Abortion: The moral choice of women

The Moral Choice of Women
The issue of abortion in the U.S. is one that has been politicized for several decades. Prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), abortion was not legal. The Supreme Court ruled that laws restricting abortion were unconstitutional and since then abortion has been seen as a natural right of women by those who believe that the pro-choice side of the issue is the moral one. The other side of the issue, of course, focuses more on the fact that abortion is the ending of a life, and that the deliberate ending of a life is an immoral action. A third perspective on the matter is that while abortion may be immoral in general there are instances when it may be acceptable, such as when the child is conceived from a rape or when aborting the child will save the mother’s life. This paper will examine these three points of the issue and show why the only moral choice of women is to be totally pro-life no matter what the circumstances are surrounding the pregnancy.
The main reason that the moral choice of women regarding abortion is to be pro-life at all times and under all circumstances is that at the heart of the issue is a life. A while it is true that everyone has a choice at all time and under all circumstances to protect and preserve life or to end life if one should so choose (this is after all the essence of what it means to have a free will), having that choice does not negate the morality of the action. In other words, just because one is free to do a, b or c does not mean that all three of those options are moral. One is free to do what is moral within any ethical framework, whether it is virtue ethics, deontology or utilitarianism (Sandle). One has a choice to do what is right or what is wrong accordingly—but the choice itself does not mean that one is free in the moral sense to do something immoral.
The problem with the argument of those who suggest that the heart of the matter is the woman’s choice rather than the child’s life put the choosing aspect of the issue over the moral aspect. The see the “right” of the woman as the defining element of the issue rather than the life of the person in the womb—and to avoid the element of life, they deny the child its personhood by referring to it in medical or scientific terms as a “fetus” as though this were some alien concept that had nothing whatsoever to do with life—as though it were something growing in a petri dish that could eventually, possibly turn into a human but that outcome is not worth thinking about because the growth is still in such an early stage, and so on. They refuse to consent to the premise that the life growing in the womb is in fact a life and that all life should be protected and preserved. They refuse to consent to this fact because were it to be consented to it would displace their focus on the choosing as being the most important element of the issue. Rather than look at life, they look at the “right”—a politicized element that grew out of the Feminist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, following the rise of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as advocates for women’s rights (Wolbrecht). Their argument is not based on the same starting point as those who argue that abortion itself is an immoral action. Their starting point or premise is that denying a person the right to choose is immoral. Their focus is on the act of choosing—not on the act of abortion. In other words, they are making a completely different argument and applying the conclusion to the issue of abortion. The problem is that their premise is based on Enlightenment ideology, which in itself has been found to be faulty (Jones).
Another side of the argument is that abortion may be immoral but that there are instances wherein it may be acceptable—such as when a woman chooses to have an abortion because she has been raped or because otherwise she might die due to complications from childbearing. Thomson, for instance, supposes that it is moral for a woman to have an abortion if she has been raped because she has not given her consent in the matter. She uses the analogy of the jogger who has been abducted and hooked up to blood transfer machine and told he must stay there for 9 months while he gives blood to an important violinist who otherwise will die. At the first chance he can get, the jogger escapes and the violinist dies. Thomson reasons that it is perfectly moral for the jogger to abandon the violinist and that applying this analogy to a woman who conceives from rape it is perfectly moral for the woman to abort the baby.
There are two problems with Thomson’s argument. First, it focuses wholly on the wrong premise once again, the idea that the whole argument hinges on “choice” as the moral issue rather than the duty to preserve and protect life as the moral issue. Second, it equates the unnatural transfer of blood from a jogger to a violinist with the wholly natural transfer of blood from a mother to a child in the womb. The two are not the same and cannot be understood to be the same. The moral law that applies to the latter is not applicable in the case of the former. A jogger is not obligated to give up 9 months of his life that a violinist might live. A mother by natural law is duty-bound to preserve and nurture the life growing inside her womb, whether she consented to its formation or not (Jones). The mother moreover is not strapped in one place for 9 months at a time as the jogger is Thomson’s weak analogy. Neither does every jogger have a moral duty to drop what he is doing to donate blood to a violinst who would otherwise die. For a jogger to do so would be viewed as an immense act of charity on his part—not as a natural obligation. Motherhood, on the other hand, is a natural obligation of a woman who has conceived. Nature does not care whether consent has been given or whether the woman “chose” to conceive. Nature and the politicized emphasis of “rights” and “choice” are not aligned. Natural law says one thing while political law says another. Moral law must align with natural law. Political law can often be at odds with natural law as modern man views nature as problematic and in need of being improved upon by political laws. This is the essence of Enlightenment thought that informs the pro-choice side of the issue—and it is important to remember where Enlightenment thought ultimately leads: it ended with the Reign of Terror in Paris at the end of the 18th century.
The moral choice of women, therefore, is to preserve and protect the life that is growing in their womb. This is true whether the woman consented to conception or whether the woman’s life is threatened by the process of childbearing. If the woman can carry the child to term, she is duty-bound by natural and moral law to do so. Life is the essential element of the issue. The issue is, after all, concerned with the element of life growing in the womb. It is not the “choice” that a person has to do one thing or another that is being argued—though that is what is protected by law in the U.S. The issue is life and whether a mother has a duty to preserve and protect the life that grows in her womb. Every mother has a duty to tend to the needs of the child prior to birth just as every father has a duty to tend to the needs of the mother and the child after birth. In the modern world, people tend to imagine that they are free of having duties and responsibilities. They embrace the idea of “freedom” as though they were free from moral law and moral consequences so long as they choose to avoid the assumption of responsibility. Nature does not alter its essence, however, just because a person ignores the laws of nature and the moral law that goes with them.
A mother who aborts her child is negligent of her duty to that child. By refocusing the issue to be one of choice, as Thomson does, it uses false reasoning to eschew the original argument—whether abortion is moral or immoral—and supplants it with a new one: whether a woman should be restricted by law from choosing what she wants to do. This is why in the abortion debate there are generally two camps: the pro-choice camp and the pro-life camp. Usually in an argument there is a pro and a con side. The pro side supports the issue and the con side opposes it. Yet in abortion there are generally two sides and both are pro. How can that be? It can only logically be if the two sides are pro two different things. The anti-abortion side is pro-life. The pro-abortion side is pro-choice. It focuses not on the life of the child because to do so would be to enter into the moral question of whether preserving or protecting life is the ultimate responsibility of the mother. Instead the pro-choice side focuses on the wholly distinct and separate argument of whether a woman’s choice or right to choose should ever be denied her. It is really an argument for suffrage and enfranchisement that is applied to the issue of abortion. It is wrongly applied, however, because it does not in the least address the morality of killing a child in the womb. And so today laws have been passed ensuring that a woman will have the right to “choose” all the way up to the point of birth. This law is now on the books in New York and may soon be on the books in Virginia. One should ask, however, why the right to “choose” ends at birth. Should not the mother have the right to “choose” to kill the child after birth as well? The child that was in the womb is the same as the child that was outside the womb. When one is pro-choice one must decidedly ignore the life of the child and the moral obligation that a mother has to give her life for her child’s.
Works Cited
Jones, E. Michael. Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. South
Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
Sandle, M. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2009.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion." Philosophy & Public Affairs (1971):
47-66.
Wolbrecht, Christina. The politics of women's rights: Parties, positions, and change.
Princeton University Press, 2010.