Every weekend here at Dartmouth, students engage in multifarious extracurricular activities. With a little luck, such activities will have very little to do with abortion. However, such is not always the case. Hence, what better way to remove the specter of extracurricular activities gone awry than to finish up this three-part series on abortion by continuing to talk about it in a lofty philosophical and legal manner?
During the last two weeks, I have principally tried to show that the argument encased in "It's my body so it's my right to have an abortion" is not sufficient grounds by itself to make and keep the right to an abortion legal.
The argument ran as such:
First, if any government has any power at all to regulate anything, then it has the power to regulate what goes on between two human beings in the government's domain, if one of those humans is to come to harm.
Second, a just government does not have the right to decide that certain human lives are more valuable than others, or that anyone may reserve the right to kill a certain type of human; the government's responsibility to protect human life is categorical.
Finally, at some point -- although it is freely admitted that this point is practically impossible to find -- a fetus becomes a human being.
What follows is that the government can tell you what to do with your body if what you do will result in the death of another human. The most important question in the abortion debate is whether the fetus is in fact a human or not, and not whether a person has the absolute right to control what goes on inside her body.
For those that are sketchy on the issue of what make a human being such, a simple thought experiment goes far to show that a fetus becomes a human at some point in the womb.
Only the very stout-hearted would say that it is okay to kill a newborn baby under the assumption that you are not really killing a human, but instead an animal that is somewhat lesser developed. However, what makes this newborn different than a baby in the womb five minutes before birth?
Certainly, passage through the vagina and into the world does not confer upon an infant some special quality that makes it a human at one point and a killable animal three minutes before.
Going in reverse then, we may see that a there exists a point at some time in the womb where a physical development takes place that turns what would otherwise be a mass of cells into what we value and protect as a human. What is this change? I don not know.
Some say the brain makes a human a human, others argue the heart does; I don't have the space to argue either. Luckily enough, such is immaterial. What is important is nobody has been able to agree, beyond reasonable doubt, what in fact makes a human a human, and this yields abortion's strongest case.
In the end, it is laws that will say whether women will be able to opt for abortion or not; the much-vaunted Roe v. Wade is essentially a legal document. Yet another important tenet of our legal system is innocence until proven guilt.
What this means is that because we cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that when a woman aborts a fetus she is terminating a human life, the government has no right to restrict her from doing so: any action that cannot be proven as a crime should necessarily remain legal.
At this point, I would like to dispense with the pro-life argument that an embryo has a soul at conception and in so is a human from the outset, sacred and to be protected.
What this basically means is that Judeo-Christians should not allow themselves to have abortions, for there is handily enough a separation of church and state as outlined in our Constitution.
What follows is that religious means for suggesting when human lives begin should not find their way into our laws. Atheists, who believe that there is no soul deserve the same rights as the most devout theist.
In conclusion, although it is popular to sport bumper stickers that say "Keep your laws off my body", there are deeper and more meaningful principles to contend with.
There is a difference between what is convenient for us to do and what we ought to do, and when passing laws that will affect human lives the way abortion laws do, we must put aside what sounds nice and deal with instead the legal principles that our nation was founded on.
So, it turns out abortion should indeed be legal, but not because we can do whatever we want with ourselves to ourselves. Instead, there is a great ambiguity in the act of aborting a fetus, and this ambiguity serves to make sure the mother has the options she needs as she faces pregnancy.
