The Basic
Issue
If abortion is the killing of an innocent human being, then, without a doubt, abortion is the biggest social problem of all time, involving more loss of life than all of man's wars put together. Not all people agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. To them, abortion weighs very little on the scale of values measuring the weight of human social problems. Present-day abortion advocates have viewed abortion as a serious social problem only because they believed there still were too many laws restricting it. The January 22, 1973, Supreme Court decision on abortion has removed that problem as well.
Most people would agree that abortion is an extremely volatile issue in our time, evoking extreme responses. On the one hand, there are those who label all people in favor of abortion as "murderers." They carry on a hate campaign completely negative in its thrust and unproductive in generating real concern for the accused wrongdoers.
On the other hand, there are those who label all people opposed to abortion as "insensitive bigots" or "male
-2-
chauvinists" who are too blind to see that any intrusion upon the rights of the woman over her own body — her privacy, or her freedom to live as she chooses — is illegitimate, even if it should be admitted on principles that the fetus is a living human being.
Such extremist "name-calling" is not helpful. Those who resort to it usually do so because they have based their position on an unconsidered and little understood assumption. So when their position is attached, they respond with emotive outbursts because they really have no "reasons."
If the zygote-embryo-fetus is a veritable human being, then there should be reason to support this; if it is not a veritable human being until birth or some later time, then there should be reasons supporting this claim.
There are, however, many people on both sides of the abortion debate who have come to opposite conclusions on the questions of the identity of the zygote-embryo-fetus but who have been more responsible than the name-callers in that they have tried to base their conclusions on some kind of rational and empirical grounds, however legitimate or illegitimate these grounds might finally prove to be.
Without a doubt, the basic issue in the abortion discussion concerns the identity of the zygote-embryo-fetus. That issue might be put in any one of the following questions:
(1) Is what is present in the womb of the mother as the result of sexual intercourse a bit of tissue belonging to the mother's own body (like her appendix)? Or is it an independent organism?
(2) Is the zygote-embryo-fetus a "product of conception," a nameless entity? Or is it a human being, a person with an identity?
(3) Is the new one in the womb an intruder (a disease like a cancerous tumor in the intestine), which ought therefore to be removed surgically as a constructive, healing measure? Or is the new one a rightful occupant in the residence of the womb introduced into its home by an act of
-3-
sexual intercourse that took place quite apart from its own willful involvement?
The whole matter of the moral rightness or wrongness of abortion hinges on the outcome of the basic questions just asked. Most everyone would agree that it is wrong (no matter what one's religious or nonreligious point of view) to kill innocent human beings. If the zygote-embryo-fetus is not a living human being, no one should have serious problems with abortion. If it is a living human being, then, by all means, every man should do everything within his power to stop the senseless and immoral manslaughter. And, the United States Supreme Court notwithstanding, what is legal is not necessarily moral.
But does most everyone agree about the matter of killing people?