Abortion ends a beating heart. Well, sometimes. I think--and I'm writing this without checking on any statistics--that most abortions occur before the heart starts beating.
Nature, or god, if you believe in god, performs far more abortions than anyone else. This is well known and long documented. What lay people call a "miscarriage" is called in medicine a "spontaneous abortion," but the term has such an emotional charge that it doesn't get used very often.
So there's a couple questions here, the ethical/moral aspect and the legal aspect. Which puts me squarely on the fence about this issue.
I wish no one would ever have a medical procedure to end a human life, unless it's necessary to save an existing human life. The natural world agrees with me here, and if you have a god, presumably she does also, since your religion dictates that she wrote the rules, but a stressed, gravid female anything will ditch her young so she can live to reproduce another day. Mothers of young, living, breathing offspring will abandon them to save their own lives. We see this in cheetahs attacked by lions, coyotes attacked by wolves, etc, etc. So there's precedent, and lots of it, in the natural world. And like it or not, there's a kind of cold calculus here. Your emotional reaction to the idea is, sorry, once again, irrelevant.
Legally, well, isn't this obvious? Get the hell out of everyone else's uterus. Sorry, but that's not a highway or a national park. It's none of your business what occurs in there. Your religious and emotional ideas are irrational and have no place being forced into a stranger's reproductive organs. The decision should be made by the woman, the man from whom the sperm came, and a doctor or other well-qualified counselor.
Oh, sorry, did I sting a bit when I mentioned the father? Well, tell you what. When a man who doesn't want a child stops being liable for a child he didn't want, then we can talk about taking him out of the conversation. Until then, I think he should have a place at that table.
A sperm donor may, if he has behaved responsibly (i.e. not raped, used condoms when asked, asked about birth control, etc.), have a place at the table, but he should never have veto power over the woman's decision (whichever way she decides). In some circumstances, it may mean he gets let out of financial responsibility, but again, that depends on his having been as responsible as possible up to that point.
ReplyDeleteI agree, mostly. I think if he's been responsible as you point out and been clear that he doesn't want kids, then he should also be absolved of responsibility. Then again, "mistakes"-- an ugly term to describe a human being--do happen, and are then a shared responsibility. I suppose I was thinking of those rare cases of a woman lying and saying she's on birth control which then leads to a man paying child support. There should be some way out for him in those cases.
ReplyDeleteMy old friend George used to say that until he grew a uterus, he had no right to an opinion. And even then, he had a right to opine upon his own uterus and no one else's.
ReplyDeleteWell, fair enough. I agree, right up until there's some legal authority that says I have to live with the results of whatever said uterus owner decides. If I'm ever going to be expected to take any responsibility for a child, I want a say in the decision to have or not have that child. But I do agree with George in a larger, legislative sense. As I said, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is properly made by the woman, nature, her doctor, and the man who contributed the sperm.
ReplyDeleteYou say "a stressed, gravid female anything will ditch her young so she can live to reproduce another day. Mothers of young, living, breathing offspring will abandon them to save their own lives.... So there's precedent, and lots of it, in the natural world."
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more, and interestingly (perhaps), there's precedence in the medical world. Which is why I'm always so surprised when it comes to the abortion "debate". In obstetrics and anesthesia, the life of the mother takes precedent over the child. (I'm not going to say "as a written rule" because I've never explored the law, or been sued, or lost a patient under those circumstances--but I know what I was taught.)
When you take care of two patients, and you truly can only save one at the expense of the other, the maxim is: a baby can't have another mother, but the mother can have another child.
Sure, this is life or death, some will say, not a "choice".
But isn't life always a choice?
Thanks for your thoughts, Feather. I was thinking, of course, of emergency medicine when I wrote that, of the save-the-mother principle.
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