Abortion

I remember vividly standing on the edge of Academy Boulevard in Colorado Springs sometime in my youth, holding a white sign that stated in bold, blue letters, “ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN.” I gripped it with both hands and stood near my father, mother, and sister. The street was lined for miles with so-called ‘pro-life’ church-goers on a Sunday afternoon. It was an event coordinated city-wide by the Christians in town, which we had heard about by our Presbyterian church, Village Seven.

Cars drove past on the busy street. I thought they were honking in encouragement of our cause. It crossed my mind that it seemed a little silly, miles of people protesting something that everyone driving past was also supporting. Why bother, if there was no opposition?

Later I remember my mother talking about the event, about how the local news had covered it, but spent most of their time on the counter-demonstration from the pro-choice crowd, which was minuscule in comparison to our massive pro-life one. We shook our heads at the sinfulness and bias of the media.

The last remnant of the demonstration was a bumper sticker that said in the same blue letters, “ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN,” which clung to our station wagon’s chrome bumper for years to come. Eventually the bright Colorado sun faded the letters into obscurity, and by the time I was driving the Tank (as it was affectionately known) to college, it was all but a white rectangle, which eventually peeled off altogether.

Years later, when I was disillusioned with religion and awakening to atheism, an anti-choice display was erected at the outdoor fountain common area near my university’s main hall. Every day while I walked to classes I passed by huge signs of aborted fetuses. I don’t recall anything else. I didn’t pay much attention to it—after all I had been one of them once, so I knew how they thought and I’d heard every one of their arguments. What they didn’t have was my mind anymore, and I instead spent my time contemplating how on earth I wasn’t going to fail my Spanish class instead, until the signs were around the corner.

Abortion has been on my list of things to come to some “conclusion” about, but it’s something I’ve delayed thinking about, because it’s never really been my concern. And that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s not my concern, not my business. Women have the right to safely end their pregnancies, and how or why they do it is their own business and none of mine. Aborting a fetus is not equivalent to killing children quite simply because fetuses are not children. It’s like saying that killing a tadpole is killing a frog, a false equivocation. While we are all aware that fetuses eventually grow into children and tadpoles to frogs, saying they are one in the same is false.

Limiting when abortions can take place—which trimester, and so forth, is perhaps a trickier distinction. Surely aborting a fetus that, if pulled from the womb with caesarian section, would thrive healthily, is to be deleterious to all involved and reserved only to prevent hurting the mother? I am no expert in this line of reasoning—and there are lines drawn—for what constitutes an acceptable time to abort and when it should be considered repugnant. On the extreme end there are those who say that is the woman’s right to choose and that the timing is irrelevant; on the other end they say that all fetuses are children or ‘persons,’ and all abortions are murderous.

During a recent trip to Colorado, I noticed an article in the newspaper which discussed an amendment to be put on the ballot on the upcoming election day, Amendment 62, which defines a person as a human being from the beginning of “biological development.” I won’t go into the devastating implications of the amendment if it passed. I hope that Colorado residents have the good sense to defeat it at the polls. I’m also glad that I am no longer one of those Colorado residents, forced to vote on such a ridiculous proposition. (Never mind the campaign ads promoting the proposition that compare abortion to slavery. Colorado, how I miss thee not.)

I have been similarly puzzled by various states’ laws which treat homicides of pregnant women as chargeable for two murders and not one. By all standards, I have a hard time seeing how a fetus can be not a person if aborted but treated as a person if its mother is killed. I suppose some protection should be afforded the fetus in these cases—such as a pregnant woman who is kicked repeatedly until she miscarries, which is surely a crime beyond just the battery of the woman? I suppose I could simplify the position by saying that a woman has the right to both choose to keep the pregnancy or end it, and that no other person has the right to choose for her. If the monster kicks her enough to miscarry, then he has breached the right of her choice, and violated a deeply emotional and physical bond she carries between her and her fetus, which is indeed worse than just the battery of the woman. I suppose in these cases, I can see treating the fetus with more of an elevated status (counting as another murder, for instance). It would be a tricky line to divide, and I’m glad it’s not my responsibility to form the laws for such things.

Regarding the fine lines that one chooses to draw for acceptable versus unacceptable abortions, I’m prone to side with very few, if any, limitations on what constitutes a legal abortion. I suspect the vast majority of women abort their pregnancies with remorse and very good reason, but even if they didn’t, it is their own bodies and they should—and do—have full rights for how to safely conduct or dispense with the organisms growing therein.