Much as I support the last resort of abortion, I cringe every time I hear someone use that phrase, "My reproductive rights," or "It's my body: I should have control over it."
It's been a relief to see that the fight over abortion has in many states come down to a discussion of up to what week of gestation is abortion going to be legal, or, conversely, where to draw the line after which you cannot have an abortion--6 weeks, 21 weeks, etc. This suggests the American public, without ever really discussing it in an academic way, has accepted the notion that abortion is and should be all about where you draw the line.
Plenty of folk, I suspect the majority of my fellow citizens, are willing to allow abortions, but they are repelled by infanticide.
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| 28 weeks |
But when does the same procedure (a D&C or suction curettage) drift from being an abortion to infanticide?
Certainly, when I saw a "salting out" procedure as medical student at The New York Hospital, I was shaken and appalled. That 28 week fetus sure looked like a real baby to me, and it was shaking and moving like a living thing as the nurse placed it on a stainless steel tray and rushed it into a utility room off the delivery suite and we stood there watching it. Did we watch it die? Or did we simply stare at something not yet quite born? Whatever it was, it struck me on some visceral level as wrong.
The mother, on the delivery table had looked at the receding back of the nurse carrying that fetus away and she said, teary eyed, "I'm so sorry..."
She may have been sorry, but it was definitely her choice.
On the other hand, later that week, I looked over the shoulder of an OB-GYN resident as he scraped out a 4 week conceptus during a D&C and he kept wiping his curette on a 4 inch square gauze pad, examining the red goo, and saying, "Nope, that's not it," or "Okay, that's it," because that stuff was so unformed it was difficult to be sure what it was. That looked like an abortion to me, not infanticide.
It was the difference between potential and fully formed realization.
So, when I hear a women assert, "It's my body. I get to decide what happens to my body," I can only think: At a certain point, it's NOT just your body; it's two bodies and one of them is not you and has the right to develop and to live and breathe.
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| 24 weeks |
In all of this, I should hasten to add, I am a male, not a female, and have never been and will never be pregnant, and have never had something growing inside me which I might think is so connected to me, it IS me and cannot be separated from me in any meaningful way.
And that whole rap about, "I am in control of my own body," strikes me as a bit odd. Once you are pregnant, you actually are no longer in control. If you want to end that pregnancy, you cannot simply close your eyes and say, "End it." You need someone else to help you do that. So you are not, in that important sense, in control of your own body. Something is happening inside your body you need others to help change.
If you read Justice Harry Blackmun's actual opinion in Roe v Wade it is striking how little law there is in it. Most of it is an examination of the problem of how to determine when something crosses over from being a potential life to being an actual life with rights of its own. Blackmun finally settles on the idea that once the fetus is capable of survival outside his mother's body, it qualifies as a distinct human life, i.e. he draws the line at "viability."
He also says he knows that line will get closer and closer to conception as medical science develops the means to sustain life using technology, but at the time Blackburn was writing, about 1973, it was about 22 weeks or thereabouts.
(He actually spends very little time on the law, the Constitution, searching for an implied right to privacy--a mumble which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg found disquieting. She never liked the Roe decision.)
Having said all that, the whole idea of "It's MINE!" or "IT'S MY BODY" or "I have a right to be in control of my own body," strikes me as unsettling and obtuse.
What this line of attack says is that the other side, the Right-to-Lifers, have no valid point at all. That those people are trying to force a woman to do something with her own body she doesn't want to do, that they are violating her body with their insistence she carry the baby to term, as if that developing fetus were nothing more than a growing tumor, or a cyst expanding inside her.
But at what point does this expanding mass inside a woman acquire "rights?"
To say that life begins at the moment of conception, strikes me as medieval. Well, not exactly medieval, because at one point in the Middle Ages, the whole concept of conception was pretty vague, and they defined life as beginning at "quickening" when the mother first felt the fetus move. But then later they said life began when the baby drew in its first breath. The line was for ages a moving target. The Church accepted abortion for centuries, then changed. Once the new knowledge about a sperm and an egg being united, the Church heard a different word from God.
But a two cell thing is not a human life, in my eyes. Might one day become that, but isn't now, any more than a tadpole is a frog or a caterpillar a butterfly. Conception is time zero, but there are a lot of steps which have to be successfully negotiated before you call something a human being.
The "heart beat" line, by the way, is ridiculous. You can see a contracting clump of cells within a few weeks of conception but just because it contracts does not make it a heart. Muscles contract and they are not hearts. Just because it moves fluid and makes a sound does not make it a heartbeat. Gut structures do all that. Swoosh, swoosh. You really do not have anything which qualifies as a heart or heart cells until somewhere in the vicinity of 22 weeks.
My point is, however, that the anti abortion crowd has a point: At some point this debate is about more than the mother. To keep repeating, "This is all about ME," is to deny the other side a certain respect which, much as they may be unappetizing, they do deserve.
It's all about you, up until a certain point in pregnancy-- when and why can be argued-- but at some point it's not just about you; it's about two people, one of whom is you.
To say abortion is simply a matter of "defending women's health" is so specious as to barely merit a response: An abortion does not improve a woman's health, ordinarily. It may well relieve her of a burden, but, apart from that tiny percentage of women who would be in physical danger from carrying a child to term, it does not improve the woman's physical health to end a pregnancy. It may well be her right, if it's early enough, but if she allows the pregnancy to progress too far, there is another set of rights involved.
To say that holding a scalpel up to a full term baby descending the birth canal is simply a matter of "women's health" or "women's rights" loses me and, I suspect, a lot of other citizens.
Simply chanting slogans may make some folks feel empowered, but it persuades no one.
But then again, maybe demonstrations and protests are not about persuasion. They are about display and feeling a sense of solidarity.
Voters, citizens, however, at some point have to do some thinking.
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