrinsic worth of human beings, including "the unborn." If we can assign moral value to a fetus, or an embryo for that matter, then it is easy to do so for the entirety of humanity. In this sense, the abortion debate is bizarre because both pro-life Christian conservatives and pro-choice liberals are likely to hold human rights in high esteem; they just disagree on when human life begins.
Regardless of your theological persuasion, the fact that this is even an issue shows that if we are not the creators of our own morality systems, we are at least their arbitrators. Can God really be said to ensure the fair execution of morality when hundreds of thousands of humans are unjustly killed each year in violent conflicts and millions more die of starvation and preventable disease? The human rights project is by all means worthwhile, but in the end we are its proprietors. Therefore, should we be so dogmatic to value an embryo or fetus over a woman's freedom and health? Even if we did, should we devote more attention and energy to the "3600 killed every day" than to the 3600 or more killed each hour by bombs, bullets, famine, and disease – beings whose human status is completely undeniable, as is their innocence in most cases? Should we be so historically naïve as to completely misunderstand the unrelenting presence of abortion in human cultures down through the ages, regardless of its legality and safety?
Within America's legal and judicial framework, which presumably strives to remain secular and earthly, religious arguments for outlawing abortion in all its manifestations are simply untenable. Furthermore, they are theologically baseless. It is ultimately unjustifiable for a human being to invoke the word of God. The variety of human ethical and moral systems across space and time, and the appalling acts which have been committed in their name, reveal the malleability, indeed instability, of our highest ideals and beliefs. The ethics of freedom, law, and human value are the creations of human beings – Homo sapiens – animals that possess the ability of complex symbolic cognition. We cannot deny our existence in and fixation to an inherently mystifying, devastating, and unjust world in which morality provides a social coping mechanism. Therefore, as long as moral systems of humans, by humans, and for humans do not perish from this earth, we should valuate the moral "certainty" of individual freedom over the theological uncertainty of the "personhood" of the unborn – and leave such cardinal determinations to whatever divine being may or may not be out there.
Pieragastini is a senior History and International Studies major involved with Catalyst: Students for Social Justice, Case-ACLU, and the Philosophy Society.
