The first article I ever wrote was an opinion piece for my high school newspaper. One of the students was a girl named Toni from South Africa who wrote an article against Apartheid, and our teacher had a policy that every opinion piece needed to have a counter opinion. As the only conservative in the class, I was tasked with writing basically all of the counter opinions, including a counter opinion on Apartheid.
I was of course against Apartheid, so the best I could do was to write a highly nuanced article against America being the spearhead for sanctions, on the grounds that Jimmy Carter had applied them like cotton candy and nations no longer respected our use of them, and that sanctions would hurt, first and foremost, the black South Africans we were trying to protect. My article was against Apartheid, but also against America being the driving force behind sanctions.
The next article I wrote was on abortion.
I really latched onto a poll that had come out showing that 80% of Americans supported a ban on abortions in the third trimester and 80% opposed a ban in the first trimester. My article argued that we should have a Constitutional Amendment banning abortions in the third trimester and making them a true constitutional right in the first, leaving the second trimester up to the states. I also argued that Roe Vs. Wade was one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history, conjuring up a right to ‘privacy’ out of thin air, and then tying a right to abortions to that mythical right, as if having an abortion related to privacy. I also said that short of a Constitutional Amendment, it should be left to the states.
I don’t think that polls today would still show the same support for allowing abortions in the first trimester, nor for banning them in the third. Too many people now view abortion rights as sacrosanct, and the science shows that fetuses develop faster than previously thought in terms of when they can suffer and feel pain.
Let me frame the abortion question correctly, today, by equating it to another subject where someone is sometimes allowed to kill someone else: self defense.
It is legal to kill someone in self defense in every state in our country, although the specific laws regarding when self defense is justifiable and when it is excessive, vary. The technical term for self-defense is ‘justifiable homicide.’
The question of abortion is not a question of women’s health, or reproductive rights. It is the question of when the killing of an unborn baby should qualify as justifiable homicide, and whenever the topic of abortion comes up, that is how I now frame it.
This is a framing abortion supporters have a hard time backing away from. They can’t deny that abortion is the killing of an unborn child. ‘Unborn child’ is a perfectly functional definition of a fetus. They can try to argue that a fetus is a clump of cells and that killing it is not murder, but that too is a justification for killing it, leading right back to whether or not the homicide is justified.
When I hear that a woman has a natural right to control her own body, my argument is that all people do. Women are no exception. If a fetus were a cancerous growth, of course a woman would have a right to have it surgically removed, but a cancerous growth kills its host, whereas a fetus grows into a separate person, which abortion kills. Once again, all roads lead to justifiable homicide.
Some pro-life people do not like this framing as they misread it as justifying homicide. It does nothing of the sort. I’m free to debate whatever position I want on when or where such homicide is or is not justified. From a pro-life perspective I can argue that it is never justified, and from a pro-abortion perspective, I can argue that it is always justified. Framing abortion as a question of justifiable homicide does not negate the argument. It simply makes it honest.
The modern pro-abortion position is not that the unborn child is nonexistent. Increasingly, it is that the unborn child’s right to life is subordinate to the autonomy, interests, or preferences of the mother. That really is an argument about justifying homicide. Call it that.
I can accept that a woman should not have to bring a child to term if the child is the product of rape or incest. I can accept that women may have a right to an abortion if her life is in danger. I can accept that there are severe fetal deformities that a mother should not be forced to bring to term.
I cannot accept that abortion is a human right. It is nothing of the sort.
I cannot accept that a mother has the right to kill a baby that is partially crowned. I cannot accept that an unborn child is functionally different five minutes before it is partially crowned.
I cannot accept that it is justifiable to kill a fetus if it must be cut apart and removed in pieces.
I cannot accept that a fetus is just a clump of cells, and I would hope everyone would agree that if a pregnant woman wants an abortion, she should seek it before the unborn child has developed enough that it can feel pain and suffer.
The mainstream position is that meaningful pain perception likely does not occur until roughly 24–28 weeks, as the cortical neural pathways believed necessary for conscious pain perception are not fully connected before that, but some researchers argue that nociceptors begin developing around 7–10 weeks, spinal reflex responses appear earlier, thalamic and subcortical structures develop before full cortical maturation, and premature infants at very early gestational ages exhibit pain responses and are treated for pain clinically.
I’m not a doctor. I don’t even know what nociceptors are. I do know that it is generally immoral to intentionally cause another human being pain, so in my opinion the bar for having an abortion should be much higher after that point – wherever it is – than before.
My old framework used to be that there were three competing rights involved, between the mother, the developing baby, and the father. The father has equal rights to the mother once the baby is born, but not before. Before birth, however, as the fetus develops its right to survive grows. At some point, the baby’s right to survive supersedes the rights of the mother to kill it.
That’s still a viable framework, but now the central question is not one of whose rights are most important, but when and where the killing of an unborn child should be justifiable, based upon those rights. This framework correctly portrays the killing as homicide, and homicide requires justification.
Pro-abortion activists like to portray pro-life activists as anti-woman, or as seeking to control women. I reject the notion that it is anti-woman to be pro-child. Pro-abortion activists also like to suggest that someone cannot be pro-life without also wanting the government to pay to support all children, but this argument conflates the moral question of whether or not abortion is ever justifiable, with the separate question of who bears the economic responsibility for raising them, to create the ridiculous claim that you cannot be pro-life without also being pro-socialism.
If your argument is to change the subject, that is a pretty good indication that your argument is weak.
One can argue against my framework by saying that a fetus does not have personhood and thus killing it is not homicide, but the legal definition of personhood is secondary to the biological definition, and even beyond that, denying a fetus the definition of ‘person’ is just an attempt to justify killing it, returning us once again to the question of justifiable homicide.
Pro-abortion activists like to argue that bodily autonomy supersedes any claim a fetus might have, or that dependency changes the relative moral statuses of the mother and the unborn child, but these arguments too are justifications for killing fetuses, returning us to the question of justifiable homicide.
If there is an argument for abortions that cannot be boxed into a framework of justifiable homicide, I have yet to hear it, and my experience is that arguing in favor of abortion when framed as justifiable homicide is just as fruitless as defending Apartheid would have been.
Just as I had to use a tremendous amount of nuance to write a counter-argument to Toni’s anti-Apartheid piece, so too the pro-abortion crowd has to use nuance to write viable counter-arguments to this framework. They may try to reject this framework altogether, but the framework is too honest and too clean for rejecting it outright to stick.
And forcing them into nuance also forces them into retreat, framing abortion as an immoral act that may only sometimes be justifiable.
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