Answers to Hard Case Abortion Arguments

This is my Ethic's Term Paper. It will probably piss some people off. It should. Abortion is evil.

10 week fetus

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew and approved of you as My chosen instrument and before you were born I separated and set you apart…” Jeremiah 1:5 AMP

     For the sake of argument I will not be arguing when life begins.  There are facts through science that have already answered this question. If life is defined by science then,

 “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.” –Professor Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic.

     The woman’s egg is fertilized by a sperm and science calls it a zygote. The zygote now has its own genetic DNA separate from the woman’s. It carries all the code a full grown human has. It is an individual person.  By definition personhood also begins at conception. Only in the abortion debate is this an issue. There is no example of life starting off as something different than the final result. We do not start off as nonhuman and become human because we grow. We are human from the beginning. Actually, all the logic against the unborn’s personhood are illogical and false.  This specific issue would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. I could go on for pages and pages but this paper is not about that.

      One of the big questions I run into is the case for rape and incest. Why should an innocent woman have to suffer all her days with a baby that was not conceived in love, but by a horrific crime? Women shouldn’t have to carry a baby they don’t want and be put through more trauma and responsibility. It’s not fair. What about incest? No one should ever have to carry a baby conceived that way. The baby will be born with deformities and have a horrible life. Abortion is definitely justified in these cases.

     According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 1% of all reported abortions in the United States were due to forced intercourse.  1% of 1.21 million abortions performed is a very small percent. We use rape as a defense because Americans believe the rate is much higher. It is actually very rare and very preventable.  Conception does not occur immediately and medicinal prevention to conception is widely available. Many woman lie about their “rape” due to fear, feeling that rape will justify their abortion. This was the case in Roe vs. Wade.

     Rape is never the fault of the child. The unborn cannot be punished by killing them. The unborn are individuals that are innocent regardless of how they came to be. Civilized people do not put to death the children of rapists or any offender, for that matter. The unborn are not responsible for the crimes of their parents. Carrying the baby to term, raising the baby, adoptions etc. are definitely very hard for the mother. The decisions are many and she needs support, but none of it justifies the taking of another’s life. The rapist is the one that needs to be punished. Of course, this comes back to the “When Does Life Begin” debate, which I have already addressed.

      Abortion is as violent to the baby as rape is to the victim. The two events are of the same philosophy, one human acting on an innocent with totally disregard.  Abortion does not bring healing to the rape victim. For many women it brings added guilt, especially years later when they are no longer in denial. Abortion does nothing bad to the man who raped her and it does nothing good for the woman. Abortion creates a second victim. Of the women that I know personally who had children born from rape, the child was a gift and part of their healing. They brought something beautiful into the world from something ugly.  Adults that were born of rape feel the same way. They are glad to be here and want their lives validated.

     Incest is even worse than rape and pregnancy through rape is very rare. Incest is horrible and evil, but it IS a form of rape and the same truths still apply. Incest does not cause mutations; it only allows the recessive genes that are faulty to be reinforced.  Incest raises deformity rate but is also rare. We cannot destroy life for the abuses of another.  The victim should be removed and protected. Abusers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The victim needs full support through the healing process. In time, her choices of prevention, protection, raising or adoption become a lot clearer. Still, the taking of an innocent life cannot be justified and brings me to my next case.

     What about deformities? It isn’t right to bring a child into this world when they are just going to die. It’s not ethical to make a child suffer and go through life with horrible disabilities. It’s not fair to make a mother go through having a baby that is going to be such a burden. It’s not fair to burden society with them either. It is cruel to the child and it costs way too much money to care for these kids. What if the mother can’t afford the child’s care or can’t handle the child’s disability? Won’t the child end up worse in the end than if she had aborted it?

     The number one thing to realize here is the diagnosis is sometimes wrong. If we are talking about the life of another human being, wouldn’t we err on the side of caution? We do for every other circumstance.  Sometimes these diagnoses aren’t even proven or the deformity is minor. Other times deformities can be corrected quite successfully. The tests used to determine POSSIBLE deformities are more life threatening than the methods used. Amniocentesis can be dangerous and has many risks. In my personal life experience, four tests showing a Down syndrome issue, turned out to be false.

     When we abort a child with deformities we are saying we know best.  How is it not cruel to decide that ending their life is really the best? This is child abuse. Maybe we should ask the handicapped if they think they should have been allowed to live.  If abortion is the answer to control suffering, the born handicapped really shouldn’t be here. The same logic for saving society from such burdens could be to round them up and execute them. Hitler tried that with the Jews. The justification of killing because of undesired results or opinion is genocide. People who say, “Oh well, they are going to end up a vegetable,” just dehumanizes them, but they are still human in nature.  What was human will be human no matter what you call it.

     In deciding what we think is best for the handicapped child; we are really saying we don’t want the responsibility to care for them. There are plenty of people on this earth that are willing to raise a child with deformities and handicaps. The joy some of these children bring to families and the obstacles they have overcome are countless. Children with deformities are not always the burden people think and the prisons are filled with many non-handicapped people that are not only burdens to society but are no longer social assets.

     Even if a child is going to die, it is better to have those few precious moments than to spend eternity knowing it was you that ended their life. To mourn the loss of a child, even one alive for 45 minutes, is normal and better than the psychological trauma abortion brings. Healthy grief from natural death trumps taking a life. We cannot decide for the unborn what they would want. They cannot speak for themselves and in making the decision to end their life we have played God. The same reasons people use for killing handicapped/deformed unborn can only be valid if those same reasons can be used on those already born. Nowhere in society do we accept inflicting pain on another to alleviate our own discomfort or challenge.

     So really, we’re left with the “what if the mother is going to die?”  This isn’t even an argument. Abortion was legal to save the mother before “abortion-for-hire” was protected. If a woman is pregnant and she has cancer, the removal of the cancer may end the baby’s life. This is not abortion because a life has been saved. Abortion is the taking of a life. Ending a pregnancy to save a life is morally sound. When two lives are at risk and only one can survive, doctors by law must save that life. There are cases where the life saved is the baby’s. Every case is different, but better to save a life is better than to lose two. Also, these cases are even rarer than rape cases and even Planned Parenthood has said, “It is possible for almost any patient to be brought through pregnancy alive, unless she suffers from a fatal illness such as cancer or leukemia, and, if so, abortion would be unlikely to prolong, much less save, life.”

     These cases are hard but mostly exceptional. There is no scientific evidence or rational thought that proves an unborn child is not human.  No matter how a child was conceived or developed, she is still a human.  What women need is support, understanding and compassion. True compassion serves both mother and baby.