‘My body, my choice’ not a good slogan
The headline of Susan Campbell’s column of Jan. 19 (“Not just YOUR body we’re talking about”) inadvertently expresses the reason many of us oppose abortion. Apparently realizing this, she takes time out from denouncing the “morons” (!) who refuse the COVID vaccine to accuse pro-lifers of not really wanting to”save babies’ ” lives, but to “regulate women’s bodies.” But this is badly mistaken. We’re not against “a woman’s right to have agency over her own body — her whole body, including her womb.” What we are against is giving her a license to kill the unborn child who is temporarily living in her womb. If a woman doesn’t want to nurture a child, she needs to exercise her “agency” by not conceiving one.
Basic biology tells that the unborn child is a member of our species, a fellow human being who receives a full genetic identity at conception and needs only time and nourishment to grow and develop as the person s/he already is. We pro-lifers know that both mother and child are persons, and do our best to help them both (which, contrary to pro-abortion propaganda, doesn’t end at birth). It’s the pro-choice crowd who deny science by pretending that the child isn’t one.
Ms. Campbell, however, dismisses this, saying “we know the abortion question isn’t really about whether the fetus is a person,” claims that the real question is “whether a woman is a person” (how does not being allowed to take another person’s life makes one a non-person?), and sneers that “scientists would tell these conservatives that viability in the womb doesn’t begin nearly as early as they’d like to think.” Accusing pro-lifers of arguing from “viability” is truly absurd, since viability — defined as ability to survive outside the womb — was the principal argument used by Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe. v. Wade, to justify giving the pregnant woman the power of life and death over her unborn child. By his twisted logic, the fact that the child isn’t yet viable outside the womb somehow makes it OK to rip it out of the womb, its natural habitat in which it is viable, and thus render it non-viable.
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later pointed out, advances in medicine have made viability a moving target; babies born prematurely can now survive much earlier in pregnancy than was possible in 1973. Using viability to judge who should have the right to live is also dangerous, since many born people — infants, children, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped — are non-viable without the help and care of others. It’s not surprising that legalizing abortion has spawned a “quality of life” ethic that has put many of their lives at risk also.
Ms. Campbell correctly states, “The decision to not wear a mask and/or not get a vaccine slops over on the rest of us.” But “a woman’s choice to abort” also adversely affects others. Beyond the obvious victim, the unborn child whose life is snuffed out, it affects the child’s father, grandparents, siblings — and society as a whole which is degraded by the denial of the child’s most basic human rights. Last but not least, it affects the mother, who kills a part of herself — often under pressure from those who should be supporting her and her child — and then finds that abortion not only hasn’t solved her problems, but has caused many new ones.
Perhaps we could agree that “My body, my choice” isn’t a good slogan for anyone?