Let's talk about abortion

But like adults, please

Dear T,

People say hypotheticals are stupid, but I was a hardcore pro-lifer until somebody gave me the following one.

It goes, in short, like this.

Suppose there are two buildings on fire. And suppose you've got one axe, one firehose, and a single chance to put one of the fires out.

To the one on your left there's a baby inside, maybe three or four years old, and he's crying for his life. On the right however there are two-thousand zygotes. They're suspended in test-tubes and fluids, but still totally viable supposing anyone wants to give birth to them. Which do you pick? And why?

For me, the answer is easy. I'd pick the baby. Democracy and her numbers don’t have sway here because the God-given tyranny of emotions takes over: the same thing that keeps you from farming rats or snakes instead of cows, or from braining cows but not from squishing bugs. There’s no complex argument to be made when the feelings hit: just a gut-level, no-nonsense move in the only direction that feels okay. It's a baby’s cry versus what you know to be a thousand non-deaths, a thousand non-pains, and a thousand non-screams.

I had believed, previously to this, and stood by the fact, that "life begins at conception.” But of course it’s even more than that: it never actually begins with us at all. It began somewhere in the twilight of time — that moment God put the breath of life into the dirt: certainly not the moment of coitus. We pass life on, but never make it. We have never made it. It was always a gift. So there’s that argument for the pro-lifers.

And back then this led me to argue further. The argument was that a fully-grown baby was no less a human the day before it was born. But what about the day before that? And what about the day before that? Simply put, there was no day before any of the days that I felt comfortable saying "that's not a baby anymore.” The difference between a nine month-old and a zygote was something I knew but couldn’t really define — like the moment the twilight turns into the day. I knew deep down inside that a woman who loses her baby at two weeks and a woman who loses her baby at two years aren’t dealing with the same issue; and that to console them the same way wouldn't only be silly, but crazy. Yet this is what all of us pro-lifers pretended was right. The problem was, when looking at a cell’s development into a baby, who am I to say when?

This is the same problem we have with the age of consent. We know, for instance, that a seventeen year-old girl isn’t any smarter than an eighteen year-old — and in fact, they're usually both pretty stupid. But try to push the age of consent downwards or upwards and you’ll be in a fight for your life. The parents will kill you for the first, and the teenagers will kill you for the second. Either way you go, though, there’s no God-given argument for 18 either*. We had to pick the date because we had to settle on something. We had to know that at some point we could send somebody off to war, or let him drive a car, or vote— or hang him for murder. And nobody really knew when, but we knew it wasn’t at three, or ten. So we picked a day and that was it. And if anybody questions it we question not just his morality, but his sanity. And rightly, I think.

This is what we’re up against with abortion. The radicals — people who know there isn't a sane answer for when a zygote becomes a person — say either “not until birth" or “always”: the one side too scrupulous about the definition of baby, and the other too loose about the definition of murder. The fact is that our inability to come up with an arbitrary number — the drawing of a line not by science, or religion, but by sheer art — means that only the radicals can decide for us, and that when they do, most of us will hate it.

So women are worried they’ll get raped and forced to carry a zygote to full term. Or that their kids will get impregnated by some aspiring rapper on food stamps and they'll never have a chance to marry a good man. Or that a woman’s life can be in jeopardy and the doctor will be scared to make the right move to save her. All of these are plausible fears because they’re likely scenarios — for most of the women we know; fully-grown women, who have dreams and fears and feel pain with the full force of adult consciousness. And they have to live with the consequences, one way or another. And many times we have to pay for them.

This is the real fight over abortion, and it’s something we need to address and codify while the Republicans have control of the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. So I advise us to pick a date earlier on in the pregnancy, maybe eight to twelve weeks**, feel queasy about it, and hang on — until like the number 18, it becomes enshrined in the annals of our forefathers, well outside the range of living memory, and the children who grow up with it think it was given to us by God — and that to move the needle one way or another isn't just an act of craziness, but of sacrilege***.

Either that or we keep doing what we’ve already been doing. That is, to let single-issue voters put dimwits in charge, where they'll decide when to send our kids to war, or to leave the border wide open, or to cut off our kids' dicks, or to allow people to kill fully-grown babies.

