My view on abortion as a legal issue

Abortion

I might as well go ahead and handle this difficult topic early. This is the most poison topic in current politics, and I will not be on the right side of everyone, and in this particular instance, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

As a teenager and young man, I was a part of a group of middle class, sometimes unruly kids.  I got to see firsthand what experimentation with all sorts of things brought about.  Among these things I saw the results of drug and alcohol abuse, and the results of thoughtless and careless sexual activity.  And I can say with certainty that many of the situations I witnessed were among some of the most convoluted and messed up that you might find – no clear ‘morality’ in most of them, just a bunch of difficult threads to untangle.

It might surprise many folks to hear that a teenager would be OK with abortion at that time in their life.  It seemed to be a convenient and relatively harmless procedure to fix a very drastic problem.  Yes, I had been told throughout my faith formation (I am a Catholic) that abortion was wrong.  I did not make a habit of believing things I was told unless I could find some way to verify those things myself.  And in looking only at the external resiliency of street-wise youth, I could not see the real harm.

But as I grew up and saw the delayed effects of many of these decisions on my friends, I began to find the verification I needed, and began to adopt a less and less tolerant view towards abortion.  The change was gradual but steady, and after my marriage I began to be able to discuss my views with people, I found that they had become focused and strong enough to make them a real part of the Chris Nogy people would get to know.  I needed to feel certain, and to be able to present my feelings in a way that wasn’t preachy, but that was logical and substantial and justifiable with more than ‘my Priest told me I have to feel this way’.

OK, so here’s the point.  Ending a life is killing.  Ending a life without another viable way out of a situation is murder.  When people try to trap me into agreeing with abortion with what-ifs like “when the mother would die if the baby was allowed to live” or other such situations (admittedly, I do not know the numbers, but I know in my heart that these situations don’t make up even 1% of the abortions performed in the US each year), I simply tell them that murder is never acceptable, sometimes killing is.  I know that you have to be justified without alternate recourse, as a soldier shooting an enemy that has a gun leveled at his buddy, or a man shooting a gunman in the middle of a shooting spree in a school, to kill.  But you have to be justified, and it has to be something you have no reasonable and decent alternative way of handling.

I know more people that have had abortions than I care to think of, and I know that most of them were out of fear and confusion, but in the end these fears and confusions were not life-or-death matters, but were matters of convenience.  That is no more acceptable than killing a classmate because he constantly ‘blows the curve’ and without a good grade in that class you won’t get into the college of your dreams and won’t have the future you so desire.

I am smart enough to know that there is never an absolute answer to such a big problem, but there are absolute answers to parts of it when you break it down.  Take a hypothetical case where a woman is pregnant with twins, and all 3 will die if one of the babies is not ‘terminated’.  In that case, I could not look harshly if the doctor and the mother decided to save 2 lives, and I would not call it murder.  But that again is a one in a hundred million case.  It is not the current societal norm for abortion justification.

As far as legality goes, if the Government has injected itself into this argument by means once again of invoking the ‘promote the general welfare’ clause to address a woman’s supposed sovereign right over everything that happens to her  body, then the government must invoke the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to each life involved, and MUST rule to provide opportunity to both lives, not just one.  If you allow yourself to claim a right by interpretation that you don’t have by law, you have to hold a steady and consistent point.

But where people get angry is where I say that the U.S. Federal Government has absolutely NO RIGHT to rule on this matter until it is agreed by scientific and moral consensus that a fertilized ova, zygote or fetus that is the offspring of two humans cannot be anything other than a human from the moment the genetic material describes a whole human being.  Once that distinction is made, then the law can rule against abortion.  But until that distinction is made, and as long as there is a question about the truth of that claim, the Government cannot err on the side of recklessness – we don’t allow it in our courts, we can’t allow it of our leaders.  So at the very least, the federal government cannot in good faith support the legality of abortion, the best it can do is not to declare it illegal and use the limitation of power clause of the Constitution to justify such a proper, but weak, stance.   Once the proof of life argument is solved, then the power to decide will be within the right of the Federal Government, and each case will be decided like any other killing – as to whether circumstances justify the action or not.  And we already have ways of determining that under the law, those ways will merely have to be adapted a bit to the expanded circumstances.

I am saddened by the loss of any human life.  I am saddened and furious at any murder.  But this life contains sadness – it isn’t mandatory to contain fury.

So to walk head-on into the trap, I am very pro-life, not because I was told to be that way, but because I have seen enough and been through enough in my life to move with certainty to that position from an apathetic one.  I cannot support the federal government involvement in any way other than to err on the side of caution in favor of the genetic material at the weakest, and to full out guarantee a right to human life from conception at the strongest.

Christopher Nogy