Woman’s Right to Choose Is Important, but Not Solitary

You can feel it in the air. In 1989 major changes are occurring in the way Americans regard abortion. The nation has now had 16 years of experience with the dramatic change in U.S. law wrought by Roe vs. Wade. Restlessness abounds. Let us hope that reason prevails.

At present, 4,100 abortions are taking place every day, 29,000 a week, 125,000 a month, 1.5 million a year.

Eighty-one percent of the women who obtain abortions are unmarried. Only 3% of them cite health as the major reason. “Most were concerned about how the baby would change their lives,” feminist Judy Mann concedes, “about not being able to afford a child, not being ready for the responsibility of a child, and not being in a stable relationship in which to raise a child.”

It is difficult not to feel sympathy for young women pregnant outside marriage. But do we really want to be a nation in which easy and cheap abortion encourages so many pregnancies outside marriage, in which 30% of all pregnancies end in abortion--mostly to the unmarried? Is that what Roe vs. Wade intended?

Feminist Erica Jong writes that the movement against abortion in 1989 is “about political power,” in which “women’s bodies are the first to be marched on.” She is wrong on both counts. In the march of feminist political power, the bodies of infants in the womb were the first to be marched on.

And, unlike the elderly, the unborn have no political power. They depend on respect for their human rights from the rest of us. Thus the civil-rights movement taught us that political power does have a role to play in defending human rights. Rising political power does command attention, in this case quite unselfishly--for the human rights of others unknown.

Even those who in 1989 defend Roe vs. Wade rarely try to defend the procedures, the industry or the unpleasantness of abortion. They have retreated a lot since 1973. They are defending, they say, only the right of a woman to choose. But they fall silent about the right of the individual being formed in the womb to be protected, and the interest of society in that individual’s inalienable right to life. The woman’s right is important, but not solitary.

Again, scientific knowledge has advanced tremendously since 1973. Now we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the life within a pregnant woman is very early a separate human individual, of a determinate sex.

I sympathize thoroughly with those who try to argue that this separate individual is not yet a “person,” protected by constitutional rights. At what moment, they ask, should constitutional “personhood” be reasonably assigned?

To make this determination is not a matter of religious faith. It is a matter for reasoned inquiry. Until our generation, virtually all Americans concurred in a long tradition, humanistic and religious both, which held that the most reasonable path is to give the benefit of any doubt to individual life. This tradition has honored the moment when ovum and sperm from two other individuals form a new individual--the moment of conception.

Others, who seek a little more room to maneuver, may argue that the criterion now widely used for determining death should be applied: the detectable beginning of a heartbeat and/or brain wave. This occurs four to six weeks after conception.

The courts have already been obliged by medical advances to recognize that birth at the full term of nine months is far too inadequate a criterion, since a living child may now be born prematurely even at five months.

What we have learned, in 16 years, is that the constitutional criterion for the beginning of individual life cannot be anything nearly so rough as that used in Roe vs. Wade. The clear direction of medical advances is to drive a reasonable criterion back ever earlier. Those who argue that individuality begins at conception may be regarded by others as being too “generous” to the unborn. But, in the light of contemporary science, the reasonableness of that “generosity” can scarcely be impugned.

A woman’s right to choose should by no means be limited except by the beginnings of the rights of other individuals. Sexual activity is fraught with seriousness. When it results in pregnancy, a conflict of rights becomes inevitable. Roe vs. Wade has been on a collision course since its conception.

Maintaining civic unity during this public search for a reasonable criterion for the beginnings of constitutional rights will not be easy. To see things as those with whom we disagree see them is almost superhuman, but necessary. The issue is not one of clashing faiths. It is a serious search for a reasoned social obligation.