There is more and more evidence that the biggest divide in this country is over the abortion issue. Many people who would otherwise not have voted for Trump did so strictly to try to reverse Roe v Wade. I know two of them myself.
44 years after Roe v Wade, it has not been universally accepted as controlling law. This is perhaps the only time this has happened in our recent history. Other controversial issues are settled by a Supreme Court decision (most recently gay marriage) and are after some time has passed are accepted, even though disliked by many, as a fait accompli. That simply has not happened with abortion.
It’s not a case of agreeing to disagree, either. Passions are as strong on both sides as they were 44 years ago—perhaps even stronger. It’s “killing babies” vs “women controlling their own bodies”. Look at what happened on Jan. 21st: a group of women who considered themselves “pro-life feminists” were denied the right to participate in the Women’s March. At the time this struck me as both insane and bizarre. If it was supposed to be a march for “all women”—well, weren’t they women? At a time when all are needed to oppose a threat to our very existence, we allowed ourselves to be divided by a single issue tangential to the main peril.
At it’s bottom, this is a controversy over when human life begins. Perhaps the even more fundamental question is “What is a human being?” The “pro-life” people look at a tiny zygote and proclaim “It’s life”. Well, so is a carrot. It’s a silly pronouncement. The question is not whether it’s “life”. The question is whether it’s a human life.
If we had a definition of human life, or the beginning of human life, that most people could agree on, this controversy would be over. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t like it, but they’d be willing to accept it. I say “most” people, because the most religious would probably fall back on arguments about “souls”, and exactly when a “soul” gets injected into a fetus. If they think that happens at conception, there’s no arguing with them. You can’t refute a non-logical religious belief. But everyone else would be willing to accept it, though reluctantly.
We have a model to work with. That model is the agreement on when life ends. It used to be that life was thought to end when the heart stopped, or when breathing could no longer be detected. Then medical science threw a monkey wrench into the works. They figured out how to detect brain waves, as well as to keep hearts breathing and lungs pumping. The argument didn’t last very long. It was agreed that life ends when no brain waves can be detected over a specified period, even if the body was still breathing and the heart was still pumping.
When I say “It was agreed”, I don’t mean that everyone accepted it. In fact there is still some disagreement connected with the criteria under which organs can be harvested from donors. This has happened because organs can deteriorate if not harvested quickly. Thus the argument, for example, that if a person has left an order for “Do Not Resuscitate”, but there would be a chance for resuscitation if it were allowed, and the brain has not yet flat-lined, organs can still be harvested because by following the patient’s desires death is inevitable. Or not.
Nevertheless, lay people seem to have almost universally accepted the criterion of “brain death” as being true death. The bizarre case of Terry Schiavo underlines this. The woman had been in what was termed a “persistent vegetative state” for several years. She was kept alive by machinery, and still had some detectable brain waves. Her husband wanted to withdraw life support, but her parents, and the right-wing community, contended that she was not truly dead. It became a cause celebre for a short time. Eventually life support was withdrawn by court order, and a post mortem was conducted, which showed that her brain had deteriorated so badly that there had never been any hope of her revival.
What this case shows is that if she had not had detectable brain waves there would have been no issue. No one would have objected to the withdrawal of life support. In fact this happens every day, with no fuss, and certainly no public controversy. Thus this is, despite some uncertainty in the medical community, a publicly accepted definition of death: in other words, the moment when a person ceases to be a “human being”.
So what is needed is an equally well-accepted definition of the point at which a fetus begins to be a human being in the eyes of society and the law.
I would contend that, because the absence of brain waves is already accepted as the criterion of death, their presence should be accepted as the criterion of life. It would be a solution to the dilemma that we seem unable to resolve, and one that could most readily become accepted by a broad cross-section of society.
This is not a new idea. There has been a lot of literature and controversy surrounding when this occurs. Reading some of it, it seems to me that older literature, often cited by the “pro-life” lobby, puts it much earlier in gestation than modern literature. This, in addition to being a sort of wish-fulfillment, seems to be based on older, less accurate research which is no longer widely accepted in the medical community. The most widely accepted time for organized brain waves to appear seems to be during about the 25th week, or at the end of the fifth month of gestation.
What is needed is for the medical community to come together and make a pronouncement about this. Their reluctance is understandable. They would be immediately assaulted from all sides. One side would be screaming that it was much too late, the other that it would cut off abortion earlier than is now the case. However, because both sides would find it offensive, it would stand a chance of being accepted—not immediately, but after the passage of some time, providing that the medical community stood firm.
If we could put the abortion controversy to bed, it would clear the way for other issues to come to the forefront, and remove one of the largest knee-jerk bones of contention upon which our seemingly irreresolvable divide is based. That might clear the way for some rapproachement on other issues.
I’d urge the medical community to consider this.