More talk about abortion

If anything good can be said to have come from South Dakota's attempt to challenge Roe v. Wade, it's that the blogosphere is once again talking about abortion. It would seem that most of the time bloggers are as keen as anyone to avoid the topic. Perhaps that is merely a reflection of the blogosphere's tendency to chase after the popular story of the hour en masse, but I suspect it is also because most people tend to think that abortion as an issue has been talked out. People seem to think that pro-lifers have said everything they have to say, and pro-choicers have said everything they have to say, and it's pretty much all been said for at least 20 years now. With a situation like that, what's the point in bringing it up?

The problem is that I don't agree that everything has been said. There are some very persuasive arguments being made in favor of keeping abortion legal that to the best of my knowledge have only come up fairly recently. Granted, I really don't know the history of these arguments. Perhaps it is the case that these arguments have been making the rounds for 20+ years. But if that's the case, then it's even more imperative that we talk about them even louder, because I can tell you this much for sure: I hadn't heard them until recently. If these arguments have been around for years, the right people haven't been making them.

Which brings us to Lance Mannion's post from last Friday that argues that the main problem with abortion laws is that we really can't decided when life begins. Lance's post is basically a rerun of the same old pro- and anti-abortion arguments that have been making the rounds for the last 20 years.

Lance writes,

No argument for unrestricted abortion holds water unless it includes the argument that at no point is a fetus anything more than a parasitical accumulation of tissues taking up space in a woman's body.

When this is your starting point, you've already conceded a large portion of the battle. In fact, Lance is wrong when he says that any argument for unrestricted abortion must include this argument. For example, I could point out that even if I concede that a fetus is a person, it still isn't right to force the woman carrying a fetus to donate her body to care for it. Just like you can't force someone to give blood to save a dying person, you can't force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.

Lance goes on to argue that it is morally wrong to abort a pregnancy once the fetus can feel, think, and respond in kind outside the womb. He points out that we don't really know when that happens, then continues,

And that's the pro-choice argument's basic premise. We don't know. Not exactly. All we know is that at some point around here (gesturing toward a calender) it's a baby. Anything we do or say about it before then is just guessing.

The question is, who should make the guess?

For thirty-five years, as a nation, we've agreed that the guess should be left up to the woman who has to live with the outcome of the guess.

...

At some point, yes, [abortion is murder]. But when? You don't know. You're guessing. So am I. Your guess is as good as mine and our guess is no better than the woman who is actually pregnant. Since we're all just guessing, but it's her body and her life depending on whose guess wins, shouldn't she have the first and final guess?

So far I don't think I've said anything that isn't obvious to most pro-choice people.

Here's where I go off the reservation.

What if the mother is guessing wrong?

What if the fetus becomes a person earlier than she supposes?

This is why Lance's original assumption that arguments for legal abortion must address the issue of personhood is such a big mistake. The entire conversation gets derailed from the start, and all we end up with is the same tired stalemate that we've all grown tired of over the last several decades.

I wonder if Lance would call someone's refusal to donate blood an act of murder. Think about all the people on dialysis machines who die every year. Am I a murderer because I have two kidneys? Obviously, I am not. We don't consider it a murder when someone refuses to donate his body toward the support of another person. So why should abortion be any different? The question of when a new life "starts" is nothing more than a red herring that does nothing to advance the discussion.