The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Abortions are surgical procedures that are performed only on behalf of pregnant women. No one else, female or male, seeks an abortion. Therefore it seems logical that only pregnant women should be the people allowed to decide whether or not they should have an abortion.
Needless to say, that has not been the case. Perhaps it has never been the case. However, for tens of thousands of years of human history, likely it was only women who secretly made the decision to seek an abortion., The pregnant woman herself and possibly another midwife-type woman took whatever measures they believed would be effective to insure that the pregnancy was terminated. Sadly, many of those efforts likely resulted in permanent injury or death to the pregnant woman. But even when such horrors were avoided, the fetus still may not have been successfully aborted.
Only in the last half-century or so has abortion widely become legal, safe and certain. That occurred because the procedure is almost always administered by a qualified medical practitioner in sterile conditions in a properly authorized medical facility.
In much of the nineteenth century, abortion was legal in America up until the fourth month of a pregnancy, which is when the woman is able to feel the movement of the fetus. However, religious opposition to abortion became codified when, in 1869, the American Roman Catholic Church officially forbade abortion.
In 1873, heeding the insistence of religious groups, Congress passed the Comstock law, which outlawed the sale of contraceptive devices of any kind. By the 1880s, again at the urging of various Churches and church officials, most states had declared abortions to be illegal.
The Guttmacher Institute is a non-profit foundation which studies issues of human sexuality. They estimate that prior to the Roe vs. Wade decision, there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions performed in the USA every year. With the wide disparity in those estimates, it obviously is impossible to know what the actual numbers were.
The US Supreme Court in 1965 struck down a law which banned contraceptives for everyone, including married couples. That was the judicial impetus which eventually resulted in Roe v. Wade, one of the most famous cases ever to come before the court.
“Jane Roe” was an unmarried Texan who petitioned a Texas court to overturn the Lone Star State law which forbade all abortions. (“Wade” was the state’s attorney general.) After a long and heated battle in the US Supreme Court, the justices, by a vote of 7-2, decreed the Texas law to be unconstitutional, on the basis of the privacy language in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
This essay shall not attempt to try to hack through that thorny judicial thicket. Nor shall I address the question of whether a fetus is a person, although that is always a point of contention, especially from conservative Christians, in every abortion debate.
What I do want to highlight here is the manner in which the abortion controversy has shifted through the years since the Roe v. Wade decision. The Supreme Court mandated that it is unconstitutional for any state to prevent women from having an abortion in all circumstances. In other words, abortions are and by right ought to be legal. They implied that laws could be passed by Congress or state legislatures which could specify particular circumstances under which abortions might not be legal, but the court clearly held that abortion as a surgical procedure could not be abolished under all circumstances.
Once Roe v. Wade became settled law (to the degree it has ever been settled), many states overturned their statutes which outlawed abortions. In the early decades afterward, many hundreds of thousands of legal abortions were procured each year by pregnant women. With the advance of more reliable methods of birth control, however, the number of abortions declined in general, because fewer women were faced with unwanted pregnancies.
In the past thirty-plus years, two obvious trends have emerged regarding the major ethical concern that is prompted by abortions. Many states have enacted statutes which have made it far more difficult for women to receive abortions in those states. At the same time, evangelical Protestant denominations and individuals, the Roman Catholic Church and many individual Catholics, and many leaders and members of the Republican Party, have united in an effort to rescind the Roe v. Wade decision. They want abortion prevented under all circumstances.
It is acceptable to oppose abortion on moral or ethical grounds. However, Roe v. Wade negates opposing it on legal grounds. In that landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that federal or state laws that forbid all abortions are unconstitutional. Nearly all other developed nations and even most underdeveloped nations agree with the legal principles upon which the Roe decision was based. Abortions are legal and readily obtained in almost every country on earth except the United States of America. That is an example of many similar types of “American exceptionalism” in which many Americans do not take pride.
Despite the continuing religious and political opposition to abortion, it is now widely accepted throughout the world that women have a legal right to have an abortion if that is their choice. Most societies have decreed that neither governments nor legal systems can or should prevent them from exercising that right.
Giving or not giving birth to a fetus is perhaps the most significant choice any human ever makes, but only half the world’s population is physiologically capable to follow through on that choice. Even in 2020, it is still human males who are responsible for the insemination of females. Nonetheless, it is only females who can give birth, not males.
That being the case, only pregnant women ethically should have the decision whether or not to carry a fetus to full term. No one else has the right either to force those women to complete or to abort a pregnancy.
An unwanted child is inevitably an unanticipated burden to the mother, to the father, and to society. In the best of circumstances, a wanted child is a blessing to everyone.
Some pregnant women may decide to go full term and put their babies up for adoption. That is their right, and their decision may bring unlimited joy to the adoptive parents. But at best it has always been morally very ambiguous to force potential mothers to become actual mothers because laws or social customs require it.
There are many reasons why women might decide to have an abortion. The father may already have abandoned the woman he impregnated. She or they may be financially unable adequately to provide for a child. The potential mother knows she lacks a sufficient support system for raising a child. The parents may be married and have as many children as they want or feel they can afford. Most of all, the woman may object to becoming a mother.
High quality sex education and contraceptives can avert many unwanted pregnancies. Even with the best of intentions and with the greatest care being taken, however, accidents still happen, and women get pregnant. Then what?
It is the woman, and only the woman, who has the right and the responsibility to choose whether to continue or discontinue a pregnancy. In the past, too many males have passed laws or laid down edicts governing the bodies of too many females. Too many male clergy have thundered their easy opposition to abortion, too easily dismissing the profound issues that pregnant women must always face alone. It is morally and legally repugnant to prevent women from making that choice.
Does God oppose abortions? Who, on earth or beyond it, favors abortions? Nevertheless, an abortion may be the least offensive ethical decision for many women. Surely God, more than anyone else, understands the ramifications of such a heavy decision.
Vasectomies are probably the safest and cheapest means of preventing unwanted pregnancies. Attempting legally to force that decision on every male after he had initiated one or two pregnancies would be a fascinating legal and sociological experiment. But millions of people, to satisfy their own personal ethical scruples, are willing to force powerless women to go full term in an unwanted pregnancy.
Women have always gotten short shrift in virtually every culture anywhere on earth. In the twenty-first century, it is about time that pregnant women should be granted the freedom the Supreme Court gave them in Roe v. Wade. The Constitution has legally granted the right to seek an abortion should they, for their own carefully calculated reasons, decide to do that. God continually blesses all of us, and He shall surely be there to bless those women in the most difficult decision they shall ever have to make.
No woman could ever be truly happy to have an abortion. But legally and morally, no woman should be prevented from having one, either.
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.
More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.