OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Why Funding for Abortions is Essential to the Nation's Health

The popular position that abortion is murder has inflamed politics in the United States, where many citizens embrace "single issue voting", casting their ballots for those who oppose abortion and actively working against the "pro-choice" position. One would have thought that forcing a woman to carry a fetus to term against her will was on a par with forcing a woman to have sex against her will. But "pro-life" proponents don't appear to be bothered by this specific form of enslavement as though women are not entitled to exercise control over their bodies or how they spend their lives, even though there are many reasons women might not want to carry to term. As a rule, bringing a new life into existence entails a minimum eighteen-year moral obligation.

That a conception has resulted from incest or rape may be the most disturbing motive to seek an abortion, but it is far from the only. Women who are very young and immature may simply not be prepared to bear and raise children. Women who are sufficiently mature may have other plans in mind than rearing children, including the pursuit of higher education and securing employment. A woman with children may dread the responsibilities that come with having more. They may also lack the resources-material or emotional-to sustain them. And many parents are unwilling to pass responsibility for raising their offspring to others through the process of adoption. Surely no woman should be compelled to bear children, give birth or surrender her offspring against her will.

Those who oppose abortion would not only impose their moral codes upon others but appear to adopt a narrow-minded attitude toward sex. Even the church tends to categorize sex as proper when its objective is procreation and improper for other purposes as recreational. But surely there is an appropriate role for sex within the context of affectionate and loving relationships. It is not the case that sexual relations are necessarily procreational or recreational. And if measures taken to prevent conception should fail-which has been known to happen!-the termination of an unwanted pregnancy may be the most responsible and morally appropriate alternative. It may be the option that, under those conditions, represents the highest degree of respect for all of the parties, including husbands and other children, who are thereby affected.

Like the existence or the non-existence of a divine creator, there is no proof of the occurrence of ensoulment. Whether there is one god or many gods, a god for every season or every activity-even whether God should be envisioned as male or female!-lies beyond all possibility of human knowledge. Were I to declare that there are exactly 435 gods, no one could prove I am wrong. And the case for envisioning God as female rather than male is rather substantial. Women, after all, are capable of giving birth, something no man can do. If God is supposed to be the creator, then it makes more sense to envision The Creator as a woman than as a man. The very idea that pubic policies should be based upon beliefs that lie beyond any possibility of objective investigation raises problems than which few qualify as more profound.

And yet the claim that ensoulment occurs at conception as opposed to implantation, coincident with the development of the heart and the brain, at viability or quickening (when the mother can feel activity by the fetus within her uterus) or even at birth is logically arbitrary and endlessly debatable. There is no objective or scientific foundation for any such belief. This, of course, is why matters like this are articles of faith insofar as they are incapable of resolution on the basis of objective or scientific investigation. There are no observations, measurements, or experiments that could settle the matter one way or the other. As in the case of the existence of God, no one can prove the existence of souls, much less that ensoulment has ever taken place-even once!-during the history of the world. The question lies beyond any prospect of empirical resolution.

As a young assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Kentucky, I attended a seminar by a member of the Department of Physics, who asserted that, because souls and electrons are both kinds of non-observable entities, there are no differences between them. Challenging the audience to prove him wrong, I pointed out that there are significant differences between them because there are established laws that govern the behavior of electrons and but no known laws that govern the behavior of souls. Electrons make impressions on photographic plates during the conduct of experiments in the laboratory, but no similar empirically detectable results are possible in the case of souls-or of God, for that matter! If we allow articles of faith to determine public policies, we abdicate our responsibility to base actions that affect us all on established truths rather than mere beliefs.

The philosopher who has shown the most acute appreciation for the problems thereby engendered was a 19th Century Englishman by the name of William Clifford. He advanced a principle known as "the ethics of belief", according to which we are morally entitled to hold a belief only if we are also logically entitled to hold it. We are logically entitled to hold a belief-about what is true as well as what is right-only when it satisfies appropriate standards of logic and evidence, which are objective in their application. In this case, every suitable investigator, confronted with the same range of alternative hypotheses, the same body of evidence, and the same rules of reasoning, would arrive at the same conclusions as to which beliefs should be accepted, rejected, or left in suspense. Beliefs about souls and gods would be left in suspense, since there is no way to determine their truth or falsity objectively.

Those who understand the ethics of belief recognize that many-even most-human beings are psychologically incapable of suspending beliefs about souls and gods and other mysteries that transcend human knowledge. The vast majority of theological beliefs, including those about God and the afterlife, cannot satisfy its conditions. Indeed, given Clifford's standard, most theological and religious beliefs are ones that we are not logically entitled to accept and therefore are not morally entitled to believe. This is the case with respect to the Vatican's latest declarations. Most of us may be unable to satisfy this standard with respect to our personal beliefs, but it is surely in the public's interest-and respectful of all of its members-that the formation of public policies should not be determined by-or strongly influenced by-beliefs that we are neither logically nor morally entitled to accept."--From "The Vatican's Immoral Decision", OpEdNews (google)

Posted by: James Fetzer | 2009-07-28 6:58:51 AM

It is embarrassing to observe a prominent libertarian--who is an ob/gyn physician, to boot!--staking out a position that would severely limit a woman's right to choose. That is about as dumb as it gets, even in Washington! If there is a fundamental "right to privacy" that is rooted in the Constitution, as the Supreme Court has found, then it applies across the nation and not only in specific states that choose to acknowledge it.

Denying funding for this purpose, which wealthy women can afford, moreover, obviously and blatantly discriminates against the poor. This is an immoral stance for a principled politician to take. While I often agree with Ron Paul, in this instance, he is so far off-base that it is a stretch to imagine how he can adopt such a demonstrably indefensible position--as I have explained above--either as a libertarian or as a human being.

Posted by: James Fetzer | 2009-07-28 7:18:08 AM

"staking out a position that would severely limit a woman's right to choose."

Ron's position is that it should be a state issue, and further to that, abortions shouldn't be taxpayer funded. That says nothing of choice.
Posted by: Scott Carnegie | 2009-07-28 7:53:56 AM

Actually, James, in most cultures life is seen to begin at conception. Some cultures even count age from the calculated conception date, not the birthdate. According to a 19th-century medical text, a child who was born dead was considered to have had a "separate life" and a death certificate was issued.

Not to mention the fact that, with rare exceptions, all of the reasons for refusing personhood to zygotes and fetuses are based not on fact, but on selfishness and emotion. When you're talking about something as basic in our society as the right to life, you're faced with something you can't casually abrogate because a sniffy teenager whines, "My boyfriend said it wouldn't happen to me if I was on top," or "Whaddya mean she's pregnant? We only did it once!" Truly, behavior we should delight to honor, hmm?

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