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Disclaimer: The opinions stated in this piece are not necessarily the opinions of Maryland Students for Life. We provide this article as an educational aid for pro-life interests but do not imply official endorsement of the author's views. For more information on our stances, see the About Us page.

April 21, 2004 - The Diamondback opinion page
Morgan Hubbard
Fresh Debate

The way you think about abortion is incorrect. But before your
hackles rise and you reach for your "Child-not-a-choice" pins
or your "Save Roe" patches, hear me out. The issue of abortion
has been choked and smothered by unseemly rhetoric; it's nigh
impossible to even talk about it - much less make definitive
statements - without getting tangled in the slogans and
catch-phrases of a topic that's much too complicated to
discuss in bumper-sticker form.

For instance, check out www.prolifeaction.org to learn about
pro-life campaigns that "expose the horrors of abortion" and
"make it difficult for those who profit from abortion to
exercise their lethal trade."

On the other side, try the National Abortion and Reproductive
Rights Action League's website at www.prochoiceamerica.org.
Read about its efforts to "defend" and "protect" a woman's
"basic American right to choose." Also read about the
"anti-choice" labors of "right-wing extremists" who are
"intent on taking away rights and freedoms."

Even the names the respective camps have given themselves are
patently misleading. Who, besides sadists in general and
everyone else most of the time, is not in favor of life? By
the same token, who isn't pro-choice? I certainly am - I tend
to choose mint chocolate chip most days, but I support your
right to choose rocky road (but not bubble gum. Ew).

No one is comfortable saying what he or she means to say. He
who is pro-choice supports (a woman's right to choose)
abortion, not ice cream. She who is pro-life seeks to deprive
women of the (state-granted) right to have legal abortions,
which may or may not be a moral right.

Think past the misleading rhetoric. Serious dialogue about
abortion demands investigation of a few - or maybe just one -
absolutely vital questions. Abortion is, first and foremost, a
matter of morality and ethics. A court cannot confer morality;
it can only seek to enforce it. Segregating society by race
did not become wrong in 1954 - it just happened that in that
decisive year, legislation caught up with morality. Likewise,
the issue of abortion must first be considered as a moral
matter; legislation should merely to mirror this. The central
moral question at the heart of the abortion issue is this: How
should we define the entity a pregnant woman carries in her
womb? Is a fetus a mass of cells, and a part of a woman's
body? Is it a human being? Could it be a mass of cells with
the moral significance of a human being? (And by what standard
do we confer that ambiguous term "moral significance" on human
beings in the first place?)

The implications of this question should be obvious. It's not
black and white, and volumes have been written on the issue,
but the gist is this: If a fetus is human, then it should
deserve all the same intrinsic value we attribute to most
other human beings; a fetus is a toddler is an old man. If a
fetus is not human and does not possess the same significance,
then abortion, medically necessary or not, is no more an issue
than, say, liposuction.

From this - and only from this -should secondary issues of
legality and circumstance follow. What, exactly, should be the
extent of the law in dictating what women can and cannot do
with a fetus? Is female autonomy jeopardized by prohibitive
legislation? What about privacy rights? What if the pregnant
woman in question is a 14-year-old rape victim?

These questions, many of the most commonly addressed in the
popular dialogue about abortion, should be secondary to the
deeper moral issue concerning the identity of an unborn fetus.
Other questions about equal access and the racial politics of
abortion fall even farther from the core of the matter.

What's most important is not how many back alley abortions
were performed before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, nor how
many more would be performed were that legislation overturned.
Nor should we be content to talk about psychological stress
and the trauma of abortion. Not when we have failed, thus far,
to address the real issue: What exactly are the unborn?

Morgan Hubbard - sophomore history major.

Used by permission.

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