Very important primary elections are right around the corner for Nevada, and the way candidates try to spin their position on abortion can make you dizzy. The most mesmerizing position says, “I am personally opposed, BUT…. I think 1.) the government should not be involved,” or 2.) “that we should not interfere in private personal family matters,” or 3.) “that we should not tell women what to do with their bodies,” or 4.) “I don’t think I can impose my personal beliefs on others.”
This personally opposed pro-choice position is the easiest abortion position to deconstruct and the least serious because it is clear that killing innocent human beings is NOT permissible when or because it is done in private and/or the decision to do so was agonized over and agreed to by family members. Abortion is a public (not private) act because it involves two people not one. An unborn child is never his or her mother’s body or part of it. And since abortion involves the destruction of one person by another, a just government is duty bound to intervene in these “private” affairs to protect the right to life of defenseless human beings. They are duty bound no matter how personal the decision is or how much deliberation or agony a woman and her family have put into or experienced over the decision to abort unborn children.
No serious person believes that parents are free to abuse or dispose of their children as long as it’s done in private and handled by the family. But personally opposed politicians are in the bizarre position of saying people are free to destroy unborn human beings for THOSE reasons. That is why the “personally opposed (because abortion takes a human life) BUT…” position is the least respectable of all positions on abortion. Personally opposed BUT politicians are telling us that they do not have the will to assert and impose their belief that aborting innocent human beings is wrong. Every law or regulation proceeds from someone or some group’s morality-their sense of right and wrong. Why then are personally opposed candidates running for office if they are not willing to impose morality?
There’s another flaw with the “personal opposed BUT”… pro-choice position. Princeton Professor Robert George says the personally opposed BUT… pro-choice position suggests “that someone can will for others the freedom to have an abortion without being responsible in any morally significant way for the abortions sought or performed by people exercising that freedom.”
That flight from responsibility is impossible. You cannot as a public official will that one person or a class of persons' rights not be protected and escape responsibility when others seek and accomplish their demise because of your actions just because you hope or prefer it doesn’t happen. Professor George says any public official “who acts to establish or preserve a legal right to abortion necessarily wills that unborn human beings be denied the legal protection against direct (and other forms of unjust) killing that he wills for him and others whom he considers to have lives worthy of protection of the laws. … in this way, he renders himself complicit in the injustice of those abortions that his actions help to make possible. However sincerely he may hope that women will forgo the freedom to abortion and opt instead for pro-life alternatives, the blood of abortion’s unborn victims is on his hands.” (The Clash of Orthodoxies, p. 247).
These are things for the pro-life voter to consider in the imminent elections.
You said that "every law or regulation proceeds from someone or some group’s morality-their sense of right and wrong." The classical world's view, meaning the ancient Greeks' and Romans' view from which so much of our legal framework is derived, held that 'legislation' was not truly derived simply from morality. They believed that laws were in the truest sense of the word 'passed' to us from the divine through the agency of 'legislators' who understood themselves to be not 'lawmakers' but 'law communicators.' Note that the root 'legis' refers to law while the root 'lat' refers to the passage of communication (cf. 'relate' or 'translate'). Recovering this understanding should contribute to the refocusing of the legal machinery involved in these important pro-life issues. Even our most esteemed legislators seem to have neglected that vital distinction in their tasks. Legislators who adopt the personal opposition-resigned approval approach would do well to consider whether or not they are adequate to their roles as law communicators.
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