Oklahoma is logical and Texas isn’t

Abortion, unless performed to save the mother’s life, has been outlawed in Oklahoma. Earlier this year, Texas and Mississippi stopped short of a total ban, instead limiting abortions to the first six and 15 weeks of pregnancy respectively.

Predictably, all these laws have whipped up a storm of impassioned clamour both pro and mostly con. The Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on Roe vs Wade, which legalised abortion nationally, is again in the news.

Jen Psaki, the press secretary to that good Catholic Joe Biden, described all such bills as an “unconstitutional attack on women’s rights”, and she wasn’t just speaking for herself.

On the other hand, real (as opposed to ‘good’) Catholics, along with some communicants in other denominations, are hailing the new law on religious grounds. They refuse to see abortion as a God-given right, nor one specified in America’s founding documents. These mention the right to life, not to nipping one in the bud.

These events, and the widespread reaction to them, have highlighted the trifurcation of the argument. For there exist only three possible stands on the issue.

Miss Psaki and her ilk see abortion at any stage in pregnancy as one of those inalienable rights the Declaration of Independence failed to mention only by oversight. They regard Roe vs Wade as equivalent to the lapidary commandments Moses pulled out of the burning bush.  

To the Oklahoma legislature, along with Catholics and other orthodox Christians, abortion is the arbitrary taking of a human life. Yet they tend to agree, though not universally, that the choice of the mother’s life over the embryo’s must be allowed should the necessity arise.

Many other people, including those in various legislatures, don’t oppose abortion in principle, but they have misgivings about administering the procedure in the later stages of pregnancy. Most European governments are also in that camp. In Britain, for example, abortion isn’t allowed after 24 weeks, unless the mother’s life is at risk or the child would be born with a severe disability.

My own position has always been rooted in dispassionate ratiocination. Any such process must involve the ability to strip an issue down to its bare essentials. Having performed that divesting operation, I have to reject the third position out of hand. There’s no logic to it.

Catholic doctrine, on the other hand, is irrefutably logical. Life is a gift from God received at conception. Therefore, abortion is tantamount to the unlawful killing of a human being, thereby contravening one of the aforementioned lapidary commandments.

Miss Psaki and her fellow abortionists don’t lack some logic either. A foetus, they argue, isn’t a human being. Until it pops out of the womb it remains but a part of the woman’s body, hers to dispose of as she sees fit. No substantive difference exists between an abortion and, say, an appendectomy.

Such are the two extreme ends to the argument, and both can be profitably reduced to a single overarching question: whether or not the foetus gestating in a woman’s body is a human being. If the answer is yes, abortion is abhorrent. If the answer is no, there’s nothing wrong with it.

I happen to agree with the first proposition and disagree with the second, but neither contradicts the demands of sound logic. However, the intermediate position, limiting abortion to some arbitrary point during pregnancy, just doesn’t make sense.

And, by showing why it doesn’t make sense, I can explain, without as much as mentioning religion, why I welcome Oklahoma’s decision, but not that in either Texas or Mississippi.

Both states implicitly accept the notion that a human life is born in the womb at some point, beyond which it mustn’t be destroyed. In Texas, this point comes at six weeks. In Mississippi, human life is later in arriving: it takes nine weeks longer. Why don’t they just split the difference and settle on 10.5 weeks?

It’s the sheer inability to pinpoint the exact moment at which a human life is born that ought to clinch the argument. The only indisputable point is that of conception. Everything else is open to the possibility of error, and we in the West have always tended to err on the side of protecting human life.

All extraneous arguments endlessly gravitate towards inanity. For example, I’ve heard people say that, since a foetus can’t survive on its own, it isn’t a human being. That argument doesn’t hold water.

If self-sufficiency is a sine qua non of humanity, then neither little children nor some very old or ill people are human (and neither am I, if you believe Penelope). Yet, though some calls for euthanising the latter are heard, I have yet to encounter any mention of wholesale infanticide – this side of the Massacre of the Innocents, that is.

These days a foetus can be fully gestated in vitro, which alone should eliminate the argument from self-sufficiency, much as some of us find such experiments distasteful.

Rather than being an actual human being, a foetus is an inchoate one. Here the notion of potentiality, central to Aristotle’s metaphysics, comes into play. A foetus possesses all the physical, spiritual and moral attributes of a human being in embryonic form, as it were.

This potentiality will inexorably develop into actuality under any normal conditions. It can only be prevented from doing so by either a medical accident or a violent intervention.

The same goes not only for a foetus but also for a new-born baby. The baby also possesses only a potential for developing into a fully fledged human being. Thus, denying that property to a foetus would remove any logical and moral objections to post-natal abortion, and yet I’m sure even Jen Psaki would balk at that.

Such are the arguments against abortion. I’d suggest they appear intellectually weightier than a woman’s reluctance to take time off from her career or to start having less fun, of the party-going sort.

Yesterday’s heresies become today’s orthodoxies, and “women’s rights” is one such. Yet neither women nor men have rights indigenous to them. All such rights are bogus. People in general have real rights, those that involve no concomitant obligations on anyone else’s part.

The right to life falls into that category. The right to abortion doesn’t – logically speaking.