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Name one law – ONE – that is not the government legislating morality. I’ll wait.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, today we’re going to unpack why this is just another bad argument that has kept people from people recognizing and being willing to stand for life in the abortion debate.
Keep your laws out of my uterus. This has become a popular posterboard chant from pro-choice activists over the last decade or so. The reasoning goes that the government should have no jurisdiction over the bodily autonomy of sovereign individuals. In other words, politicians have no right to tell me what I can or cannot do with my own body. Now, add in the factor of the religious right shoving their beliefs down everyone’s throats and trying to force birthing persons to have babies! Doesn’t that cross lines; infringing on the separation of Church and state?
To understand why these are bad arguments, we have to understand what is the actual role of the government in our lives. The relationship of the government to each of its individual citizens, in the United States at least, is primarily to protect the rights and freedoms of those individuals. So, women should be free to have abortions and the governement doesn’t have any right to say otherwise? Not so fast. The government can and must interfere with individual rights when they endanger the lives, wellbeings and freedoms of others. For example, we have posted speed limits in the United States, telling drivers how fast they are legally allowed to go on any particular road. Why? Shouldn’t individuals be allowed to operate their own vehicles, their private property, in any way that they see fit? Of course not! Driving at unsafe speeds can be dangerous both to the driver, their passengers and anyone else on the road or in the potential path of their car. In order to protect the lives and freedoms of all of those people, the government posts and enforces specific regulations regarding how fast people are allowed to drive on public roads. All of this is an example of the government legislating morality. There are existing moral presuppositions which undergird the laws our country operates under. In this case, human life is valuable and therefore endangering human life is inherently wrong. That is a moral statement. Civil society cannot exist without mutually understood, applied and enforced moral and ethical presuppositions. It is the role of the government within a given society not to invent those morals or ethics, but to recognize and enforce them.
With abortion, many pro-life supporters get flustered when the religious separation argument gets brought in. The question shifts from, “In what situation is it permissible to take the life of an innocent person” to “what defines a person?” The Bible tells us that God formed us in our mother’s wombs, that He knew us before we were born and that, for believers, our names were etched in the Lamb’s Book of Life before the foundations of the earth! These truths lay the foundation for the Christian position that life begins at conception. Now, understand that not all people who call themselves Christian subscribe to this definition. Of course not! We’re simply pointing out that this is how the Bible describes personhood so any opposing opinions, even from a professing believer, are unbiblical and, thereby, unchristian. That being said, does the pro-life position require a Christian or even religious framework? Not at all. If it did, then the separation argument could hold just a little bit more water, but thankfully science is on our side here.
We discussed last week how babies have a unique DNA and genetic code from the very beginning. At no point are they biologically the same as their mother, but a distinct and separate other person growing and developing for a time inside of their mother. The pro-choice movement is very aware of this truth, which is why some have started referring to babies in the womb as parasites, growths or similar to cancers that need to be removed. Those derogatory terminologies wouldn’t make any sense if the baby were just a part of the mother. Even from the other side of the theological divide, there are a growing number of the non-religious, the humanists and atheists who identify as being pro-life or anti-abortion. According to a Gallup poll back in 2012, 19% of those identifying as non-religious said they were pro-life. Even renowned atheist debator, the late Christopher Hitchens, wrote:
“That the most partially formed human embryo is both human and alive has now been confirmed, in an especially vivid sense, by the new debate over stem-cell research and the bioethics of cloning. If an ailing or elderly person can be granted a new lease on life by a transfusion of this cellular material, then it is obviously not random organic matter. The original embryonic “blastocyst” may be a clump of 64 to 200 cells that is only five days old. But all of us began our important careers in that form, and every needful encoding for life is already present in the apparently inchoate. We are the first generation to have to confront this as a certain knowledge.” - Christopher Hitchens
Now, in so many important areas, I strongly disagree with much of what Hitchens built his life around teaching, but even with those great areas of difference, we can agree here because at the end of the day, it’s just true.
A famous Doctor once put it more clearly and succinctly than I could attempt, so I’ll just quote him:
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.” - Dr. Seuss
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