All or nothing (Erin)

I'd like to start by getting back to what Douthat says about moral philosophy--because I think that this is the crux of the matter, the reason why I can't agree with him, and think that however well-meant these sort of attempts are they invariably end up lacking moral coherence.

It's true that the law is not a philosophy seminar; but it's also true that the law tends to be cognizant, when speaking about individual rights, that these rights can come from a few different places. There are plenty of rights the law grants to its citizens by the kind of process of "custom, compromise and common sense" Douthat alludes to. The right to vote is one such law: it was first, in America, granted to white male landowners, then other males who didn't own land, then, after slavery was abolished, to black males, and then, a long time later, to females. There is no absolute, inherent, intrinsically human right to vote, in other words; it was proper for the law to expand that right to include more people than the earliest custom-based laws included, but it is also proper for the law to revoke a person's right to vote under some circumstances, to decide that only citizens may vote, to determine the age at which one may begin to vote, and otherwise to make pragmatic decisions about the application of voting rights.

But there are, according to the founders of this nation, rights which are inalienable, rights which precede the state and its laws, and are the property of every human being. We usually speak of the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness as some of these rights; these are things which we believe may not be removed from any person without the due process of the law, because these rights come to man not from any human agency, but from God; or, if one insists on disbelief in a Creator, it could be said that these are things intrinsic to human dignity, things that no one can remove merely at will from another human being.

And that really is the centrality of the abortion debate: does abortion unjustly remove from a human being his or her inalienable right to life? Or does it, instead, remove from a woman her liberty to destroy the contents of her womb at will and continue her existence unencumbered by unwanted progeny? This is a clash of philosophy, not of law.

The abortion debate is not, at its heart, a debate about law and policy. It is not outside the realm of possibility for the law to uphold the right to life of the human being in his or her developmental state, yet target any legal punishment toward those who provide abortions, not those who procure them; nor is it outside the realm of possibility for the law to decide that a woman has the right to kill the life growing inside her--but only up until a certain point, such as the 24-week gestational cutoff currently the law in England. If we forget anything, we forget how possible it is for the law to hold two or more seemingly conflicting ideas at once. This is precisely because the law is not a philosopher.

But we who seek to shape the law abandon philosophy at our peril. If we believe that human beings are entitled to life, and if we understand the developing human in the womb to be both human and a being that is genetically distinct from his or her mother, by what logic do we argue that he or she, merely by the temporary condition of his or her dependency, has forfeited this inalienable right? Have we not created as a principle the notion that human beings may be deprived of their right to live when they are inconvenient? And have we pondered the reaches to which this principle might eventually go--as, indeed, we're already seeing it go in some cases involving euthanasia?

To use an example from a different moral issue, most of us understand that torture is immoral because it also removes something that is intrinsic to human dignity. We believe in safeguarding the rights of the accused, not in permitting them to be treated inhumanely; we believe that torture reduces the person to an object, who may be harmed at our wills, for our purposes, and that this is always gravely evil. The right of a human being to remain free from direct and intentional harm is tossed aside, and justifications involving national security or other perceived needs are supposed to outweigh the prisoner's right to be treated humanely.

If we abandon that philosophical principle--that humans have the right to be treated humanely, in accordance with their intrinsic human dignity which does not depend on their status as friend or enemy or on their condition of incarceration--then we reduce arguments against torture to the merely pragmatic, and open the door for our opponents to insist that the inhumane treatment they favor shouldn't be considered torture, for the dubious reason that they prefer to call it something else. I don't think I have to spell out how greatly that restricts arguments against torture, or how important, how necessary it is that arguments formed against it always refer back to the dignity of the human person and his intrinsic rights--so why should it be any different in the abortion debate?

There are many things the pro-life community can do to further the conversations with the pro-choice community. I think that guaranteed maternal health care coverage for any woman who needs this would be one such thing; policies that would come to the financial aid of women in crisis pregnancy situations would also not be a bad idea, as people have suggested. Reminding the woman in a crisis pregnancy that we value her dignity and intrinsic worth and are willing to give any practical help necessary to her and to her baby is a strategy that works to save unborn babies from death by abortion, as any long-time volunteer of such a center knows well.

But downplaying, diminishing, or abandoning the philosophical and moral arguments against abortion means downplaying, diminishing or abandoning the innocent unborn human whose life is at stake in every abortion, no matter what the circumstances. To the little girl or boy whose heart is just about to begin, or has just begun, to beat beneath his or her mother's own heart, abortion really is all or nothing.