ON ABORTION AND RIGHTS

The abortion debate seems to be the conflicting interests of two groups of individuals: the woman and her rights, vs. the unborn baby and his rights. When a government legalizes abortion on demand, it is saying that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the unborn child, and that legalization doesn’t REQUIRE anyone to go against his conscience, so has no power to coerce anyone against his conscience.

There are several problems with this approach, of course. First, it seems obvious that there is no one to stand up for the rights of the child. If we are to consider individual rights, don’t we need to consider those? But could it be that this argument assumes the PUBLIC approach to the question? By assuming the highest good is to protect the rights of the individual, we pit the right of one against another and can’t win (of course, the woman’s “right to choose” is itself an example of begging the question as it assumes its conclusion in its premises. If the question is, “Is abortion on demand moral?” we assume the answer is affirmative when we claim the inherent good of “a woman’s right to choose” -- a woman may have many rights, but she has no right to do evil. We don’t say that robbing a liquor store is something a woman has a right to choose, so there is a category of actions that are not allowable -- we are trying to decide if THIS is one of them or not. To claim that a woman’s right to choose is an argument in favor of abortion on demand is to claim that the abortion itself is NOT in that category of disallowable actions.)

The other problem is that we may be giving too much ground to the PUBLIC approach over that of the COMMUNITY (to use Wendell Berry’s terms). The PUBLIC assumes that the rights of the individual are paramount, the rights of families are secondary. But the COMMUNITY, a collection of individuals who have exercised their freedom of choice to define marriage in a biblical fashion, holds that the family is the smallest unity and as such, deserves protection. In the case of the COMMUNITY, the argument against abortion is far more than a debate between the right of mother as an individual and the right of the child as one. It is between the survival of the family and its extinction. The argument against abortion on demand may be better put by addressing it as one part of a larger and more multi-faceted attack against families in general. It absolves men and women of the responsibility to raise are care for a child, it ends any responsibility on the part of the father altogether, and it encourages the mother to pursue the level of responsibility allowed the father. In other words, abortion undermines the basic structure of the family, and through it, the family’s significance in the Community, thus ending the Community.

All the statistics about crime, school dropout rates, poverty, sexual promiscuity (and more) stem from broken families - why can’t we argue that anything that undermines the family will have the result of undermining the culture at large?

The reason is clear - to buy this definition of family without buying into the rest of the Christian view of the world is next to impossible. The moral restrictions seem too binding to lead to personal happiness, is the entire thing is rejected. Without a definition of marriage that has authority, we will (as a culture) embrace self-centeredness and each become an individual and expect the government to defend the rights of individuals against any choice the Community might make (and think they are doing a good thing when they do so.) If we Christians buy into this and attempt to argue pro-life law from a position of individual rights (of the baby) we may have already lost the war as we have assumed the individual rights argument is the only one that is valid.