Abortion: The Problem

WASHINGTON - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

“It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong." [AP, Nov. 18, 2007]

Mr. Huckabee would be wise to remember the old adage: “Be careful what you wish for.” Apparently this wanna-bee-president is not aware of the fact that most states’ abortion laws readily accept the federal decision to protect a woman’s right to a first trimester abortion. State legislatures are close to their people. They reflect the will of the people with greater accuracy and clarity than the federal government in Washington DC. There’s no reason to believe that federal legislation would yield a different result. Extremists like Mr. Huckabee would surely lose if abortion rights were determined by some sort of national referendum. Every woman in America 35-years-old or younger has lived her entire life with the knowledge that if necessary, abortion is a legal option. Most people—however much they deplore abortion—recognize the decision to have children belongs to the parents, not government.

If not for extremists on both sides of the abortion argument, a rational, objective solution to the problem is well in hand. In fact, 40 state legislatures have already arrived at the most essential truth, the proverbial line in the sand, the key word: viability.

Pro-life extremists, governed by their feelings and mystical revelation believe blindly that life begins at conception when a God places an undetectable, immortal soul into the microscopic embryo. From that moment on, in their minds, that potential life has as much right to exist as its 14-year-old mother struggling to pass middle school mathematics. There’s no reasoning with this group. The worst elements among them have actually bombed abortion clinics and murdered doctors who perform abortions. There is no chance this group will even consider taking a more scientific look at this question. Most are not violent, to be true, but that is only because most still retain some hope that the judiciary will reverse nearly forty years of settled law. [Roe v. Wade, protects a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester.] If you think these people are so far out of the mainstream that they could never achieve their goal, keep in mind our current president shares their values.

Pro-choice extremists, so determined to protect a woman’s right to reproductive choice, health, and privacy, are forced by their formidable adversaries to take indefensible positions [e.g. supporting partial-birth abortion] for fear that any concession to the right will result in a total loss down the road. They are right to oppose the religionist, extremists on the other side, but they lose credibility and their majority when they try to defend the indefensible. To kill a fully-formed, viable, unborn human being is not reasonable unless the procedure is deemed necessary to protect the life of the mother.

A compromise between these two irrational camps is not the solution. The solution is reason and objective law, law devoid of feelings, mysticism, prejudices, fear, or favorite ideas. The solution will require a truly creative, new look at the issues at stake. How is human life to be defined? When does a potential human life acquire the unalienable right to exist? How do we balance a woman’s right to privacy with an unborn baby’s right to exist?