The current controversy over Planned Parenthood has me thinking about my own stance on abortion rights. The truth is that I did not immediately become pro-choice after I became an atheist. The reason is that I have a strong respect for human life and dignity. It is at the center of my moral setup.
Upon doing research, however, my own views changed. After finding that fetuses do not seem to feel pain until about week 22, at the earliest, I lost all my qualms about abortions up to 20 weeks. I think they should be safe and freely available.
After that…there are extenuating circumstances. The idea of a fetus that can feel pain being aborted makes me uncomfortable, but rather than that fueling a desire to make laws against abortion, it drives me to work towards making abortions before 20 weeks more readily available, to make paid parental leave a law in this country, to ensure birth control pills are as available as possible, and so on. It should, in my mind, be as easy to terminate a pregnancy before 20 weeks as it is to order a free pizza, and there should be absolutely no stigma in doing so.
And, in addition, only 1.4% of abortions take place at 21 weeks or after. I imagine that those are likely severe circumstances – and even if they are not, I don’t think I, as a man, am really in a place to look down on a woman for deciding to terminate a pregnancy. The idea of being forced by the opposite sex to carry another human being inside me for months on end, without recourse…is profoundly upsetting. I can see myself as preferring to choose. Anything else seems a bit intrusive.
Carl Sagan, in a piece he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, presented these sentiments when, in 1990, he discussed the pro-life position in the following way:
“This conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up; forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with; saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home, and bring up babies; and, worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants. Legislative prohibitions on abortion arous the suspicion that their real intent is to control the independence and sexuality of women…
“And yet, by consensus, all of us think it proper that there be prohibitions against, and penalties exacted for, murder.”
The discussion, from here, asks a challenging questions. When does life become “human”? Why choose the arbitrary moment when the sperm fertilizes the egg, as so many are apt to do? Is it because it’s in a woman, and becomes a way for us to inflict on women the view that they are here to bear and raise children, instead of be individuals in their own right who have equality with men?
Later, he addresses this discussion with this statement:
“Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg….
“A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg – despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby – why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?
“Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex?”
The standard rebuttal to this is that a sperm is not a fertilized egg. True. But why is one automatically a human, and the other not? Because the sperm is alive…and could be a child.
Why don’t men feel guilty about the sperm they kill? Is it because that would be something that affects us?
Because think about it – if “pro-life” people were really concerned about the infants – why don’t they teach safe sex? Why don’t they encourage contraception? Why don’t they encourage maternity leave?
It’s hard for me to think of something more cruelly inconsistent than being against maternity leave and abortion at the same time. Maybe it’s not really about the child. Maybe it’s at least partly about controlling women with laws and guilt – especially when the scientific evidence seems to indicate that the fertilized egg, at least before 20 weeks, isn’t even conscious.
And according to Carl Sagan’s discussion, first trimester abortion wasn’t really a problem until the seventeenth century, except for the Assyrians. As he states:
“Different religions have different teachings. Among hunter-gatherers, there are usually no prhibitions against abortion, and it was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the more severe Assyrians impaled women on stakes for attempting abortion. The Jewish Talmud teaches that the fetus is not a person and has no rights. The Old and New Testaments – rich in astonishingly detailed prohibition on dress, diet, and permissible words – contain not a word specifically prohibiting abortion. The only passage that’s remotely relevant (Exodus 21:22) decrees that if there’s a fight and a woman bystander should accidentally be injured and made to miscarry, the assailant must pay a fine.
“Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. The Catholic Church’s first and long-standing collection of canon law…held that abortion was homicide only after the fetus was already “formed” – roughly, the end of the first trimester.”
Sagan goes on to state that until the nineteenth century, abortion in the United States during the first or second trimester was considered, at worst, a misdemeanor, because it was legal until “quickening” – but it was hard to get convictions, “because they depended entirely on the woman’s own testimony of whether she had felt quickening, and because of the jury’s distaste for prosecuting a woman for exercising her right to choose. In 1800 there was not, so far as is known, a single statute in the Unites States concerning abortion.”
So this is not a new concept. Later, there was an interest in raising the population, and in the twentieth century the decision as to when a baby could be aborted was left up to physicians, who had begun to say, mistakingly, that the fetus was conscious before it actually was. Because women could not really attend medical schools at the time…the opinion were biased. And so opinions changed.
But the traditional view is not that abortions are killing human beings. Upon deeper examination, the traditional view is that early abortions are of no consequence, and abortion, in general, is a decision best left up to the mother – with a few exceptions, like ancient Assyria.
I think Carl Sagan’s arguments are especially relevant now, due to the current Planned Parenthood discussion, and that it would definitely be helpful to get back to the way we used to think on this issue. The focus should be more on the woman’s right to choose. And if the concern is for the fetus – frankly, I’d be a lot more convinced that this is the case if the religious right were more passionate about maternity leave and contraception. Or, better yet, for the billions and trillions of sperm the Christian right has brutally murdered over the past few decades.
Just sayin’.
Thanks for reading.
