There has been a distracting (perhaps) firestorm
within the GOP over Todd Akin’s statements about wanting to protect the right to unborn
life even immediately after rape or incest.
I have to give the pro-life movement more credit
than I had before, for wanting to have a simple principle for protecting all
human life, one beyond all political manipulation.
And at a certain intellectual, abstract level, I
cannot really find one.
Akin would say that an unborn child’s (even the day
after conception) right to life trumps a woman’s freedom from having duty
imposed on her. That is, to protect
another’s life, it is permissible, maybe necessary, for the state to impose a
duty on the woman to carry the baby ti term (then it could be put up for
adoption).
Of course, reasonable civil libertarians oppose placing
of all involuntary duties on people. Gloria Allred, on CNN’s Piers Morgan show,
called this “forced motherhood”.
And we all know that, at a certain psychological
level, some heterosexual men want to keep the absolute “right” to force women
to have their babies at their will. Conservative writer George Gilder even
admitted that in his books in the 70s and 80s.
Many people forget that Roe v. Wade focused primary
attention on the right of the mother and her own physician to make decisions
consistent with her own health. The
decision did not confer a “right” to have intercourse without responsibility
for the life that it creates.
Whenever a mother’s health or life is at risk, it is
logically impossible to protect everyone’s absolute rights (the child’s and the
mother’s) without making some kind of informed relative judgment. In a
civilized society, it seems intuitively appropriate to give a lot of weight to
the health of the mother.
What is more difficult to resolve in an absolutely
principled way is preserving life when it will be severely disabled or have (in
apparent view) very poor quality.
Society makes a judgment to go a long way in protecting the rights of
the vulnerable to life to avoid a slippery slope. Still, in modern medicine, with increased
longevity and ability to preserve biological life indefinitely, novel moral
problems are inevitable.
At a certain point in our thinking, emphasis shifts
from the absolute respect for every individual life to concern over the “common
good”. Of course this is dangerous. But it has seemed inevitable throughout
history, leading to moral double standards.
For example, we used to have a compulsory male-only
military draft. And then we created
exceptions, or deferments: first for married fathers, and then later for
students. In the 1960s, going into
Vietnam, we baldly decided that some male lives were more valuable than
others. That’s not intellectually
consistent with absolute fidelity to right to life.
In a broader sense, throughout most of history,
culture has often required men to be willing to sacrifice themselves (or make
themselves fungible) to protect women and children, and this often applied to
young men who had not yet had a chance to reproduce. (Remember “Titanic”.) Failure to do so was considered cowardice.
Even today, men often feel compelled to take grave
risks to save others in sudden emergencies, such as floods or fires. Culture expects this of them. Is this totally
consistent with “the right to life”?
A culture that will bend over backwards to support all life also places responsibilities on others beyond the scope of their own choices. Everyone is exposed to the likelihood of increased responsibility for eldercare now.
Update: Aug. 31
On CNN, Sanjay Gupta discussed some of the "personhood" bills and amendments that would define personhood at the moment of creation of any embryo or fertilized ovum. This could complicated in vitro fertilization (for heterosexual couples where the wife cannot get pregnant naturally, or for surrogate parenting for gay couples) because extra embyros are created which now are discarded, but the medical process is likely to get more efficient so that extra embryos don't get made.