Abortion Opponents and the Hypocrisy of Appearances

The reaction to the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller has given both sides of the abortion debate a reason to repeat old arguments. And there really are no new ones.

On the one side there are people who believe that a human person is created the moment a sperm merges with an egg – a person entitled to the same the moral and legal rights as any human person. And on other the other side are those who do not believe this.

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This is not, as President Obama pointed out at his speech at Notre Dame, a reconcilable difference.

There is no science, no experiment, no physical test that can be done to measure personhood. But with all due respect for those who oppose abortion, that doesn't stop them from pulling out physical and emotionally compelling images and arguments to try to sway the murky middle to their side.

A debate between abortion opponents on the appropriate political response to the Obama administration took place only a few days before Dr. Tiller's murder. Princeton legal professor Robert George offered a graphic description of what happens in abortions.

He argued that there can be no reasoned disagreement about "...who is dismembered in a dilation an curettage abortion or whose skin is burned off in a saline abortion or whose skull is pierced or whose brains are sucked out in a dilation and extraction..."

Pretty effective, if gruesome rhetoric.

Less academic opponents of abortion rights famously use sonograms of fetuses, audio recordings of a heartbeat, or gory photos taken post-abortion. An airplane pulling a banner bearing one of those photos circled Notre Dame on the day of Obama's speech last month.

A bill that failed to pass in the just-concluded session of the Texas legislature would have required a woman to have an ultrasound and "listen to her baby's heartbeat" before having an abortion.

At the start of his recent talk, Professor George said: "Candor, far from being the enemy of civility, is one of its preconditions."

So let me be candid: I find the appeal to appearances on the part of abortion rights opponents to be pure hypocrisy.

Would those who hold up those photos of a fully formed fetus as evidence that abortion should be illegal allow the other side the same kind of "evidence?" A human zygote – an early-stage embryo – is indistinguishable from one of a starfish or sea urchin except by an expert. A human emrboyo that is as much as a month old is all-but indistinguishable in appearance from that of a chicken embryo. Are those blobby specks therefore OK to abort?

At the debate, Professor George said that during an abortion the "blood that is shed is human blood. Those bones that are broken are human bones."

As any Jehovah's Witness or Christian Scientist (or surgeon, for that matter) will tell you, the same is true during just about any medical operation. Consider, for gruesome equality, a therapeutically necessary amputation of a leg. There is no question that the tissue and blood removed are alive and totally, chromosomally human.

Would Professor George take a stand against that operation? Does he accept the appropriateness of early-term abortions, where no bones are broken? Would he accept a method of later-term abortions if it could be proven that no blood was shed or bones broken?

Of course not.

If the abortion debate is about sounds, appearances, or the clinical descriptions of the procedures, those who oppose abortion have reduced the argument to worldly aesthetics. The abortion debate is not about whether a fetus is "alive." It is an argument about the most fundamental question of how one defines a human person.

While the differences between the two sides cannot be reconciled, surely they can be defined honestly.


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