One could be forgiven for assuming that pro-abortion absolutism, the idea that
abortion
should be legal in every conceivable circumstance from the moment of conception until the moment of birth, represents the baseline view of the vast majority of people. After all, every nonreligious cultural institution, from Hollywood to academia to the news media, bombards the public with pro-abortion absolutist messaging each day.
The right to abort the unborn under any circumstance is perhaps the most sacred belief of the cultural elite in 21st-century America, and so its concomitant assumptions are fed ritualistically into the zeitgeist: Abortion is healthcare. Abortion is freedom. Abortion is equality. Well-articulated counterarguments are simply not allowed to punch through the haze.
THE MARCH FOR LIFE REMINDS US OF OUR COMMON HUMANITY
(For a laugh, I
Googled “best pro-life arguments
” to test this theory. The first link listed is a New Yorker article called, “The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments.”)
And so it was a great surprise to learn that, according to a
Pew Research Center study
released in December, only 19% of adults believe that abortion should be legal in all cases without exceptions. On the opposite end, only 8% of people believe abortion should be illegal in all cases. The remaining 73% of Americans fall somewhere between the two poles, holding variants of nonabsolutist ideas about the legality of abortion. Thirty-six percent believe it should be legal in most cases, while 27% believe it should be illegal in most cases. Six percent believe it should be legal in almost every case, while 2% believe it should be illegal in almost every case.
It is a remarkable fact that, despite ceaseless mainstream messaging to the opposite, the vast majority of people believe that at least some aspect of abortion is morally unjustifiable. And yet, it is unimaginable that this viewpoint would ever be aired on a mainstream cultural touchstone, such as Saturday Night Live or one of the professional
sports
leagues. The idea that there would ever be a good reason for the government to intrude upon “a woman and her doctor” is anathema to our cultural gatekeepers. Yet it’s the view held by 81% of people, according to the Pew study.
This discrepancy raises an obvious question: What is it about the practice of abortion that the vast majority of Americans find troubling at least some of the time? It stands to reason that this cohort believes the unborn possess inherent value or that they gain value over the course of their development. Otherwise, there would be no reason to restrict abortion at all.
A healthy and functional society would enter into a vigorous debate in order to form a consensus about when exactly an unborn child deserves legal protection. It would rely upon the latest discoveries of science to shape its thinking, as well as various philosophical and ethical traditions that have informed the human conscience over millennia.
But alas, ours is not a healthy and functioning society. We do not enter into anything resembling a healthy discourse when it comes to abortion, nor do we rely upon the
latest science
to inform our thinking. Rather, we hide behind our screens and allow the conversation to be hijacked by the least thoughtful minds among us. The result is a profound moral incoherence: the belief that unborn life has inherent value and that it is also OK to kill unborn life when convenient.
A society built on such a flimsy foundation cannot continue to stand. Just as America once addressed the incoherence of asserting that “all men are created equal” in a country that practiced the unutterable evil of
slavery
, so too must it reconcile its stated values with the practice of abortion.
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Peter Laffin is a writer in New England. Follow him on Twitter at @Laffin_Out_Loud.
