Commentary: High Court abortion ruling should spark conversation
Abortion is a necessary evil. That may have been one reason that led usually-conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to vote with the four liberal Supreme Court members and overturn Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
Texas House Bill 2A placed severe restrictions on abortion clinics that would have left only 10 clinics open to serve the needs of 5.4 million women of reproductive age. The court’s decision may affect similarly restrictive laws in states such as Mississippi and North Dakota. Kennedy was also respecting the precedent set in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision that tightened restrictions on abortion with the proviso they not place an “undue burden” on a woman seeking the procedure.
Abortion is necessary because a woman (or girl) must in the end have the final say about her well-being and that of the embryonic or fetal life she is carrying. If she has been raped, impregnated by a family member or may die if the pregnancy is not terminated, most people across the political and religious spectrum will concur with her choice to abort.
After that, opinions start to diverge about what justifies the taking of fetal life: severe economic hardship, the future wellbeing and career of a teenager, potential mental health problems for the woman, putting a marriage in jeopardy, etc. Along with these considerations are philosophical and theological theories about when human life begins — at conception, or when the fetus has a functioning brain, or when the child emerges from the birth canal and takes its first breath.
Ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973 made abortion legal, public opinion has been very divided on the morality of the procedure. In a May Gallup survey 29% of respondents thought abortion should be legal in all circumstances, 50% in some instances, and 19% never. These numbers have remained fairly constant for 40 years.
Abortion is evil because the taking of a fetal life (whether one considers it pre-human or human) is a kind of tragedy — the death of a living being, not just a mass of tissue. So we are locked in a political and ethical struggle that began most directly with Roe and will remain with us for the foreseeable future.
Along with the evil inherent in an abortion is the tragic history of so-called back-alley abortions that killed or rendered sterile thousands of U.S. women in the era before Roe. In nations where abortion is illegal, an estimated thousands of women die yearly of complications from unsafe abortions and more become sterile.
A principal cause of abortion is poverty. The liberal Guttmacher Institute reported in 2005 that 73% of those seeking the procedure feared they could not afford to take care of a child. Hopelessness and lack of educational opportunities can spawn unintended pregnancies.
Another cause is lack of access to birth control. It is ironic that Planned Parenthood — so often seen as mainly an abortion provider while only 3% of its work involves pregnancy termination — actually helps prevent the procedure by providing contraceptive care.
Pro-life and pro-choice advocates need to talk. Doing so might provide solutions to the social problems plaguing our society and thereby stem the number of abortions.
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BENJAMIN J. HUBBARD of Costa Mesa is a professor emeritus of comparative religion at Cal State Fullerton.