The abortion paradox

[Neo-Scholastic]

I told you already. Whether it can survive without the mother or not.

That seems to be a very arbitrary measure. And it seems more reasonable to me that many more adamant pro-abortion advocates. Many decisions boil down to a judgement call and I can understand why someone would believe this to be one of them. Generally, I believe people should try to base life and death choices on firmer criteria or at the very least defer in favor of the possibility that we are talking about a human life even if it is unborn. Especially when we are talking about late-term abortions or those currently considered to be on the edge of viabiity. Is there really that much difference between three-months and four. And when we look at an ultrasound of a very early term fetus, for all intents and purposes, it looks human.

With respect to choice, I'm reminded of the movie, Crimes & Misdemeanors. In it, Martin Landow plays a doctor that murders his mistress to prevent his wife from discovering the affair. His brother, played by Jeffery Orbach, arranges the hit. Raked by guilt the doctor threatens to confess the crime. To this the brother replies, "The time to confess was to your wife about the affair. Not now. This is murder." My point is that the time to make reproductive choices is before pregnancy, either by contraception or abstinence. Once a child has been conceived, I believe the parents have tacitly assumed a moral responsibility for the being they created and primary responsibility for the care of the child until it becomes an adult. There are appropriate time windows in which to make choices and a time after which one must live with those choices.

Some other people have argued that by my logic, people should also allow diseases to progress naturally without medical intervention. This argument is severely flawed. Pregnancy is a natural function of the body. A healthy pregnancy is not a disease or bodily malfunction that requires medical treatment.