Restating My Thesis:
Premise 1: All acts that intentionally take the life of an innocent, human person are immoral acts and should be illegal.
Premise 2: Abortion is an act that intentionally takes the life of an innocent, human person.
Conclusion: Therefore, abortion is an immoral act and should be illegal.
This is a valid argument.
Which means, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is necessarily true. For more on validity and arguments go here. For a further treatment of my thesis go here.
Objections to my thesis tend to fall into one of the following categories:
- The objection on the being of the fetus.
- Objections from choice, privacy, and rights.
- Objections from the lesser evil.
- Objections concerning endangering the mother's life or women's health.
- The objection base on the Violinist Argument.
- The objection that I should not shove my morality down someone else's throat. a.k.a. "You cannot legislate morality."
In this post I address the second group of objections: Objections from choice, privacy, and rights.
I'll address the later objections in other posts.
Objections from choice, privacy, and rights:
These
objections say abortion deals with a woman’s body and no one has the right to tell a
woman what she can and cannot do with her body.
Abortion is wholly and solely the woman’s choice, they say. This is probably the most frequent objection
hence the name pro-choice. In fact, some pro-choice advocates refer to
the other side of the debate as anti-choice. Others will just have to deal with it when a woman makes a choice concerning her
body, they say.
A related objection is the right to privacy. Whatever a woman asks her doctor to do is a
private medical matter and the government has no right to legislate anything
that would invade that privacy. This
objection appears often in matters of parental consent for minors or for
spousal/partner consent. If a woman
wants an abortion she can have it and that is all there is to it, they say.
Some
think since the United States Supreme Court ruling in Row v. Wade made abortion legal it is therefore morally
acceptable. Pro-choice advocates think
this makes the issue of abortion a closed matter since it is “constitutionally
guaranteed.” They say it’s a
constitutional right to have an abortion and to anyone who tries to take away a
person’s constitutional right is criminal (since they're violating someone else's constitutional rights).
The Supreme Court ruled on the matter; the matter is closed. Do not take away our rights, they say.
Response to objections of choice, privacy, and rights
Is Abortion Merely a Matter of Choice?
It is
misleading to say that a woman (or anybody) has a right to do whatever they choose to
their bodies . Sure,
a woman has the right to make many choices: hair styles, body piercing, clothes
styles, which church to attend (if any at all), for whom to vote, etc. They are also free to choose to pursue other
areas where their choice is not the
sole determining factor in the decision.
They may choose to apply for a certain job, but others make the decision
to hire her or not. She may choose to
ask a man to marry her, but he still has a right to say no. Every person has many choices in life that
others also have a voice in the matter.
No person – man or woman – is in complete control over every aspect of
their life. An certainly no person has absolute rights to do things with their life, or their bodies, when others are directly related to the consequences.
There are
also some choices that we are not to make – even to our own bodies. If someone is suicidal, others do not sit
back and say, “Well, it is their choice.
We shouldn’t interfere.” The same
situation would apply to a woman in cases of anorexia, bulimia, drug abuse,
alcohol abuse, staying with an abusive spouse, or self-mutilation. We would not be outraged if someone else
intervened and urged the woman to make a different choice – we would applaud
such actions by that other person. There
are some choices we do not allow others to make even to their own bodies. Therefore, it is not necessarily wrong to
make laws forbidding actions against one’s own body.
But, as I
have shown, the fetus is not a part of the woman’s body; the fetus is in
her body, but the fetus is not a part
of her body. So, the argument of a woman
saying she has the right to have an abortion because she has the right to do to
her body whatever she wishes fails on two grounds: 1.) the fetus is not a part of the woman’s
body and, 2.) she does not in fact have the right to do whatever she wants to
her body especially when the outcome of that action has effects on someone else.
Abortion is not a matter of a woman doing something to her own body. It is a matter of a woman destroying another's body - an innocent person's body. No woman has a right to do that!
The objection from a matter of choice is not valid.
A Constitutional Right?
Does a
woman have the right, even the constitutional right, to kill her child (because
that is what is happening during an abortion) for any reason she so
chooses? Absolutely not! Even though there are currently legal
decisions “giving” her that legal right, we must remember that legal rights are
not always morally right.
It was once legal to
own slaves and treat them as you wished, but was it right to do so? No! Even though slavery was legal, it was not morally right. The legal right was even upheld by the
Supreme Court, but it was later overturned by one President. The laws of men are not set in stone. Therefore, the argument from Supreme Court
approval is not a valid argument either.
The pro-choice objection from a matter of "constitution" rights is not valid.
A Matter of Privacy?
What about the woman's privacy? Well, privacy is not an
absolute right either; this applies to
everyone. There are many things that I
could do in the privacy of my own home - or anywhere else I may have privacy at the moment - that could get me arrested, but I do not
do them and then plea that my privacy needs protected. The same goes for everyone else.
Say a woman takes her toddler to her
doctor and says, “Here, get rid of this child.
I can’t deal with her anymore, she's getting in the way of other things I have planned for life; but, oh, let’s keep this whole thing just
between you and me.” Would the rest of
us be expected to say, “Oh, well, she did it in private, so it’s none of our
business”? Certainly not!
Now some object that I am talking about
a toddler and they are talking about a non-viable group of cells. Once again, I say that an innocent human is
an innocent human regardless of the point of development. Age and location of the human are not
qualifiers for a life-ending act. Privacy is not an
issue when it comes to terminating the life of an innocent human being.
The pro-choice objection from a matter of privacy is not valid.
