Against abortion, again
Going through my Facebook memories for today, I found a debate about abortion which was left unfinished - or at least halted - when I did not, for whatever reason, answer a question by one of my friends. I have written a sketchy yet rather lengthy answer under that question - and won't this friend be surprised to get one after two years, when she must have long forgotten her question? But the answer turned out to be interesting enough to print an edited version here. TO ALL SUPPORTERS OF ABORTION, YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ THIS. Start your day in peace.
Now then, this person had begun her part of the argument with: "For me personally all life is of equal value, but I am very privileged to be able to live by that belief. Not all women are."
Now this is clearly far outside the realm of logic. First, if everything is of equal value, then nothing is. And even if that is not admitted - everything might be worth three pence, or four Euros thirty-two cents a piece, or a couple of dozen buttons - nonetheless there is only one objective way in which "all life" can show a measurable value. "All life" eat each other. Tigers eat goats, but goats eat vegetables, which are equally alive. And while most vegetables may superficially be said to subsist on water and soil, that soil is made fertile by the constant deposit and decomposition of dead living matter. Vegetables don't grow on bare rock or sterile sand, not until pioneer mechanisms such as lichens on rock and beach weeds on sand have fertilized them. In other words, the only inherent value that nature, outside the human race, finds in living things, is in being food.
And that is not the only objection to "all life" being of equal value. You would be saying that the life of a microbe or of a mushroom is as valuable as that of a homo sapiens; a notion that nobody who is not desperately invested in it could regard as anything but intuitively absurd, untenable well before argument even begins. And there is another even more damaging objection; that is, that you cannot even make such a proposition without unconsciously making an immense amount of exceptions. When you speak of "all life" being of equal value, you are only thinking of all the things you SEE around you. You are inevitably not thinking of microbes and amoebas. Which, to complete the circle of argument, is exactly parallel to the way that supporters of abortion think of human life: they make the immense and unstated exception of human beings not yet born. In both cases, these exceptions are made because you cannot see their objects. You do not see the face of the baby till it is out of the womb, and that is when most abortion supporters suddenly discover a humanity that they literally could not see before.
A few logical individuals, such as Peter Singer, have built an argument that there is no real right to life until the child has become able to fend for itself, which would authorize the execution of babies; which our Greek and Roman ancestors, who were strongly logical, actually practiced, and which is coming back into fashion in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada. But most of you would reject the notion without any argument, clinging to the illogical notion that there is a point in the development of a human being up to which it is legitimate to kill us, and that, conveniently, that point is found before the child becomes visible and starts bothering us with its humanity.