Choice and Compromise

Am I pro-life or pro-choice? Can I be both?

It’s a little tougher than walking and chewing gum at the same time. First, I recognize that I shouldn’t be discussing this at all for two big reasons: I am not a woman, and I have no children. But to be brutally honest, I have a hard time shaking some internal conviction that life begins at conception. Another human will potentially be joining us on Earth.

I say this because one of the justifications for abortion is that fetuses don’t quite count until they reach a certain stage, what is called viability. That’s a comforting construction. It relieves us of the thought that abortion might actually involve killing something.

OK, at this point, I can hear the blood in some of you boiling at me. But let me finish. Roe v. Wade is less about defining life than it is about allowing a woman a choice, up to a point in the fetus’s development. I support that choice.

Laws have always been about compromise, about threading needles, turning lofty principles into  workable rules for living down here on this planet. We permit the taking of life under certain circumstances, such as self-defense. And physician-assisted suicide is increasingly allowed. We are starting to accept the notion of choice at the end of life as well as at the beginning.

The determination of the beginning of life is by no means a settled issue in the law. Someone who kills a pregnant woman can be charged with two crimes in many states. And in a few, pregnant women who drink or take drugs are committing child abuse or neglect. Frequently, these are low-income women who have difficulty accessing legal abortion and/or giving up a bad habit.

We make moral compromises all the time. Before we bite into the hamburger, do we think about the fellow being it came from? We didn’t have to look the cow in the eye before it was slaughtered. We comfort ourselves with the thought that the animal was bred for this fate or that protein is good for us. I have not stopped eating meat, though, and probably won’t, as long as it’s legal.

As for the courts, they will always be raising or lowering bars. Since this country’s founding, Supreme Court decisions have sometimes been shockingly unfair, on either side of many issues. What were those justices thinking? we ask. But it seems that even jurists gradually learn to adjust their decisions to accommodate clear moral shifts, or at least to admit reality. That said, I don’t see a nice clean ending to the debate over abortion anytime soon. But I’m not a big fan of euphemisms, either.