19 July 2004 Blog Home : July 2004 : Permalink
The NY Times had an article about an apparently self-centered woman who decided to kill off two of the triplets she was carrying and just give birth to one live baby. Michelle Malkin called the story "creepy" and garnered many comments at other blogs about the sorry tale. One of those was the couple of articles at "A Small Victory". In the second of the two the blogger and her commenters make a number of excellent points - starting with this from Michelle which would describe my own viewpoint to a T:
Pro-choice does not necessarily mean pro-abortion. There are so many mitigating factors that lie within my stance on abortion that I honestly don't know what to call myself anymore.
I am generally speaking pro-choice - but I believe that for a rational woman choosing an abortion (or a selective reduction) should be an option of last resort. However - and this is the key bit - I both remain tolerant of other views and believe that abortion will always shades of gray. There are of course isolated and rare cases at both ends of the spectrum but the majority of cases where a woman considers an abortion are cases where there simply are no right answers; there are just a range of answers that are wrong in one way or another. It's a question of the lesser of evils rather than a choice between good and evil. As a believer in personal responsibility I think that the decision to have an abortion or not is not one that should be taken by anyone other than the mother. Of course she may be advised by others but its her body and no matter what happens she is the person who will have to live most closely with the consequences.
This is why I see no reason to make abortion illegal. Having legal access to abortion does not force women to obtain one but making abortion illegal means that you are forcing your choices on someone else. This is an asymmetrical coercion in an area where not only is there no consensus about the possible options there is fundamental disagreement about the basis on which the choices should be made. To be clear, I believe that late-term abortions are borderline infanticide but I don't believe it is possible to state a clear rule about where the border lies other than the clear one of birth. For every attempt to make a rule someone will find a reasonable exception - rather than make bad law I'd rather have no law, just education and moral 'suasion.