The abortion debate: What is human life?

Abortion on demand can be morally justified only if the entity whose life is extinguished is not a human being worthy of the legal protection any decent society provides.

The Supreme Court’s overruling of the abortion-law precedents Roe and Casey is a massive victory for the conservative movement. It is also the beginning of a long-overdue national debate on the most important question that abortion raises:

What is a human being?

I’ve wanted abortion outlawed all of my adult life, so this is a joyous moment. The court has finally removed a shoddily reasoned, ungrounded barrier to the fulfillment of a desire that I share with tens of millions of Americans: to protect human life from wanton destruction. For that, we should be forever grateful to the courageous band of five justices who followed the law and their principles — and perhaps risked their lives, given the recent arrest of a man who allegedly sought to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — to protect the unborn.

Abortion rights advocates have long tried to look past that unborn person by exalting a woman’s autonomy. But this is not about creating Margaret Atwood’s Gilead or somehow returning to the days when women had no vote and few property rights. The women who largely lead the pro-life movement would not countenance enabling their own servitude.

That unborn child is the only reason abortion is, and ought to be, an issue of political discussion. No rational person today believes that one human being ought to take the life of another because they want to. Abortion on demand can be morally justified only if the entity whose life is extinguished is not a human being worthy of the legal protection any decent society provides.

This is not an easy question to decide. Casey’s viability standard was an attempt to establish when a legal right to life is conferred, albeit without directly making that case. Texas’s fetal heartbeat bill, which bans abortions after a heartbeat is detected, is another. Others would draw the line in different places, with some saying the legal right to life begins at conception while others would place it well after viability. No answer is immune from serious and well-intentioned criticism.

Making such difficult determinations, however, is at the heart of what democratic self-government is about. If the people collectively cannot determine who counts as a person, then their ability to reason about other, less weighty matters surely must be called into question.

This debate will be painful and long. My friends in the pro-life movement need to understand that we start this debate in the minority position. Polls regularly show that a majority of Americans support legal abortion on demand during the first trimester. That position makes sense only if our fellow Americans do not see a 13-week-old fetus, one that possesses a human brain and beating human heart, as a human being deserving of legal protection. We in the pro-life movement will win only when they come to see that fetus as we do — as a tiny but very real human being.

All our efforts, then, must be placed toward winning that central debate. We cannot allow ourselves to be sidetracked into important but subsidiary discussions over things like importation of abortion pills into a state that bans abortion or whether to criminalize behavior that leads to interstate abortions. Those matters are significant, but they are secondary to the primary issue. The question of what defines human life worthy of legal protection is that issue; focusing on it should be our lodestar.

We will need to make many other commitments to win others’ trust. A woman’s ability to secure and use effective contraception should be nonnegotiable. We must use all means, public and private, to care for people who need our help navigating the difficult times attending to an unexpected, and perhaps unwanted, pregnancy. We must never lose sight of the sanctity and dignity that every woman’s life possesses, even as we seek to extend that understanding to the unborn.

The outcome we seek will come slowly, state by state. Abortion regulation has traditionally been a state matter, and so it should remain. State-level, democratic change will seem painfully slow to many. But it is the only constitutionally proper way available, and that is the path we must embark upon.

But I hope and believe we will ultimately prevail.