Zeal Must Be Tempered Within the Pro-life Movement.

A proposed Georgia law, if it is being understood correctly, would call a woman to task if she suffered a miscarriage. Unless, that is, she could prove that the incident had occurred beyond the scope of human action. In short, and again, we must say that if we understand things properly, a woman who had a miscarriage would have to prove she did no wrong.

Right off the reel, it seems that such laws would violate the innocent until proven guilty assumption which is supposedly at the heart of our system of justice. Yet that is surely an easily altered section of the bill. When the big picture is considered, when we hear ideas of this nature, our first thoughts quickly move towards how these proposals might affect the pro-life movement. That effect cannot be good.

That a willful miscarriage would qualify as an abortion cannot be denied. But to put a woman in the position of defending a miscarriage simply because it was a miscarriage must be seen a nothing more than a witch hunt. The trauma which such an awful event would have on a woman expecting to have a baby must be understood in order to fully appreciate it. That trauma cannot be good, of course. To then add the threat of prosecution to the horror she would have already went through is nothing short of vulgar.

That does not mean that government actions supporting contraceptive use is any less vulgar. That does not mean that real and true abortions are not on their very face willful murder and ought to be stopped. But it does mean that, in their zeal to end abortion on demand, the actions of pro-life activists and legislators must be tempered by reason.

This type of legislation is exactly the kind of initiative which will not help the pro-life movement. It does indeed paint the anti-abortion crowd as lecherous souls leering into every bedroom. Indeed, it threatens the movement in ways and manners of which we should hope that a rational soul would have taken notice: if it embeds the practice of abortion all the more within our society through any substantive counter-reaction, then the blood of those children aborted in the future would in truth be on their hands.

Nebraska Attempts to Restrict Abortion

The State of Nebraska has imposed a limit on abortion to twenty weeks, on the grounds that it is at that point when the fetus begins to feel pain. Whether this is a step forward or not, is difficult to tell.

Simple reason tells us that human beings have human babies. On that point alone it should be obvious that abortion is a moral evil. Yet seeing as the political and moral climate of our land is not likely to change anytime soon based on even that simple and easy to understand concept, then any restriction on abortion perhaps should be hailed as a step in the right direction.

But as to whether the ability to feel pain is what makes us human, well, that seems weak on its own merit. Certainly feeling pain, as with feeling empathy or emotion of any sort, is part of what makes one human. Still, mere animals can feel pain, and arguably at least even some form of sympathy. The question is, do we want to view humanity in the manner in which we view animals?

If we are defending human life merely on the grounds that people feel pain, are we really saying anything valuable about it at all? It just seems, on a certain level anyway, shallow. If this is an idea of the Right to Life movement, then it seems as though they are falling into something of a trap: the idea takes the value of human life out of the metaphysical and moral and into the mere animal. What are we really supporting when we do that?

Any step which may limit abortion is, one hopes, a positive one. This law will surely be challenged, so that it may not serve a purpose anyway over the long haul. And so far as it keeps the abortion debate stoked there may be a good served by it. Still, there are far greater reasons for disallowing the practice. When we effectively step into the pro-abortion arena on the terms of the pro-abortionists, who see human life as nothing more than another aspect of our world, have we won any ground at all?