The Only Way to Resolve the Abortion Controversy
America's ongoing war on women just got nastier.
Public support for abortion rights in the United States has never been higher. A Gallup poll in May showed a startling 80% of Americans in favor of abortion being legal in all or most cases. Several other recent polls confirm near record high support for pro-choice.
So why has 2021 become the most anti-abortion year in history, with 21 states ready to ban or severely limit abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade? Why are Republican legislators in Arkansas and North Dakota supporting bills to ban virtually all abortions at any stage of pregnancy, making abortions less available today than in the 1600s when abortion was permitted up until at least the third month?
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Because, to them, it’s about power, careers, and money—not abortion. For those pandering for votes and donations, abortion is merely a popular platform to get everyone’s attention in order to promote other “products”: their political ambitions, their religious agenda, their business interests. They are like slick hucksters taking advantage of the rowdy crowd at a lynching to sell miniature gallows for the home mantel.
The timing of the sudden outrage couldn’t be more suspicious or revealing. Texas governor Greg Abbott wants to be the New Trump: a younger, more appealing version of the former president but with less of the sexual-harassment-twice-impeached-failed-businesses-hiding-taxes-creepy-dad baggage. New packaging but the same old bitter aftertaste, like New Coke. Toward that end of getting the GOP nomination, he’s led the Texas Republicans into legislating against all the conservatives’ usual suspects: transsexuals, vaccines, immigrants, the poor, minorities, and women. He’s willing to climb over the broken backs of all of them to be president. What a patriot. He’s definitely not interested in what his own state wants, having signed the U.S.’s most restrictive abortion law even though 46% of Texans disapprove of the law while only 39% approve.
Republicans in other states who also want to chase the nomination, or curry Abbott’s or Trump’s favor, are rushing to pass similar laws that envision a soundstage version of America in the 1950s, with obedient women, compliant Blacks, grateful immigrants, and white men in charge of everything. They don’t care if these laws get overturned, they will have gotten the publicity they wanted.
For those who want to discuss abortion based on the merits of the arguments, we should examine a few of those main arguments.
Life begins at conception.
Everyone agrees that human life begins at conception. The science is irrefutable. However, that’s not the actual issue. The issue is when during the gestation do we choose to call the zygote/embryo/fetus a “human being.” Human life is defined by science, but “human being” is defined by society because it is society that decides when to convey equal rights of protection. That’s why societies throughout history have been able to define people who didn’t look like them as not fully human beings, as we did with Blacks in the original Constitution.
Yes, if left alone, the human cells will develop into a human being. But that doesn’t mean it is a human being until it is born. A common analogy is that cookie dough placed in the oven isn’t a cookie until it is fully baked. (Hold off on the protestations about heart beats and brain waves. I’m getting to that.)
Society decides the exact point to call the cells a human being and grant it full rights. The problem arises when granting the zygote/embryo/fetus full rights as a human being restricts the rights of women so that they have fewer rights than men, which most see as a greater evil than abortion. Our country has been slow to exorcize the inherent misogyny in its laws, attitudes, and culture, but great progress has been made in the past 50 years. Unfortunately, the backlash to those gains is choosing to say that even though you are a valuable member of society with many social and family ties, the zygote/embryo/fetus is more valuable.