Letters To America - On Abortion

Dear America,

Abortion. There, I said it. The dreaded word that divides your political landscape more than anything else. You could add it to the fabled list of things one doesn't discuss in polite company: Religion, politics and abortion but then, I've never been all that polite.

In general, you can boil the responses to the abortion question down to two schools of thought: The pro-life side holds that human life begins at conception, that abortion is therefore the termination of a life (often, they hold the fundamentally wrong view that "abortion is murder") and that access to abortion should be either banned entirely or limited to specific circumstances. Very often, they will also talk of things like "Post-Abortion Syndrome", a supposed link between abortion and breast cancer and often argue that the legality of abortion has led to a climate where children are not valued and therefore, led to an increased incidence of child abuse and/or neglect. They are generally religious but not always and are generally decent people arguing for what they see as the right thing. Conversely, the Pro-Choice side holds that a woman's body must be her own dominion, that while a foetus is alive, it is not human in any significant way; that there is no such thing as "Post-Abortion Syndrome", that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer (the facts are with them there, the BMA has comprehensively disproved such a link) and that any child born should be a wanted child. They can be religious but are generally of a more liberal school of religion if they are and are also generally decent people arguing for what they think is right. You might have noticed that I went out of my way there to make the point that both sides are composed, in the main, of generally decent people. There are probably a few pro-lifers who genuinely want total control of all women and their reproductive capacity. Although I've never met them, there are almost certainly pro-choicers who really are frenzied individuals who want every pregnancy to end in abortion but the vast majority of both sides are made up of fundamentally decent people arguing for what they believe to be right. Both sides have decent points to make and both sides have the best interests of society at heart, they just disagree on which of their views would be better for society.

But bloody hell America, you'd never know it. The division between the two sides is now so venomous that killing the other party is, in some quarters (and one must hope that they are the lunatic fringe), considered an acceptable option. Anyone advancing a pro-choice viewpoint is vilified as a fanatical baby-killer (very rarely true), anyone advancing a pro-life viewpoint is demonised as a misogynist Neanderthals (slightly more often true). It's the politics of soundbite and spin, a determination to ensure that not only does the other party not win the debate but that their points are never even heard (an attitude all too prevelant in American politics generally). All this over what amounts to a difference of opinion (of course, looked at that way, the Crusades amounted to a difference of opinion).

You might wonder where I fall in this debate so I'll tell you: I am, in very general terms, pro-choice. However, my support for that choice decreases as the foetus approaches full-term and by the time a foetus is viable (that is, capable of living outside the womb), I'm down to supporting choice only in extreme circumstances (i.e. danger to the health or life of the mother [beyond the normal dangers associated with childbirth], severe foetal abnormality and so on). I think, in very broad terms, that the pro-choice side has the right of it. That's not a fixed position, it's modified by circumstances. I do think that if the father is still involved in the mother's life, he should have a right to at least voice his opinion even if that opinion is overruled but, in very general terms, I'm pro-choice. I can however, look around and see so much bullshit flying around that the fans can't even be seen. There is a popular perception of pro-lifers as wild-eyed fanatics who blow up clinics or shoot doctors on their spare time. Generally, that's not true. The majority of pro-choicers are decent people trying to preserve life as they see it. There's a popular conception among pro-lifers that such bodies as Planned Parenthood support abortion because they make a fortune from it. A moment's thought would indicate that bodies like PP could make a great deal more from prolonged pre-natal and post-natal care than they do from a single abortion. There's a popular view that an abortion-breast cancer link is denied because... well, no pro-lifer I've ever talked to has come up with a good reason it would be denied (short of the kind of conspiracy theories that the John Birch society would balk at). The existence or not of Post-Abortion Syndrome is a little more complicated. I have no doubt that a certain number of women do suffer depression following an abortion but whether the numbers are significant enough to be described as a "syndrome", I have no idea. There's also this irredeemably stupid idea that those big posters of abortions in progress make us shudder because we know that abortion is "wrong". That's bollocks. The posters make us shudder because blood and gore from any source have a powerful effect on the human psyche. Your reaction to shots of open-heart surgery in progress would probably be much the same because blood and gore trigger something in the primal part of our psyche which doesn't care where the blood comes from, it just views blood as a scary thing (for reasons that should be obvious with a moment's thought). Abortion isn't murder, let's swiftly quash that notion. The definition of murder is quite specific, it applies only to an unlawful killing. Abortion is legal for the most part and therefore, it's not murder (for exactly the same reasons as the death penalty isn't murder).

