Abortion part 2 - column for the Times Dispatch

It was nice to read all your comments to last week’s column, especially since you all agreed with me – yes, I should have never written it.  Again, I do agree that abortion should remain legal, but should be viewed as a desperate action for desperate people. This week I’m taking issue with another prochoice argument: the one that insists no one can tell a woman what to do with her body.  This just isn’t the case, though. Of course I can tell you what you can do with your body, as you can tell me what to do with mine. This is part of our social contract with each other: I give you freedom to do what you want with your body, and you give me freedom to do the same with mine, as long as that action doesn’t harm another person. Yes, we have agreed to allow each other to say what we can do with our bodies – when it affects another person. 

And that’s why the front lines of the abortion debate are all about personhood. We decided, as a society, in 1973 that a woman did have freedom to do what she wished with her uterus unless there was a 3^rd trimester fetus living inside of it. She gives up certain freedoms at that time, parts of her body are now not totally subject to her unfettered will, but have rights that are completely independent of her desires and protected by the force of law. It’s because the contents of her uterus are now considered a person. It all comes down to personhood.  You know it, the other side knows it. But it all comes down to personhood, because we all agree that people deserve the chance to live and to be protected by certain unalienable rights. So anyone who thinks that the recent bill on personhood that’s making its way through the Virginia Statehouse has nothing to do with abortion needs to contact me quickly. I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. Cheap.

It all comes down to personhood: it’s the front line of the abortion wars, and it’s also the issue where our integrity drowns in a sea of contradiction. You have libertarians who want to kick the government out of every area of our lives except a woman’s uterus. You’ve got liberals who will travel around the world to defend human rights in Palestine, but will deny those same rights to a 22 week old fetus in the abortion clinic down the street.

In the end, if we are to make any progress in the debate on abortion, we’re going to have to realize that both sides have good reasons to be so passionate, but neither side has a monopoly on integrity. It would be better to discuss the issue in a context where both sides admit that legalized abortion is here to stay but abortion is the ending of at least something with the potential for a human life, and the ending of that potential is never to be entered into lightly.

There are no easy answers here. If we lived in a Christian theocracy, we might find it easy to outlaw all abortion based on our respect for life as a gift from our creator.  But we live in a democracy, with a separation of church and state, and given this fact, maybe a better approach would be for all of us to recognize that a human embryo is something extraordinary at any stage of development, but to balance this recognition against the desires and needs of the other lives involved – the mother and those that depend on her. And with every abortion we should be reminded of the sad reality that we live in a world where the desires and needs of one group come at the expense of others: the mother’s at the expense of the fetus, the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the powerful at the expense of the weak. Maybe we’re all so passionate about abortion because we’re all involved in these inequalities, and through that involvement, in some way, we’re all in this together.  Let’s work on it together.