There is much worry and angst these days about the Supreme
Court overturning Roe vs Wade, the landmark abortion ruling. It got me to thinking
about the religious argument against abortion, because at root it is purely and
simply a religious argument, not a logical or biological or legal one. Some branches of Christianity assert that life
begins at conception, but that is a purely arbitrary point asserted as religious
dogma, because of course life never ceases between production of the sperm and
egg in the parents and the successful live birth of a new baby. Everything in between
is just a process, and to pick any single point in that process as the point
where “life begins” is just arbitrary – life never ended or there wouldn’t be a
developing baby.
So I have wondered why pro-choice supporters haven’t made
the obvious legal argument that forbidding abortion is the federal government imposition
of a particular religious view on the entire country, contrary to the First Amendment's Establishment
Clause.
All this hinges around the question of
when the state should recognize a baby as a new person, with the civil rights
of a person. Clearly a live birth is a new person. One might possibly argue
that as soon as the fetus can survive outside of the womb - somewhere around
22-24 weeks - it is a new person. I find it hard to argue that a blastosphere,
the small ball of cells developed in the first few weeks after conception, is
really a person yet. It has the potential to become a person eventually, but in
fact research has shown that something like half of these never become live births
and are spontaneously aborted or resorbed.
And then there is the valid argument
that women ought to have the power to control their own bodies and their own
reproductive behavior. I find that persuasive. Those that oppose abortion are
free to never have one, but I don’t see why they should impose their own
religious views on others who believe differently. Finally, I like Scott Adam’s
position – he thinks men ought to butt out of the whole debate, since it is not
men who bear the full weight of pregnancy and child upbringing. It is an
example of Nassim Taleb’s “skin in the game” moral principle – it is the woman
who has the most skin in the game, so it is the woman who morally ought to make
the decision. Others, including other women, who don’t have to carry the child
for nine months and suffer all the health risks and raise it and support it for
decades afterward have no moral claim to be involved in the decision.
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