Dean Barnett is not your average conservative and as such, he puts to rest the notion that only religious people are pro-life.
But I’m pro-life, and adamantly so. Unlike the often erroneous stereotype of the pro-life citizen, I didn’t arrive at my position as a matter of religious faith. Rather, my conclusions flow strictly from logical inquiry.
So Barnett starts off by stating his opposition to abortion and that he has arrived their logically apart from religious belief.
You might expect that since I’m pro-life, I would argue that life begins at conception. Actually, that’s not quite right. In answering the question of when life begins, the best I can do is say “I don’t know.” Life may begin at conception. It may begin during pregnancy. Or it may begin at childbirth. While I have a feeling that life begins at conception, I certainly can’t prove it.
I was struck by this because I have heard that sentiment express here by pro-choice people on numerous occasions – “I don’t know when life begins.”
He then explains why his limited understanding of the beginning of life or personhood leads him to a pro-life position.
In our society, Roe v. Wade drove us to a court-ordered “consensus” that life doesn’t begin until close to birth. But what if that “consensus” is wrong? What if life begins earlier? What if it begins at conception? If that’s the case, then the implications are beyond horrifying. It means that our country has taken 45 million innocent lives through abortion since Roe v. Wade, all with the explicit sanction of the law and therefore the implicit sanction of the rest of society.
Because we don’t know where life begins, the only logical thing to do is to err on the side of caution — the side of life. In other words, because an abortion might take an innocent life, it should be avoided. It should also be illegal in most cases.
I do not believe someone of faith should have their viewpoint discriminated against, but it does seem to reason that for many people reading a secular Jew logically explain his pro-life position may be more influential than my writing.
To me, his column begs the question: Why not “err on the side of caution?” If we do not know, or cannot agree, as a society where life begins, why should we not tilt the scales toward protecting life and a possible person?
Why not "err on the side of caution?"
Playing liberal's advocate, I'd say that we have to also be cautious about unecessarily limiting people's freedoms (slippery slope to totalitarianism lurking in the background).
But even with this in mind, I think we value human life over personal freedoms, as a general principle, though that may be laden with "how much" questions. We already DO exercise this type of caution with regard to END of life issues (right to die). We don't allow every depressed teen to kill themselves with the doctor's help. Similarly, we should not let every pregnant teen kill their unborn child. Abortion should be used sparingly, and only in the most extreme cases where other lives are hanging in the balance.
But I do think that we ought to compromise a little on this to preserve both the life of the fetus and the ability for women to make some choices, esp. early on in the pregnancy. This is why I advocate making abortion illegal past a point of personhood AFTER conception.
I think that an ethical/scientific argument using brainwaves and heartbeat as the marker of personhood (as we do at the end of life) is something we should be able to agree on (i.e. 4-8 weeks of pregnancy) as a reasonable marker.
Before that, we can leave it up to the individual. I may believe that life begins at conception, or that we should not be messing with the pregnancy and birth process at all, but I do see a need to allow a LITTLE wobble room, for the sake of reflecting our recognition that we can't KNOW for sure, as the article you posted reflects.