Yours,

-J

P.S. There are a few cases where I'd extend the possibility of abortion past twelve weeks, and those are 1) if the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, 2) if the mother is clearly a drug addict, or 3) if she’s mentally ill — in which case she should also lose her right to vote, to keep women from getting diagnosed en masse (Side note: many of them should be). In the first case I would extend it to the whole pregnancy, if necessary; and in the last two I'd do the same unless close family opts to take the baby from her. Hard choices, these last two — but less painful than throwing a kid to the streets, or CPS, or to a crackhouse.

*Speaking of God giving us "clear directions,” NPR says that Jews are some of the biggest fans of abortion, and that to many of them, life doesn’t begin at conception. They say it “happens” the moment a baby draws its first breath, because (quote) “life and breath are essentially the same thing.”

I was skeptical at first, but like slave-owners and apostate-killers they have Bible verses to prove it. First off they cite the story of Noah, where God says He's going to “destroy all living creatures,” and then follows it up with “every living thing that breathes [emphasis mine].” Then, in a master-stroke of sophistry, they hearken back to the Garden of Eden. It was then, after all, that God breathed into the dust — and proved, apparently, that there's essentially no difference between an eight month-old baby and a pile of dirt.

A charming and reasonable religion.

Moses seems to be clearer on the issue, saying that if two men fight and a pregnant woman tries to stop them, the woman might get punched. And if she ends up miscarrying the baby, the offender only has to pay a fine — clear proof, they say, that a baby isn’t technically a person with rights yet.

Others go further, and in the Talmud we find that a baby isn't a “real human” until viability — that is, not when it can survive on life support, but when it's survived 30 days after childbirth. But this raises other questions, such as: what exactly is "viability”? Is it the moment you can survive with all possible care — a fetus barely making it on life support? Or is it the moment you can totally forego it — hacking it alone like Robinson Crusoe? And who picked 30 days? And what do we do with all these people who can't even keep a job at McDonalds?

**My editor (God bless him) rejected this article on the grounds that "eight to twelve weeks” (as I casually suggested), and the drastic developmental differences between them, implies that I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to the definition of “a baby.”

And he’s right. So let’s have a national discussion (and maybe even a national referendum) about the age a baby becomes a baby. Let’s stream and televise the debates for everyone to see. Let’s show pictures and videos of babies at various stages; let the public see videos of abortions in progress and the remains of aborted fetuses in the dumpster — let people confront, face-to-face, the stories of Tiller The Baby Killer and nurses who defected from legal abortion mills. Let's hear from women who got raped and adults who were almost aborted.

But let’s hear about it — all of it. And let’s make sure nobody can play ignorant or innocent about what abortion actually is — what it involves, and looks like — almost how it smells. Because I agree that most of the time we’re not talking about zygotes here. And the main strength of the “choice" party is pretending that we are.

***Regarding picking a date and sticking with it until everybody considers it tradition, Montaigne says, in the Frame translation of his essay On Custom,

That man seems to me to have very well understood the power of habit who first invented this story: that a village woman, having learned to pet and carry in her arms a calf from the hour of its birth, and continuing always to do so, gained this by habit, that even when he was a great ox she still could carry him. For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes. We see her at every turn forcing the rules of nature. Habit is the most effective teacher of all things.

Then he adds, as a warning,

our greatest vices take shape from our tenderest childhood, and that our most important training is in the hands of nurses. It is a pastime for mothers to see a child wring the neck of a chicken or amuse itself by hurting a dog or a cat; and there are fathers stupid enough to take it as a good omen of a martial soul when they see a son unjustly striking a peasant or a lackey who is not defending himself, and as a charming prank when they see him trick his playmate by a bit of malicious dishonesty and deceit. Nevertheless these are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they sprout there, and afterward shoot up lustily, and flourish mightily in the hands of habit. And it is a very dangerous educational policy to excuse our children for these ugly inclinations on the grounds of their tender age and the triviality of the subject. In the first place, it is nature speaking, whose voice then is all the purer and stronger because it is more tenuous. Second, the ugliness of cheating does not depend on the difference between crown pieces and pins: it depends on itself. I find it much more just to come to this conclusion: “Why would he not cheat for crowns, since he cheats for pins?” than, as they do: “It is only for pins, he would never do it for crowns.” Children must be carefully taught to hate vices for their own sake, and taught the natural deformity of vices, so that they will shun them not only in their actions but above all in their heart, so that the very thought of them may be odious, whatever mask they wear.