Unalienable: My Last Entry in the Great NRB Abortion Debate
It’s incredible to hear David use our own prudence against us. To paraphrase Lincoln, “You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the [pro-life] people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.”
David next suggests that the frequency of miscarriage is somehow significant:
Not every pregnancy will result in a new human being. That’s life and we accept that. And because of that at an instinctual level we do not comprehend the death of a first trimester human being as the same thing as the death of a developed human being.
His first sentence is scientifically false—every pregnancy begins with a new human being—and it is a basic logical fallacy to suggest that the occurrence of something in nature has any bearing on the ethics of willfully replicating it. All sorts of life-threatening illnesses plague humanity at every stage of development, but nobody in his right mind would take this as justification to deliberately inflict any of them on somebody! Further, since when is what we “comprehend” on “an instinctual level” authoritative on what is true? My instincts tell me (and many other Americans) that abortion is evil no matter which month it’s done in. Hmm, what to do?
While the life of a zygote is not the same as the life of a fully developed child it still has value.
Why? This is the closest David comes to addressing the heart of the matter, but even this is an assertion, not an argument. My position is that all human beings, regardless of their development, have an unalienable right to life because they are human, and that all efforts to define a class of human non-persons that don’t deserve full legal protection are logically absurd and dangerously arrogant. David is so sure I’m wrong that he claims, deep down, I know I’m wrong (!), but he doesn’t even try to refute the pro-life view or its reasoning. Indeed, saying that “just because something is bad or morally wrong it does not mean that it necessarily should be illegal” ignores the obvious point that abortion isn’t opposed simply for being “immoral,” like promiscuity, but for being an unjust deprivation of human rights that even libertarians can recognize.
David scoffs at the idea that abortion should be one of the Right’s top priorities. But if you recognize the humanity of the unborn, it’s preposterous to suggest that the killing of 1.2 million innocent people annually is nothing to get worked up about. And as I’ve argued before, the division between pro-lifers and “true” or “serious” conservatives is utterly arbitrary. Simply put, you cannot expect the Declaration of Independence’s promises of liberty and the pursuit of happiness to remain secure while abandoning its promise of life. Ronald Reagan understood that “we cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life,” and Lincoln saw that:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes” When the Know—Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty —— to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
David concludes by asking whether I could vote for a pro-choicer who’d fight America’s enemies over a pro-lifer who wouldn’t. I wouldn’t rule it out—terrorist attacks are also anti-life, and a country on the brink of collapse isn’t going to make progress on any domestic policy issue anyway—but again, the decision wouldn’t be an easy one. What David is asking us is nothing less than to accept an America in which both political parties have rejected the Declaration of Independence and abandoned their respect for Americans’ most basic human rights.
To get an idea of just how torturous the scenario is to our consciences, ask yourself if you could have voted for a pro-segregation anti-Communist in the 1950s—and then consider that abortion is more evil than segregation (David should read what Ramesh Ponnuru had to say about Rudy Giuliani and abortion at the time). Hopefully, conservatives who want to win elections rather than repel voters will have the humanity and good sense not to force that choice upon us.
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Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College. He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.
