State-Sanctioned Terrorism in South Dakota

A committee in the South Dakota legislature recently approved a bill that would have defined the killing of an abortion doctor as justifiable homicide. The bill has since been shelved, but anti-abortion activists have praised it because it would scare away abortion doctors. In essence, the bill is state-sanctioned terrorism.

And in the House of Representatives the new Republican majority started attacking abortion rights straight out of the gate by introducing a bill allowing abortions only in cases of "forcible rape." So, if you get date-raped by some loser who puts rufies in your drink or a horny step-father, tough luck.

What's behind these perennial attacks on abortion rights? It's obviously not an overweening concern for human life. A law that declares open season on doctors performing a legal medical procedure can hardly be considered pro-life.

And it's not about responsibility. If you get pregnant, and you know can't take care of the kid, or don't have the money for the proper prenatal care, or can't afford to take time off during the last part of the pregnancy, or don't have money for the actual delivery, or don't have the money to raise the kid, the responsible thing to do is to end the pregnancy immediately, before you put another burden on society.

And it's not about the sanctity of human life. Most anti-abortion activists oppose abortion in any of its forms, including the morning after pill. A fertilized ovum is still a one-celled blastocyte. It is not a living, breathing person in any sense. At all. Nor is a two-cell, four-cell, eight-cell, sixteen-cell blastocyte a human being. A five-week-old fetus is not a living, breathing, thinking human. It looks like a tadpole.

And functionally speaking, it's not a human being either. There's an old saw in biology, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Basically, this says that fetuses sort of descend down the evolutionary ladder as they develop. Human and chick embryos have gill slits and tails. Though much of this theory has been discredited, you can tell just by looking that early-stage fetuses of salamanders, frogs, fish, rabbits, cows and humans bear much more similarity to each other than to their full-grown counterparts.

All animal fetuses start out with pretty much the same body plan. As the fetus develops certain changes are triggered. Males are identical to females until testosterone is released, and the ovaries transform into testes. Certain body parts come and go: for example, in manatees (legless sea mammals) the fetus has leg buds like all mammals, but they disappear at one point. And the thing that makes humans truly human -- the big cerebrum-- doesn't start forming until very late in the process.

So, prior to a particular point in development a fetus isn't really human. It's proto-human, yes, and might become human one day. The approach taken by the courts acknowledges this fact, positing a date of fetal viability. That's basically the point at which the fetus can breathe outside the womb, but that date could conceivably be moved earlier, to the point where all the major structures of a human being are present in the fetus. As technology and science improve we will undoubtedly revisit this issue, and rightly so. Whatever the number is, there's some point where a fetus is not really human, and after that point it is.

The question of what is human is at the core of this. We have decided that certain types of brain-injury patients have no potential to recover are no longer human, and can be terminated out of mercy. A fetus without the higher brain functions is in pretty much the same boat. I would rather err on the side of caution and make the standard of proof for euthanasia extremely high. But a fetus without a cerebrum has never been a living, breathing human being, so there's not much of a slippery slope here.

And hatred of abortion is not about potential. "You can't abort that baby. It might be another Einstein!" Many abortion foes are staunch supporters of the death penalty. While your average clod on death row will never become an Einstein, they certainly might be "born again" or experience some other spiritual rebirth and do something positive with their lives, helping others. This idea of forgiveness and rebirth is core to Christian theology; it's strange that so many so-called Christians are so adamant about killing people (this is one area where the Catholic Church is way ahead of and most American protestant denominations).

And many abortion foes support war, and some even support pre-emptive wars like the war in Iraq. One of our soldiers, or an Iraqi soldier, or an Iraqi civilian, or an Iraqi child could have potentially made an Einsteinian contribution to the world. So how could anyone calling themselves pro-life have condoned W's pre-emptive fling in Iraq?

And it's not about innocence. We condone the deaths of innocents all the time. We have killed thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi citizens. Thousands of innocent people die in this country every year because they don't have adequate health insurance. We allow guys like Jared Loughner to buy high-capacity semiautomatic weapons on demand, and then are shocked when they use them to kill innocent people. Thousands of asthma and emphysema sufferers die each year from high ozone and particulate levels in the air. We drink and then drive (everyone who drinks has a funny story about driving drunk) and then have accidents that kill innocent people on the highways by the thousands every year. But that's all collateral damage because of our "rights" and "freedoms."

And it's not even about dead fetuses. Estimates of the percentage of pregnancies that end spontaneous abortions ("miscarriages") are all over the map, from 10 to 25 to 75%. Yes, you read that right: some experts think that as many as 75% of all fertilized ova fail to implant and just slide on through. If the latter number is correct, that would make God the biggest abortionist of all.

So why do people really oppose abortion? Do they want to keep women under their thumbs? Is it about vengeance and retribution? Do they want to make women pay for having had sex? Is about saving souls?

I don't know. But does it really make sense to punish a woman by forcing them to bear a child they don't want or can't afford? Aren't the pain and shame of going through an abortion punishment enough? Does it make sense for the government to interfere with the personal decisions of a woman over her own body and inflict unwanted children on that woman and on society?