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Do you support ending people's lives? Obviously, it's a safe bet that you would answer that you supported life, and not death. What would you answer if you were asked if you supported aborting babies? The answer's not so clear-cut, is it? There is a bill, one of those bills that gets proposed every few years and sent off to die in legislative committee Limbo, called the Freedom of Choice Act. Our president, while on the campaign trail last year, pledged before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, that the FOCA bill would make it out of committee, and that he would sign it. Of course, as Jim Geraghty from the National Review joked in 2008, all of Obama's promises come with an expiration date, so take that as you will. FOCA sounds innocuous enough, right? Choice and freedom sound like things that are all-American, and of is a perfectly good preposition, for what it's worth. However, the act itself and its name have little to do with each other. The Freedom of Choice Act, as proposed in the House version, would protect consistent with Roe v. Wade a woman's freedom to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy and for other purposes. This raises some more fundamental questions that lie at the core of the abortion debate. Does one individual have the freedom to decide to terminate another person's life? Perhaps more central to the debate: Do unborn babies count as people? If I decided to kill you, I would be depriving you of your rights, specifically your right to be alive. In other words, I would be depriving you of your future. Obviously, you are a person; therefore you have the rights to enjoy your future. For argument's sake, I'll use an inkhorned word - prenates - to describe unborn humans, in order to keep loaded terms at bay. If postnates, or born humans, have the inalienable right to live, why don't prenates, that have not yet had the chance to be born, have this same right? Is there something magical about coming out of a birth canal that turns lumps of cells into people who deserve to live? It could be argued that prenates are not human beings because they are dependent on the mother's uterus for survival, just like any other lump of cells. But if we're linking personhood to performance of life processes, then is a person who needs a heart transplant less of a person than someone whose heart is healthy? Why is the recognition of rights tied to the development of the prenate? If prenates can go from being non-persons to persons, why don't other non-persons, such as trees or televisions, turn into persons, too? Either there is something special about unborn humans that allows them to go from being non-people to people, or all humans are people, from the time that an egg and a sperm combine to become something unique. If we accept that all people have the right to live, and that no person has the right to end another person's life, then it stands to reason that abortion is immoral, from a secular standpoint. There are exceptions to this, of course, but when lives aren't on the line, and it's purely a matter of convenience, the matter is more definitive. Most arguments about cultural issues such as abortion are made from a religious point of view, because for most people, religion provides a well-studied line of philosophical thought. However, there are many good, secular reasons to oppose liberal policies such as those embodied in the Freedom of Choice Act. FOCA deprives unborn babies of their right to be alive, simply because they can't vote and can't speak for themselves. Jesse Hathaway is a senior studying English. Send him an e-mail at jh309105@ohiou.edu. |
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Opinion
Jesse Hathaway
