Overview - Abortion

The Pro-Choice Movement

Pro-Choice advocates see the debate in terms of their primary concern—a woman’s right of choice regarding her moral principles and body—hence their tendency to get the question of fetal humanity over with as quickly as possible, in many cases choosing to sidestep it altogether. While a woman’s reproductive rights and health are indisputable, they are hardly the only issue at stake, and focusing exclusively on them to with little regard for any other moral concerns trivializes the larger question of fetal humanity.

In principle, if it could be compellingly shown that a gestating fetus is human than a woman would have no more right to abort it than she would to drown a newborn infant that she didn’t want. Perhaps I’m missing something, but to me this seems pretty self-evident. I’ve never met anyone who was so antisocial that he/she did not place at least some value on human life and most consider it sacred, so regardless of our opinions about fetal humanity I cannot fathom why the question wouldn’t at least be a matter of concern. Yet throughout my life it’s been a struggle for me to get any Pro-Choice advocates I know to even address it, much less wrestle with it.

This coming summer (2007) I turn 50. I was in junior high school at the time of Roe vs. Wade and the issue has been a topic of discussion among my family and friends ever since. I can honestly say that of all the Pro-Choice advocates I’ve heard or spoken with in the last 35 years—many hundreds if not thousands—not one gave any indication that they even cared about this question, much less wrestled with it. The few times any discussion of it was tolerated it was casually dismissed with one-liners about a fetus being “just a few cells” followed by long soliloquies about “rights” (usually theirs). As nearly as I could tell, to these people a gestating fetus at any stage of development is little more than an inconvenience. As they drive away, their “Pro-Child, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice” bumper stickers fading into the distance, I’m reminded of the pro-environment lip service I hear in similar discussions with corporate executives and Far Right zealots. “Yeah, yeah, I know, we-need-to-protect-the-environment and all, I never said we didn’t. BUT…!” One is hardly left with a sense of deep, heart-felt concern.

In my experience Pro-Choice advocates tend to be scientifically literate and socially conscious. Few have ever struck me as callous. I have no trouble at all seeing how they could wrestle with the question of fetal humanity and suffering during an abortion and honestly reach an answer of no. But this casual and often self-centered disregard for the very question itself is as baffling to me as it is disturbing.

The “just a few cells” argument is particularly revealing in that it’s purely academic. I recently heard a speech by Sam Harris, author of the books Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. In it he chided Pro-Life evangelicals with an elaborate discussion of how the brain of a house fly is far more complex than that of a human fetus. This may well be true… for a few weeks after conception. But in the real world it takes at least two to three weeks for a woman to verify that she is even pregnant and schedule an abortion. And that if she is actively monitoring her own fertility on a regular basis, has access to top quality reproductive health care including state-of-the-art pregnancy test kits, and can make up her mind about having one on the spot with little or no spiritual struggle or anguish. A great many don’t until much later.

The very best over-the-counter pregnancy test kits cannot even detect a pregnancy with any reliability until at least 12-14 days gestation, and will be reliable enough to be useful only near the end of the third week. In the United States, which arguably has some of the finest and most easily accessible reproductive health care in the world, the large majority of abortions are performed between mid-first trimester (6-8 weeks) and mid-second trimester (16-20 weeks). Roughly 41% occur after 9 weeks. At this stage the fetus has facial features, limbs, a regular heartbeat, and the beginnings of a central nervous system.

As of 2003 less than one fourth of abortion providers in America were even offering abortions prior to 4 weeks gestation. One third offered them at 16-20 weeks, at which point the fetus has a nervous system, a brain that has developed to the point of having a thalamus regulating it, and is actively building a cerebral cortex. 1.2% offered them even later (Guttmacher, 2006). As of this writing some clinics offer abortions at 24 weeks after the last menstrual cycle, which at best places them at 22-23 weeks. By 20-24 weeks the fetal cortex has developed a full set of neurons, dendrites, and axons, connected by synapses, and stable EEG activity has been obtained at 22 weeks (Flower, 1985; Kostovic et al., 1992; MRC, 2001).