This is an older article. Here is the Abortion: as natural as life itself article.
I see this subject pop up at every election cycle. I doubt this time around will be any different. I’m so tired of this argument. I’ve been involved in online debates on this issue for more than 10 years. I’m tired of it because I know the right answer, but neither of the entrenched sides of the discussion care to recognize it no matter how many times I try to re-explain it to them.
Abortion wastes potential life, not a life itself. For it to be a life there has to be brain function and breath; facts which the pro-lifers gloss over in the quest to save the unborn. Question: how do you save children from their own parents? Even the born ones?
Medical abortion is a wasteful and costly procedure and so should not be used casually. Waste of potential, of any kind, is repugnant; but there is more than one potential at risk here.
A woman has the right to use and abuse her own body as she sees fit. Dictating to her the sacred nature of the potentials she is faced with is an invasion of her privacy. Question: why isn’t male masturbation illegal? It too wastes potential life. If she has no privacy, why does he have privacy? If individuals have no privacy, then neither do businesses. Can you imagine corporations opening the inner workings of their board rooms to public scrutiny? Can you imagine why Roe v. Wade remains and will continue as a decision? (Wrong again. -ed.)
The right answer is that gov’t has no business being involved in abortion; it shouldn’t be banning it, and it shouldn’t be paying for it, it is wholly a decision of the individual involved. She does not have a right to an expensive medical procedure, nor does the husband have a right force his will on her. If you men don’t like this fact I suggest you don’t plant seeds where they aren’t wanted. It is a private matter and the right to privacy exists whether you will it or not.
There is a need to determine, as a measure of justice, when life can be proven to exist (without destroying privacy) so that those who are in fact taking life meet with the justice they deserve. I haven’t heard a logical answer, other than the one handed down by Roe from anybody to date. I would resist any statement, by any group I was affiliated with, other than one that encompasses this simple fact: Declare what life is (Human thought. Human words. Human action) and declare the need to hold it as a supreme value.
Anything else is a waste of time, and violation of rights which I hold sacred.
Postscript
This was originally posted in the Google group Objectivist, a group I created back in the days when I was sincere in my belief that I was an Objectivist and not simply fond of the quaint notion that we can all see objective facts, understand them, and act accordingly. It was a much simpler world then. It was posted in response to a proposal from the We The People Coalition Yahoo!Group, the gist of which is lost to history.
Mercifully my libertarian delusions about tax dollars and government health expenditures fell by the wayside of my deeper understanding of what money is and what society is. What good governance entails. It could have happened sooner, but I’ll take the enlightenment anyway I can get it.
The last article I wrote on this subject was this one, in which I come out unambiguously on the side of choice, science having pretty much taken us to the edge of survivability for the fetus outside the womb. What is needed now, if the anti-abortionists want to prevail on this subject, is an artificial womb. With that invention the woman need no longer carry the baby to term herself, it can be implanted in the artificial womb and the lifers who think every sperm is sacred can just foot the bill for raising all those previously aborted children.
I’m sure they’ll jump at the chance to pay for that.