The "A" Word Is Invoked

 

In his recent column supporting assisted suicide, Xerxes brought up the fact that abortion is legal to justify legalizing extending “assisted suicide” to the mentally ill as well.

So there, anyone who refuses to believe in slippery slopes. All slopes are slippery in the law.

Xerxes writes:

            “On the one hand, a mother – who may or may not have consented to becoming pregnant – imposes her will on a fetus that cannot yet express its own wishes.

            On the other hand, a group of outsiders – in the U.S., a collusion of elderly white male politicians – imposes their standards, their values, to prevent that mother from having an abortion.

            It seems to me just as wrong to say a woman cannot have an abortion as it would be to require that she must have an abortion.”

Let’s parse this. A woman may not have consented to becoming pregnant, per se; but we are responsible for the consequences of our actions. You could as easily say that, if the father did not intend to make the mother pregnant, he has no legal responsibility for that child. No paternity suit could stand. Nor could any father be required to support a child within marriage. Nor could anyone be held responsible for running someone over with his car while drunk.

If the mother then chooses to abort, she is not, as Xerxes formulates it, merely “imposing her will” on the fetus. One “imposes one’s will” if one breaks into a line; indeed, one might be imposing one’s will on a number of people. Yet we do not consider that equivalent to mass murder. She is killing it.

She is also imposing her will on the father of that child, who has equal moral rights to it.  She is denying his reproductive rights. He cannot require her to have an abortion, and he cannot prevent her from having one.

I suspect we do not want an individual father to have either of those rights. It follows that we cannot allow the mother to have them either.

Laws against abortion are not, as Xerxes disingenuously claims, a “collusion of elderly white male politicians” to impose their will. In a democracy, politicians are elected by the population as a whole. They express the will of the people.

Indeed, this same argument, used here to justify abortion, and then assisted suicide, would equally argue that murder must be legalized, and rape, and pedophilia.

If there is an argument for abortion to be legal, this isn’t it.