Americans are fundamentally live-and-let-live people, so “The Right to Choose” is a strong and persuasive argument. But, it relies heavily on the concept of fetal non-personhood. For if a fetus, at any stage, were to be considered human life, the fetus would be entitled to the same rights of life and liberty as the mother.
This is Part 5 in a series on the abortion issue by editor/owner Justin Stapley. Click here to read Part 4.
There is a contrast between the various original arguments for legal and unrestricted abortion and the standard arguments of today. Mainly, it is that a woman’s right to choose has become the near singular argument.
In the previous parts of this series, I have demonstrated the deconstruction of the former arguments for abortion, both by statistical demonstration and by philosophical abandonment. We can, therefore, ascertain that a woman’s right to choose is essentially the near-exclusive argument for unrestricted abortion access. There is, actually, good reason for the endurance of this argument.
The idea of rights, both natural and constitutional, is ingrained in the combined psyche of American society. As a constitutional republic, built on the notion of ordered liberty, the predominant purpose of law in the United States is the navigation of the intersection of rights.
That is to say, America’s laws chiefly lay out how society deals with situations when the exercise of one individual’s rights infringe upon the rights of another individual.
The pro-abortion perspective argues that a woman has the right to make her own healthcare decisions and has the right to terminate a pregnancy. They bristle at the idea that the government can force a woman to submit her body to the rigors and travails of carrying a pregnancy to term to give birth to a child she does not want.
They believe such use of government force would violate a woman’s rights. From their perspective, it would be no different from taking a cancer patient’s options from them and forcing chemotherapy when other options could be available.
It is easy to see why Americans, as freedom-loving people, might find themselves agreeing with this stance. Nobody wants to feel like they are forcing anyone to do something. Nobody wants to feel like they are taking away the rights of others. America, at its core, is a live-and-let-live society.
Were this the end of the discussion, the issue would not be a controversial one. But there is the consideration of what exactly an abortion is aborting.
An embryo becomes a fetus, and a fetus becomes a child, undisturbed of external events, which include abortion. It is an unavoidable reality that, barring extreme circumstances, every abortion that has taken place in the last fifty years would have been a living, breathing human being had the abortion not taken place. Each of these individuals would have had a unique personality, singular talents, and their own life to live.
For this reason, the idea of a woman’s right to choose relies heavily upon the concept of fetal non-personhood. If a fetus were to be considered human life, the fetus would become deserving of the same fundamental human rights of life and liberty as the mother. It would not be consistent with the creeds of ordered liberty in the American republic to arbitrarily declare one individual’s rights as so overwhelmingly superior to another’s that their right to live could be permanently and irretrievably suspended.
In Part 6 of this series, Abortion and the Non-Aggression Principle, Justin will discuss the Non-Aggression Principle and how it relates to the abortion debate and further discuss the concept of fetal non-personhood and whether the notion holds up to what science and medicine tell us of life in the womb.