Time Immortal

ProWomanProLife has some interesting analysis of the implications of the Canadian abortion rate in light of the outcomes of a study done by the Guttmacher Institute, the “research arm” of Planned Parenthood. Obviously, the statistics are for America rather than Canada, but given that Canada and the U.S. tend to be reasonably close on most such things, some rudimentary analysis can probably be done.

If we take the Guttmacher Institute’s …reasons for why women have an abortion, and we take the number of abortions in Canada, 96,815 for 2004-2005, approximately the following number of people were not born in Canada for the following reasons that year:

(please note we have no Canadian equivalent of the Guttmacher stats so this is all very approximate)

20,330 people died for inadequate finances

20,330 people died because the woman isn’t ready

15,490 people died because the woman’s life would change too much

11,618 people died because there are problems in the relationship; the woman is unmarried

10,650 people died because the girl is too young

7,745 people died because the woman has all the children she wants

2,904 people died because the woman has a health problem

2,904 people died because the baby has health problems

968 people died because of rape or incest

3,873 people died for “other” reasons.

(Average number of reasons given, 3.7)

I gather this is why we’re not allowed to question “a woman’s choice”: once you begin to question that, you wonder whether these are good reasons for killing people. Everyone, of course, draws their own line in the sand somewhere.

Abortion in the cases of rape, incest, and the mother’s health are what I would consider the three most commonly-cited examples of “good reasons” for an abortion. But we must be more objective. In life, the only morally legitimate act of killing is one of self-defence or, in exceedingly rare cases, killing to defend the life of another from an aggressor. And even then, the act of killing is not moral per sé, because it is still disordered and against creation — the killing is, at best, not immoral.

To be charitable for a moment, then, let us assume that the only morally legitimate abortion is one that is analogous to the act of self-defence: abortion to save the life of the mother.

Three percent. Just three percent of all abortions performed could thus be categorized as having been done for “good reason.” But let us be charitable and allow that the number could be as five percent, since the statistics would probably be a bit different in Canada.

Now, let’s be even more charitable, and concede that “good reasons” for abortion include cases of rape and incest.

Four percent.

Look at the list above. The overwhelming majority of abortions — over ninety percent — are performed for reasons that, objectively speaking, are not “good” ones. The health of the baby is irrelevant. The age of the woman is mostly irrelevant — if she’s “too young” to be having a kid, she probably is too young to be having sex in the first place. Finances, personal preparedness, and relationship turmoil are irrelevant — they are inevitable facts of life, and there’s really no such thing as an “ideal” time to have a baby. And the fact that a woman’s life would change too much is more than irrelevant; it is illogical — of course having a baby changes things! D’uh!

The overwhelming majority of abortions would seem to happen for one primary reason: selfishness.And the majority of unborn children who are aborted die to make someone else’s life a little easier. That’s not a “good” reason — in fact, it’s no reason at all.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

He addresses the issue of the “personhood” of the unborn in response to a question asking about what distinctions exist, if any, between what is a “person” and what is a “human.”

It is not a legal question. Until just recently, the law held abortion to be illegal, and the overturning of those laws were not based on legal precedent.

It is not a biological question. What defines a homo sapiens to a biologist is genetic material, i.e. descent. There is no question that even a single-celled organism is living, and that, if it comes from a bisexual race, it has a mother and a father. The word ‘embryo’ refers to the stage of development of an organism of a species: for example, an unborn fox kit passed through an embryo stage of development. No biologist would argue that an unborn fox was not a member of the species “fox”.

It is absurd to classify an unborn homo sapiens and “not a member of any species” on the grounds of a lack of observable phenotype characteristics. No biologist classifies a bald man as ‘not a mammal’ on the grounds that he does not suckle his young, being a male, and is not hairy, being bald.

It is not a moral question. No one makes caring for a diseased or underdeveloped loved one dependent on that loved one’s ability to pass an IQ test or show some form specifically human behavior. If your husband has a stroke, and loses the human capacity for reasoning in his cortex, he becomes your dependent; he does not become your property or your livestock. When he dies, you still call a mortician, not a butcher.

So what it the question of personhood?

Personhood is an excuse. If one wishes to work one’s will upon the weak and helpless, one first removes their humanity in thought. Call the Jews sons of Pigs. Call the Negroes sub-human. Call the worthless old folk bread gobblers or vegetables. Called the unborn any name by what they are: human offspring. Babies.

He’s hardly the first to observe this, and he certainly won’t be the last. Ultimately, though, many of the arguments in favour of abortion reduce to this basic issue: denying the protection and rights afforded by a legal categorization to a segment of humanity — in this case, the unborn.

Oh, there are obvious practical and semantic differences between the current abortion regimes and, say, the plight of blacks in the U.S. prior to, and even after, the American Civil War. But the underlying logic is more or less the same: those things are not “people” and so can be mistreated/disposed of on a whim.

That’s what this debate is really about: at what point is it/should it be legal to kill a human being in any capacity other than an act of self-defence*?