Choice Is Not The Issue In The Abortion Debate

We have all heard the slogan, "I support a woman's right to choose," in the abortion debate, as if the main issue here is allowing or denying a woman the choice over the continuation of her pregnancy. But the issue of choice is really a distraction from the only pertinent question: Is the life (or whatever it is) inside the woman's womb a human life with any rights to protection from the government, or not?

Couching the issue in terms of "a woman's right to choose" is silly on the face of it. Choosing is something people do almost every minute of their lives. Some of those choices are significant, others not. Some result in positive outcomes, others in disaster. Some are legal, others illegal. But people do not have the legal right to choose all behaviors simply because they have some imagined right to choose all behaviors. If a person walks into a grocery store and walks out with an unpaid for candy bar, the police would not be swayed by the statement, "I have the right to choose to take this candy bar." Similarly, a person who is driving 85 MPH in a 55 MPH zone can not escape a speeding ticket by arguing a right to choose the speed she is traveling. The argument that, in the case of pregnancy, a woman has a right to choose to end that pregnancy because she has the right to choose is baseless and, even worse, circular in its reasoning. "I have the right to choose to end my pregnancy because I have the right to choose to end my pregnancy" is a fairly unsophisticated bit of sophistry.

So we come to the question that I will not even attempt to answer here, but which is the only question that really matters in the abortion issue: what exactly is the object inside the woman's womb? A blob of tissue; a baby; a fetus; an embryo; a fertilized egg; a developing human; a little boy or girl: all of these terms have been used to describe whatever it is inside a pregnant mommy's tummy. Now here's the really weird thing to me: if a murderous thug stabs a pregnant woman and kills her baby (or blob of tissue), he can be charged with the murder of that baby. In other words, the state then considers that life to be a human life, whose death demands the full justice provided by our legal system. But if a mother decides that this is the wrong time to have a baby, she can have a doctor end her pregnancy by ending the life of the blob of tissue in her uterus. In this case, the state does not intervene or prosecute a crime, since the woman has made the decision. O.k., wait a minute here. In the first case, when the pregnancy was ended by an unsolicited crime of violence, the woman's womb held a human being. In the second case, when the pregnancy ended because of the choice of the pregnant woman, the item in the tummy was...an item.

O.k., now please forgive my confusion, but which is it? If I am to understand the "right to choose" argument, the actual nature of what is inside a pregnant woman's womb is up to the woman. But this, again, is not logical. I may wish, at times, to be able to decide that someone I'm angry at for cutting me off in my car is a monster. But he's not - he's a human being who had the nerve to cut me off. Imagine if, at the next red light, I got out of my car, pulled out a gun, and blew out the monster's brains. Would the prosecuting attorney not bring charges based on my revelation that I considered the "cutter off of me" to be a monster, and not a human? Wow, that would be cool! But, of course, in a sane society, the definition of who is human and who is monster is established by law, and is not up to the potential taker of that life.

I vividly recall the vice presidential debate leading up to the 1992 presidential election in which Democrat Al Gore and Republican Dan Quayle were debating the abortion issue. To my great annoyance, after some back and forth on the issue, Gore questioned Quayle, "Do you support a woman's right to choose?" When Quayle did not answer in the affirmative in the way Gore was attempting to lead him, Gore asked, "Again, can't you just say you support the right of a woman to choose?" This stuck in my mind because of Gore's expressed position that all that mattered here was the right of a woman to choose based on her right to choose given by the Constitution's guarantee of a right to choose. The argument was absurd then, as it is now. If it's a blob of tissue, fine, the right to choose is not an issue. But if it's a human life, the choice of whether to continue or end the pregnancy is a matter of life or death.