Tough questions, both of them. I don’t know the answers. There are those that would prosecute the mother if an abortion were performed for this reason. This proposed action bothers me on several counts:

• Fetuses are naturally spontaneously aborted in many situations like this. If we are going to prosecute woman for abortions caused by embryonic defects then every woman who has a miscarriage could be sent to jail. Not only does this strike me as wrong (even ludicrous) but I doubt if we could build enough prisons to hold so many innocent people. Surely a law specifying this type of action would violate the woman’s rights and should probably be classified as immoral.
• Are we being cruel to both the embryonic child and mother if force a mother to carry a damaged fetus to birth? Are we arbitrarily condemning both parties to a life of pain and misery^note? If so, is this moral and should it be legal?

The answer to these questions seems to me to depend on the specifics of the situation and I don’t see any universal principle that applies to all such situations.

As a result of the above thoughts I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that ideally the best people to make the judgment on whether to perform an abortion are the embryonic parents in consultation their medical advisors and that the state should stay out of the process. The specifics of the situation are best known by the parents and they appear to be the best people to make the ultimate decision especially if time is of the essence. Note that I say that this is a tentative conclusion and I do mean tentative because there are still several contentious issues within this context that bother me and which could modify my position such as:

• Potential for abuse. Let’s face it, some people just aren’t responsible and they will try to beat the system whenever possible in order to further their own selfish interests at the expense of an embryonic child.
• As with most people I cringe when I hear that a near full term fetus has been aborted. Especially if the baby would have survived on their own if not destroyed. Emotionally, it just feels like we’ve callously allowed the destruction of a human life and that it somehow diminishes us all. This type of action does seem immoral to me but I don’t know where you should reasonably draw the line between allowing an abortion and forcible preventing it. Is it before one month, in the first trimester, up to and including birth? In this respect I have to confess that some abortion statues seem to me to be not only immoral but weird as well (e.g., the statue that allows an abortion by killing the child as long as the umbilical cord is attached to the child even though the child plus placenta has separated from the mother and could survive independently of the attachment if given the chance).
• Underage (i.e., teen or younger embryonic mothers) abortions. There are several bothersome issues here including the health and fitness of the potential mother, rape (statuary or otherwise) of underage girls, and maturity of the people involved. Probably any abortions cases like these should include counseling and possibly removal from the underage mother’s parents.
• Cases of rape or incest. The embryonic mother typically has no control over getting pregnant probably due to violent abuse or emotional blackmail. This is a really tough issue for me. Regardless of the legal or ethical arguments I’m inclined to cut the mother some slack and allow the abortion. To choose otherwise is to potentially condemn a victim to a lifetime of punishment while the perpetrator is subject to little or no such comparable punishment.

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Tags: Abortion, contraception, politics, Science

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Abortion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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