Abortion, Birth Control and the Draft: Who Owns Your Body?

A couple of years ago I had a chance to debate abortion on line with a person who believes humans have a soul at the moment the egg is fertilized and any interruption of the development of that egg is murder, the same as if I pulled a gun and shot him dead–a deed that would have been mightily tempting if we had been arguing in person.

One of the nice side effects of debates like that is I get to clarify my thinking on some complex matters like abortion. I don’t always come to the right answer, certainly not the final answer, but those arguments allow me to explore what I think and feel about an issue.

Most of the abortion discussion is carried out with rhetoric, slogans, talking points, shouting points, bumper stickers, billboards, and hand drawn signs. It’s carried out at the top of the lungs with no thinking involved. I loathe rhetoric and bumper sticker slogans. I sometimes find them amusing if they support my views, but my policy statement, my visceral statement is that they rob us of our most precious gift–our critical mind.

When the partial birth abortion issue was wending its way through congress and across the rhetoric laden airwaves I decided to research to see if this horrible-sounding procedure was just another the thousands of lies that the religious right like to spew out into the world. I discovered the real name of the procedure was dilation and extraction. I discovered it was exceedingly rare. Some pro-choice guy–I did a search and could not dredge up the name–went on a news show and told the audience that only about 500 or so were performed every year in the US. This turned out to be a lie. At the time I thought the entire episode was very hinky and I didn’t believe he was actually defending abortion.

The truth is there about 3000 D&X’s performed every year. A few of them are actually elective. The vast majority, I found out, are performed because the fetus is dead or about to die. Most often it is for extreme hydroencephaly where the head of the fetus is several times larger than normal. In those cases vaginal birth is impossible and a cesarean would require a much larger than normal incision. Either procedure would deliver an infant that would die fairly soon anyway. So, as a procedure, it’s gruesome and horrible but an autopsy taken out of context is also pretty horrible.