I suppose what I'm getting at here is the tendency to view the other side in the worst possible light. Many pro-lifers would like to believe that pro-choicers are willful baby-killers who know that a foetus is a human being but are so crazed by bloodlust that they don't care. I don't doubt that there are one or two pro-choicers like that (the existence of fanatical crazies is sadly not confined to any particular political stance) but for the majority, that couldn't be further from the truth. The vast majority of pro-choicers look at the evidence and decide that a foetus doesn't qualify as human in any meaningful way. Pro-lifers feel that a foetus does qualify as "human", the medical evidence makes no claims of "human-ness" at all for the same reason that science doesn't attempt to test religion. Likewise, I don't doubt that a few pro-lifers really are crazed religious lunatics who would like to declare every woman's womb their personal property but the majority aren't. The majority of pro-lifers are reasonable people, often with a deep love of life but they also tend to be emotionally-driven and their arguments often rest on emotion (witness the use of late-term abortion pictures and the absurd playing to emotion of the "Partial-Birth Abortion" ban).

Here in England, abortion hasn't been a real political issue in years. There's been a little minor tinkering with the legislation as medical techniques have changed but for the most part, it's settled ground and partly, I think that's because abortion in the USA has become tied up both in the hatred that right and left hold for one another and with the USA's insane attitude toward sex. Pregnancy is usually the result of sex and, contrary to locker-room myth, the only outwardly visible sign. There is a worrying portion of the USA which views sex as, at best, a necessary evil which should be inflicted only on a married partner (yes, I'm aware of the "so sacred it should be saved for marriage" argument but the other comments of these people don't reveal the most positive of attitudes toward sexuality). Pregnancy is therefore visible proof that you have had sex, you've broken their view of how things should be and must therefore be punished. Of course, the train of thought is vastly more complex than that and very few people are ever aware of it but that's often what it boils down to. And then there's the morons. Now, conservatives are not necessarily stupid but stupid people do tend to be conservative so most of the people making fools of themselves over the whole area of sex and abortion tend to be conservative. People like the AFA for example (possibly the greatest collection of pure evil in one place today) want abortion banned because they fear that access to abortion is viewed as a license to have pre-marital sex. They are insane. It would be easy to point and laugh at the crazy people but they have supporters, all of whom can vote, some of whom have guns and a few of whom are not adverse to "direct action".

The real tragedy is that in amongst all this, real issues are lost in the noise. For example, there is a question over at what stage can a foetus feel pain and should therefore, be subject to anesthetic before an abortion. That's a real issue and one that should be investigated by those in the medical profession but both sides are so busy hurling insults at each other (and blame where it's due, the pro-lifers tend to be rather more ready to hurl those insults) that the question is ignored. The technology exists to measure such a thing but the pro-choicers don't want the pro-lifers to use the results as ammunition and the pro-lifers do want to use the results as ammunition so the question never breaks the public consciousness. I firmly believe that within my lifetime, technology will be developed that will enable a foetus to be extracted from the womb at a very early stage of development and brought to term outside of a woman's body. Such a development would be life-changing for those who wish to have children but cannot for medical reasons (my mother for example, cannot have any more children or her blood pressure would become life-threatening) but in the current climate, such an invention would never be deployed because the pro-lifers would try and use it to argue that abortion was now unnecessary and the pro-choicers would, well, not want to see the pro-lifers use that arguement. There are good moral and philosophical reasons for disagreeing with abortion because the current climate is all about emotion and in that climate, reason and wisdom take a holiday.