It’s been said that it’s best to avoid three topics in conversa-tions with people we don’t know, in the workplace, and at family celebrations and on special occasions: politics, religion, and abor-tion. But while it may not be acceptable to bring these topics up at social gatherings, abortion is an issue that has become hard to avoid. From featured articles between the glossy covers of maga-zines, to the televised debates between men and women compet-ing to lead the most powerful nations in the world, and guidelines issued by the Vatican in Rome, the subject of abortion has found its way right into the heart of the very topics that we’ve been en-couraged to avoid speaking about in the past: politics and religion.
It becomes clear from history that the moral issues of when, how, and if a pregnancy should be ended have been resolved based upon the values and beliefs of different societies of the time.
Beliefs are deeply personal and come from culture, conditioning, religion, and family. So when we think about abortion from these perspectives, it’s probably not surprising that the issues have lin-gered for so long and largely gone unresolved in our multicultural society today.
The highest court in the United States tried to bring resolution to the subject of abortion from a legal perspective in 1973. On January 22 of that year, in the case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court made a landmark decision regarding a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy. In a 7-to-2 majority vote in favor of Roe, the court ruled that the right to privacy outlined in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution includes a woman’s decision, made along with her doctor, to have an abortion. Jus-tice Harry A. Blackmun summarized the decision: “The right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but this right is
not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.”13 The court added a caveat with respect to the way the choice is carried out. It stated that a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy must be balanced against the laws of the individual state where the woman lives, as she is making a life-or-death decision.
Laws vary within the 50 states. So while the court made its official ruling, taking into account the opinions of both scientists and advocates for personal choice, the ultimate decision was left to the discretion of local governments. Whether or not abortion is legal would still be based largely upon the values and beliefs of the individual communities.
Nineteen years later, in 1992, the Supreme Court’s original de-cision was modified during a court challenge to reflect a change in the language describing the different stages of pregnancy. Before the 1992 ruling, the nine-month average time of a full-term preg-nancy was described in legal documents in increments known as trimesters, each of which represents a third of the gestation period.
So, for example, the first trimester is the first three months of preg-nancy, the second trimester the next three months, and so on. The revised legal language focuses less on what stage the pregnancy is in, and more on the state of development of the fetus itself.
Specifically, it focuses upon whether or not the unborn fetus is “viable,” meaning it could survive if it were removed from the womb. Rather than helping resolve the confusion, the revised guidelines seem to have only sparked a deeper resentment sur-rounding the basic question. There is a strong feeling among many people in the world that, viable or not, a fetus is a human life at any time after conception, and therefore deserves the rights and protection that come with being human.
Clearly abortion continues to be among the most controver-sial and hotly debated issues in our society. With a number of local and national elections in the U.S. on the horizon, each can-didate’s views on this topic will undoubtedly have some influence to tip the voting scales one way or another. According to Kenneth T. Walsh, the chief White House correspondent for U.S. News &
World Report, “The ‘wedge issues’ are coming back. . . . These are the social questions that have divided Americans for many years, such as gay rights, abortion, and family values.”15
While science is making inroads to help us understand the process and origins of life, to some people these discoveries miss the point altogether. They have strong feelings and strong beliefs about what life is and when it begins, regardless of what science may reveal. For others, though, the argument is open-ended and without resolution. The core issue for both camps, however, re-volves around the same theme, the unknown factor that is the subject of this chapter: When does an individual human life actu-ally begin?
While we may never know precisely where we’ve come from or how we happen to be here on Earth, we do know with a degree of certainty when different stages of life occur in the womb. So you may be thinking, If we know about these stages and when they begin, then what’s the problem? This is where the controversy comes into play. Because there are different stages of life, there are different definitions of life that pertain to each.
This fact forces us to be very specific when we ask the ques-tion of precisely when life begins. We must be knowledgeable enough to be clear about what stage we’re discussing. I’m shar-ing this information here because there is a new discovery that may help.
Scientists have identified a mysterious point in the develop-ment of an embryo when the characteristics that make us who we are (the DNA that defines our human traits) awaken and “kick in.”
While this discovery cannot tell us what’s right or wrong when it comes to the choices we make about life and death, at the very least it helps us to know what kind of life we’re talking about, and what kind of choice we’re making.