Like the majority of Americans, I do not believe that abortions are
analogous to murder. The simple fact that this is a majority opinion
does not inherently make it the correct opinion. But I do know that
if I believed that abortion was murder, and therefore tens of
millions of murders had been conducted with the tacit blessing of a
major American political party and many millions of its members and
supporters, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would not be
able to function in society. The amount of therapy I would need just
to make sense of the world in which I live would keep me from being
able to do anything else.
Maybe
I am an extreme case of internalized guilt—I can’t bring myself
to eat meat because of an outsized level
of guilt regarding living things,
and I feel legitimately upset any time I am forced to kill even
a tiny insect. And
I of course value human lives considerably more than (other) animal
lives. But it sure seems
like most people value human life enough that what could reasonably
be termed a holocaust would paralyze a material number of the tens of
millions of Americans who would deem abortion to be murder.
And yet that didn’t seem to happen, and when you consider the
central thesis of the anti-abortion movement—that hundreds of
millions of Americans are complicit in the murder of innocent
babies—it is incredible that the self-stylized “pro-life”
movement is not considerably more
militant than it is. Why would a true believer in the cause ever seek
the approval, or any level of companionship, with a so-called baby
killer? If your pro-choice
relatives won’t speak to you because you oppose murder,
aren’t they just saving you having to sever ties yourself?
At the very least, why
would an anti-abortion person not feel a strong, undying urge to sway
the people they know and otherwise care about to believe in the
immorality of abortion? Sure, the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade
was not centered around changing hearts or minds and it was
ultimately successful in subverting the will of the American people,
but they still live in a country where, in their eyes, murder is
popular. They live in a country where abortion is still going to be
legal in large swaths of the country and where there is a widespread
effort to fund abortions in states where they would remain legal.
Again, I don’t believe that
abortion is murder. But those who do
believe it is and respond with seething hatred are not the ones who
confound me—it’s those who believe that abortion is murder and
compartmentalize it, who regard the pro-choice as misguided in the
same way they might view those with differing views on
taxation—people with whom they agree to disagree. That is
impossible for me to comprehend. And it’s why I don’t believe
them.
If the anti-abortion were serious,
how could they not feel invested in making the world acutely aware
that what is happening is a moral abomination? How could they not
participate in measures that, whether impacting its legality or not,
would decrease demand for abortion, such as increasing availability
of pre-fertilization birth control, promoting forms of sex education
that demonstrably decrease unwanted pregnancies (i.e. “not
abstinence-only”), and establishing a social safety net that would
make having a child seem like something other than financially
ruinous? Why would opposition
to abortion have a strong inverse correlation to opposition to the
death penalty, or to war, or to a welfare state robust enough to
prevent homelessness or starvation, or to universal health care?
The scientific argument for the
abortion of a non-viable pregnancy being murder is effectively
non-existent—the aborted
pregnancy is a wholly
dependent extension of the mother. The religious argument
that it is murder is not especially robust, either—the direct
Biblical condemnation of abortion is, at most, open to an
interpretation of passages that is largely about confirming prior
instincts (the Biblical argument against eating shellfish or men not
growing a beard is considerably
more overt), and Judaism specifically requires abortion in certain
cases, though for freedom of religion to apply exclusively to a very
specific interpretation of Christianity is hardly new.
Even
if I do not agree with it, I understand, if you consider abortion to
be murder, how one cannot accept a simple difference of opinion. The
same cannot be said of opposition to same-sex marriage, which impacts
nobody outside of the marriage itself, or opposition to
contraception, a thing which has stopped millions of abortions from
happening, both of which
Clarence Thomas has openly stated could be reconsidered in the wake
of the Roe v. Wade overturning (Thomas famously did not reference the
court’s Loving v. Virginia
ruling that legalized
interracial marriage, another harmlessly legal thing which Thomas, an
active participant in an interracial marriage, apparently would not
reconsider). The Roe v. Wade precedent is not being used in a legal
fight against capital punishment; it is being used in a legal fight
against pet cultural grievances of social conservatives to enforce
that their concept of monoculture is preserved as a legally binding
requirement.
The prospect of a
country, and more broadly a world, where murder is shrugged off as
either a secondary concern or an outright net positive, would terrify
me, if this was what I believed was happening. I would devote every
waking moment to comprehending the callousness and trying to change
minds about it. I can’t even imagine the pain that this would cause
me internally, or how I would be able to live in such an evil world.
It is so inconceivable to me that I deem it truly and literally
unbelievable.
