On Abortion
An Opinion from 2018
Several weeks before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in the Fall of 2018, I published this piece in the now defunct Areo magazine. Many people were concerned that the end of Roe v. Wade was near. They were right, of course, although the end of Roe did not mean the end of legal abortions in the United States. At least not all of them.
In those same weeks, I heard from constitutional scholars who, regardless of how you felt about its substance, told me that Roe was “bad law.” Bad law or not, it will never return, although we may again have federal protection for (some) abortion. I hope so.
Roe became law early in 1973, when I was not yet quite four years old. When I came of age in the 1980s, the goal that I heard most often and widely was for abortion to be safe, legal, and rare for Americans. Safe, legal, and rare. In the frenzy of the last five years, ten, twenty even, the pro-choice side has become increasingly…well, inhuman in how it has engaged the question. Celebrating abortions, using it is a regular form of birth control, allowing it extremely late in pregnancy…none of this is honorable or good.
The piece that follows was written six years ago. I would write a different piece today, and considered revising the original, but opted against. Ultimately, my positions have not changed, although how I might state some of them have, and I believe that I now have a deeper understanding of alternative views.
Nobody wants an abortion. No woman wants one, and no man who has thought about the issue wants any woman he cares about to be in a position in which she feels compelled to have one. Sometimes, though, in service of the greater good, abortions are necessary.
In the wake of the announcement of American Supreme Court Justice Kennedy’s imminent retirement, the issue of abortion once again became central in many newsfeeds. It is a topic perennially guaranteed to provoke outrage—all the more politically useful now that once hot-button topics like gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana have slid out of the maelstrom.
In Slate recently, William Saletan argued that “Most Americans are conflicted about abortion. They don’t like it, but they also don’t like the idea of banning it.” This argument is backed up by poll numbers, but the position itself is not, contrary to what Saletan suggests, a conflicted one. Believing abortion necessary, while not “liking” it, is internally consistent, and both nuanced and moral.
I have friends who have had abortions. Most people probably do, whether they know it or not. One of my friends escaped an abusive home, became addicted to heroin, and got pregnant very young, before aborting the fetus, getting her act together, and becoming a scientist. That part where she got her act together and became a scientist? Far less likely had she been a single teenage mother.
Rarely does the discussion of abortion include a consideration of the fate of zygotes absent intervention, or the fate of babies across human cultures. Let’s go there.