EDITORIAL

(3/6/2006)

Reasons to Keep Abortion Legal in South Dakota

A look at some of the more common arguments

By Bob Ellis

Editor

After I posted “Getting a Grip on Abortion Hysteria” last week, Dakota Voice received perhaps the biggest barrage of email since Terri Schiavo was murdered last year. Some agreed with me, some disagreed. Some on both sides of the argument were thoughtful and rational, others were glaring examples of the “hysteria” I was referring to. The majority quickly revealed they hardly read anything beyond the first or second paragraph of my piece.

There was an entire array of reasons given by those who want to preserve abortion, some more rational than others. While I’m under no illusions that I’ll change the mind of the most vehement abortion proponents—logic and reason is optional with that crowd—I thought it might prove of value to someone who is genuinely interested in the merits of the arguments to examine some of them.

The first argument I’ll address is that “poor women need access to abortions.” This was never really explained by those who rolled it out, other than some tired old socialist dogma about oppression of the poor and all that. I guess I don’t look at poor people as necessarily being so bereft of moral fiber and a sense of responsibility that they have sex in a more irresponsible fashion than everyone else. Was the writer implying that poor people can’t afford condoms, therefore they need abortion as a form of birth control? Maybe that was the argument, but if so, even most pro-abortion folks claim they don’t want to see abortion used as contraception.

Precedent of Roe v. Wade. This is essentially meaningless. Is anyone willing to argue that the Dred Scott decision of the 1800s, which said black people were not humans deserving of rights, but were instead property, deserved to stand? Or how about the Plessy v. Ferguson decision which allowed segregated schools, but was later reversed by Brown v. Board of Education? Liberals seemed to have no problem when in 2003 the Supreme Court allowed Lawrence v. Texas to overrule Bowers v. Hardwick legalizing sodomy. Law is always subject to being overturned, especially bad law built on a foundation composed of shadows (remember the “emanations” and “penumbras” of Roe?).

Children end up unwanted. Well, there always have been and always will be children who “come along” and are unwanted. That doesn’t mean we should kill them. The fact that they weren’t sought after doesn’t mean we can’t care for them and treat them with dignity. I’m the kind of guy who could have gone through my entire life without having children and I wouldn’t have felt the least bit incomplete, or that I had missed out on anything. Yet I have two children and I think anyone who knows me would say that I do a pretty good job of taking care of them—not to mention loving them enough to wrestle an alligator to protect them. When news of my impending children came, I saw them as an addition to my family which God had sent, and realized I had a responsibility to do right by them. I’m not such an intellectual giant, nor am I such a pillar of responsibility, that anyone else could not aspire to this attitude, as well. Besides, wasn’t that what Roe was supposed to accomplish: every child a wanted child? Over 40 million abortions later, it has failed woefully.

Children end up in bad homes. Again, they always have and they always will. Even wealthy people with access to abortion anywhere and everywhere in the world can be lousy parents. (When I think of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt raising children, I shudder). The only option to protect against children ending up in bad homes would be to pass some sort of stringent approval process before people would be allowed to become parents—and I think only the most ardent of socialists would support something like that. See the previous paragraph for the explanation that just because a child is “unwanted” does not have to mean they’ll end up abused or unloved.

A law won’t stop abortions; they’ll still get them in the back alley. That’s probably true. So I guess we should just repeal all our drug laws, since people obviously still do drugs despite the laws. While we’re at it, we should repeal all the alcohol and tobacco laws aimed at minors—after all, kids are going to get access to smokes and booze anyway. In fact, murder has been illegal since Hector was a pup, and people are still getting murdered—murder laws are obviously not doing any good, so we might as well get rid of them.

The lack of a rape/incest exception is “insensitive” to women. This is one that practically everyone has some sympathy over, myself included. As I said in my last piece, even though I’m not a woman, I can still appreciate on some comprehensive level the trauma a female must go through in a rape or incest situation. I can even sympathize with the anguish they would go through carrying a child who was the product of such a terrible act. But I’ll say it again: murder is not an ethically sound solution to rape. As difficult as it is, the child is a victim of the rapist, as well. Courageous women such as Heather Gemmen realize this, taking the toughest but highest road. One additional bit of information on this topic is that, as Rep. Elizabeth Kraus of Rapid City pointed out today, HB 1215 would not prevent the use of “emergency contraceptives” until 5-10 days after conception, allowing more than enough time for the woman to use emergency contraceptives in a rape situation, if they so choose. The bill states, “Nothing in Section 2 of this Act may be construed to prohibit the sale, use, prescription, or administration of a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing…” So this, too, ends up being a red herring.

Pro-life arguments are religious, not scientific. First of all, what’s wrong with a religious reason for doing something? Polls indicate that somewhere between 80% and 97% (depending on which survey you look at) of people in America believe in some sort of supreme being; if you’re going to bother believing in some religion, shouldn’t it be important enough that it affects your real-life decisions? But this is another red herring, since just because something has a religious foundation does not automatically mean it can have no scientific foundation, too. In reality, the report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, upon which HB 1215 was based, is grounded in science. It is based on the testimony of many women who have had abortions, and the mental and physical scars left by the procedure. The report also details scientific research concerning these health trauma. The report also details fetal development, including the beating heart of the child at 21 days, and growing evidence that the child can feel pain at 7-8 weeks development. Of particular relevance is the discovery through microbiology that the unborn child, from conception, has DNA completely unique from the mother, which makes it not merely a “blob of tissue” or other part of her body, but a unique human being in its own right. This is all science, not religion (unless you consider it a part of the religion of secular humanism).

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