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I always receive “rebuttal” email or calls when I talk about the importance of preserving life in the womb. Here is an email with comments fairly representative of what I hear all of the time. I don’t think the comments are irrational. But I believe some brief, inline replies can show why I don’t believe they are sound assaults on the pro-life position either.

Dr Creamer,
…[off topic greetings]…
Now I wanted to respond to your subject today. I am pro-life in some ways and pro-choice in other ways. [So here are] The questions I’m about to ask you and I hope you put this on your talk show or blog.

Before I respond to the questions, it is important to understand the positions before us. The claim of many people that they are partially pro-life and partially pro-choice is usually inaccurate. It is the pro-choice position. The point of the pro-choice argument is that while abortion might be tragic, it ought to be legal. The point of the pro-life position is that abortion ought to be illegal. Everyone thinks life is valuable. The difference between the two sides is whether life in the womb merits the same protections given to life outside the womb. That protection means that claiming “I believe abortion is wrong but that it ought to be up to the woman” is the pro-choice position. (There is, in reality, a substantial pro-abortion group as well, and they identify themselves only as pro-choice. But their agenda is the promotion of abortions and reduction in the total number of live births, usually for purposes of population control. That problem is for another discussion.)

First question: if I am 3 months pregnant and find out I have ovarian or cervical cancer do you believe it’s right for me to abort the baby? You really have to wonder if the radiation treatment or medicine could harm the fetus, so what should a woman do, because in your standards it’s still murder.

This question takes many forms but has no significance when one facet of the pro-life position is taken into consideration: that life in the womb is morally equivalent to life outside the womb. So let me imitate the question: A man has two sons drowning but only one rope and time to throw to and save only one son: is it right for him to let one of his sons drown? Or, if I were a Nazi rationalizing the holocaust to someone objecting to the murder of innocent Jews and gypsies: “If a village will be consumed in a catastrophic mine explosion unless a brave German soldier blocks off every air passage to the few Jewish miners who will then be trapped there to die, is it right to kill those Jews?” What’s the point! The fact that there are times when we cannot save everyone in some tragic situation in no way makes it right to kill anyone. It is not right to kill the Jews in that mine, even if it is impossible for them not to die while saving the village. But that fact will never in any way justify (make right) leaving it permissible to kill Jews in Germany. By the same token, saving one son does not make it right to allow the other one to drown. We must do all the good we can to save lives, and then acknowledge not that it was right not to save the others, but that we have failed to save some of the lives under our care. Such would be the case with an ectopic pregnancy.

But the fear that a baby might be born sick or infirm because of exposure to radiation or chemotherapy even adds another level of moral failure to the queue. When we decide some lives would not be worth living or preserving because of sickness or infirmity then no life would any longer be valued as life. Rather, every life would be valued only because of certain levels of “quality” or “contributory value”, levels which would transform over time to exclude anyone whose presence would be inconvenient for those of us on the other side of the threshold.

Second question: let’s just say I am pregnant with twins and working a job that pays $5.00, plus my husband is making the same. Should I rely on the system and hope I get help, or should I give the baby up for adoption?

Let’s say it this way instead: suppose you already have six-week old twins and lose your $100,000/year job and find out you will have no income whatsoever. Should you kill the babies so they don’t have to suffer, give them up for adoption, or find a way to raise them yourself? As a pro-choice pastor once said to me: “if a young woman tells me she’s going to kill herself if she has to deliver this baby, what am I supposed to do?” And my reply: “And if that young woman said she was going to kill herself if she had to spend one more day with her two-year-old, what would you say? Kill the two-year-old!?”
Welfare is beside the point, by the way. Whether you should take welfare or not has nothing to do with your children, and so I will leave it for another discussion.

It is as simple as this: respect life in the womb as life outside the womb. There are tragedies which make it impossible to save every life in the womb just as there are which make it impossible to save every life outside the womb. But all of those lives are worth valuing and protecting the same: in heart, in practice, and in law.

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Tags: Abortion, Pro-Life

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Culture, Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.