What Abortion Debate Is Really About: When Is Killing Permitted? : Morality: Convenient fictions about what is or is not a life don’t help. Terminating a fetus is no more murder than sending soldiers to war.

Debates over the morality of abortion turn on the question of whether the fetus is a life. This is a false conflict. It exists because we cannot bring ourselves to face the real moral question that lies at the heart of the abortion controversy: When is killing permitted? To pro-lifers, a fetus is a life from the moment of conception. Thus, abortion is murder. To pro-choice advocates, life begins sometime later during pregnancy. Thus abortion is acceptable up to that moment. Both sides use medicine to argue their morality.

The Supreme Court understandably opted for a more workable concept--the point at which the fetus can survive outside the mother’s womb. After that point is reached, the state can intervene and ban abortions to protect “potential life.”

Today, viability is widely viewed as lacking a logical justification. And even before the Supreme Court’s Webster decision, fetus survival was enhanced by medical advances.

Premature babies are being kept alive outside the womb at younger and younger ages by a battery of medical equipment. Ultrasound scans and amniocentesis provide information--health, genetic makeup--about the fetus in the womb when it does not yet resemble a human. Test-tube babies begin life outside the womb, thereby turning the viability test on its head.

These medical advances will continue. Indeed, the day may come when fetuses younger than the third trimester routinely live to adulthood. In any event, these advances confirm what we know intuitively: Life does begin at conception.

Is abortion therefore murder? No, it is killing, the taking of a human life. But it is not murder. It is not murder any more than the death penalty is murder. It is not murder any more than sending soldiers to war is murder.

This is tough to face. But humanity has always believed that, at certain times and in certain places, the killing of others is justifiable. The same Catholic Church that so fervently opposes abortion has its doctrine of the “just war.” Many prolifers favor the death penalty.

But isn’t the death penalty just retribution for a heinous crime? And doesn’t the criminal enjoy legal protections unavailable to the fetus?

True. But we, as a society, still must decide the justification for death. We must make choices about which criminals to kill. We must distinguish between the types of murders that do or do not warrant capital punishment. Murder must be aggravated in some way, must be accompanied by particularly horrible details to justify the penalty of death.

If capital punishment were widely imposed for drug dealing, we might argue that trafficking in deadly substances is another form of murder. But the real reason would be that we, as a society, decided that drug dealing in itself deserved death, whether or not it resembled our common conception of murder.

What of the decision to send men into war? Pacifists notwithstanding, the gut conviction is that some wars--some kinds of killing--are justified. Would we rather not have fought the American Revolution? Would we rather not have fought World War II and watched Nazi Germany conquer all Europe? Isn’t the difference between the Nazis and the Allies precisely the difference we are contemplating now? That we killed, but they murdered?

Justifiable killing pivots on the moral acceptability of the death of another human being. It isn’t always a rigorous standard. Certain budgetary constraints are deemed morally acceptable. We do not spend the millions needed to cure “orphan” diseases because few people suffer from them. We choose death for these people, because life isn’t worth the money.

What overriding concerns justify abortion? Some are more obvious--rape, incest and danger to a mother’s life. (It is curious that these concerns should seem more obvious; a fetus conceived of rape or incest is not less of a life than one conceived otherwise. Yet somehow, intuitively, they are more self-evident as moral priorities.)

Some concerns are less obvious--expediency, for one. Abortion is the expedient way for women who are poor or under age or just unwilling to have a child.

Expediency can be a strong claim. If the woman’s right can sometimes supersede the child’s, expediency could well be justification enough for some or all these women. But clearly it is here that the true conflict lies--not in whether the fetus is a life, because it seems clearer and clearer that it is a life, but in what kinds of killing we are willing to allow.

Most pro-choice advocates won’t like the company they are being forced to keep. It is not politically “correct” to put abortion in the same category as capital punishment and war. But political correctness is a dishonest concept. Abortion, whatever else it may be, is not an unambiguous question of personal liberty. It is a balancing of rights. The language of “oppression” of women, like the language of “murdering babies,” is what George Orwell called substituting feelings and attitudes for ideas. Such language is too emotionally loaded to have any real meaning.

The most important objection is that making the distinction between killing and murder is a very dangerous thing to do. Nazis, communists, Third World despots and more than a few fashionable intellectuals and cafe terrorists in the West have preached the doctrine of necessary violence. They have made that distinction, and millions have died as a result of it.

It is a true and weighty objection. It is what makes the moral choices in abortion so hard. Almost every civilization has believed that the distinction between killing and murder exists. Where to draw the line is one of the great questions of human existence, and it is never completely settled.

There is a concept in law called the “slippery slope.” If we forbid a man to shout “Fire!” falsely in a crowded theater, we must guard against the danger of censoring political dissent. If we forbid fur coats, we may one day have to require vegetarianism. There is always the fear that to make any distinctions at all will lead us down that slippery slope, to a place none of us want to be.

Deciding when life may justifiably be taken is definitely a slippery slope. This is especially true because we are so dependent on social consensus for the answers. Many civilizations have slid too far, into barbarism and bloodthirstiness. But until we are willing to declare that killing is never permissible, we must decide when it is permissible.

None of us like being in the judgment seat. We wish to think of all life as sacred. We do not wish to think of ourselves as weighing the relative values of lives. But that is what we do when we look at abortion. Any number of things may justify abortion, but they must be seen realistically, as genuine moral priorities. The problem cannot be solved with the use of convenient fictions about what is or is not a life. The question must always be: What do we think is more important than life?