PERSPECTIVE ON THE ‘ABORTION PILL’ : The First Stage of Life <i> Is </i> Life : RU-486 allows a woman to believe that she is not aborting; this moral ambiguity abuses the most basic human right.
Like all potent drugs, RU-486 poses problems of health and safety. But a drug that is an abortifacient also presents two major moral and psychological questions. The first is the more familiar: Ought we to biochemically extinguish embryonic life? The second question is whether earlier non-surgical abortions--”easier” abortions that may also be ambiguous--will have moral or psychological effects for women and society. This ambiguity is present if the woman taking a “morning-after pill” or a pill like RU-486 that produces an “overdue period” is not sure whether she is aborting a fertilized embryo.
But before discussing the issue of easier, more ambiguous abortions, what about the basic question of early abortions? The moral status of the embryo presents a challenge to a pro-life advocate because the embryo does not look like a baby, as a developed fetus does. It takes several steps of reasoning to affirm that the tiny undeveloped embryo is a member of the human family. It is radically egalitarian to claim that all human lives have equal moral worth and that each life deserves respect and protection no matter how powerless.
Advocacy for the unborn requires looking beyond visible appearances to invisible realities. We live in a dynamic one-way arrow of time in which everybody and everything is constantly changing and exchanging energy. Human bodies, which look so solid and stable, are not made up of the same matter from decade to decade, but are held together by the human genetic informational program that begins at fertilization and finally runs down as we disintegrate in old age and death.
If we took a movie of everyone alive and ran it backward, we would see that we are continuous with our embryonic beginnings. Of course, psychologically, we, as adult self-conscious “persons,” are not continuous with all of our past. Infantile amnesia means that we cannot be in touch with our own infancy, and some people have a hard time recapturing much of their childhood selves.
However, we can rationally infer that the child and the infant--and before that the fetus and the embryo--are continuously us. I look at my thirtysomething 6-foot, 180-pound son and remember him as a 5-pound, 10-ounce newborn. The transforming journey from newborn to adulthood is far greater than that from embryo to newborn. If we protect newborns, infants and toddlers who are not yet psychological persons, why not embryos?
If we take the odds for survival as a prerequisite for moral value, then countless children (and adults) in Third World poverty also will be dismissed from moral concern. The fact that we cannot consciously mourn the loss of millions of lives we don’t know does not make those lives of lesser value. Whether embryos are mourned or not tells us little.
If a human life has to be consciously wanted to be protected--as the present abortion law makes the value of a fetus contingent on the will of the mother--then we can never progress to a society in which all men, women and children are intrinsically valued as morally equal. RU-486 does not change the moral unacceptability of abortion.
In taking up the second question of RU-486, we have to ask whether it will benefit women to have earlier, more private, easier, non-surgical abortions. And isn’t there a moral advantage in the fact that taking a magic pill can be an ambiguous act in which it may be uncertain whether an abortion takes place?
I think the answer to both questions is no . There is a world of difference between before and after when events such as fertilization are in question. I accept non-abortifacient contraception and sterilization as morally acceptable forms of family planning because they prevent conception without taking a human life that has already begun.
Abortion attempts to make conception a reversible fact; it happened only if you want it to happen.
I do not think it is psychologically or ethically good for women to be told that their voluntary choices can reverse reality and extinguish a human life, especially the life of their own offspring.
One of the most important truths of existence is that reality is to be responded to in a morally acceptable way, not distorted, denied or drugged out of mind. Our human commitments to one another are not all reversible at will; the strength of human bonding between parents and offspring determines the health of a society.
Should women as mature moral agents welcome the moral ambiguity of an RU-486 pill when it means regressing, in effect, to the condition of children who know not what they do? Allowing and encouraging ambiguity is one way we engage in self-deception and bad faith. As the bomber pilot likes to think, “Oh well, maybe these bombs aren’t killing anyone today, at least not women and children.”
Ambiguity is also the refuge of those who commit incest and date rape. Why should women seek to imitate the worst of a culture that follows the expedient logic of domination, where the powerful use the lives of others as a means to an end?
I doubt that more committed sexual behavior and more responsible procreative decisions can ever be the result of easier and easier abortion. Abortion erodes the value of human equality and breaks the irreversible bonds of human nurturance and connectedness. Once again, women will pay, as grand talk of “privacy” and “choice” leads to the reality of deprivation, isolation and cruel social pressures to destroy life.
