Ms. Harris and the media are trying their best to keep this election from being about policies or administration track records. For them there are two major issues, Trump is personified evil and abortion. The Trump thing doesn't lend itself to rational debate, so let's talk about abortion. It's a thorny issue. Supposedly it's big with single women but it's a mixed bag for the rest. The Democrat's argument is that it must be left to the pregnant woman and her doctor. That kind of makes sense, at least superficially. Tim Walz says the government should mind its own damn business, (although it is kind of funny that he's from the political side that is a fan of the government controlling most everything else).
But, let's look at the question another way. There's no doubt a woman has the right to decide about medical procedures to her own body, e.g. an appendectomy or joint replacement. The issue is whether the growing fetus is really "her own body", considering that it has an entirely different DNA and the full potential to develop into another person.
Well, what of that? What moral import is there in removing tissue, even if it has a different DNA? Here's where reason steps aside and feelings and emotions come into play. Now that we have ultrasounds, we can see the little tyke's faces, and arms and legs moving around, etc. So, we're told that whereas the majority want abortions to be available, not so many want them past a certain point in the pregnancy. In other words, they think the mother and doctor should make the decision – but only up to a point.
Where is that point? i.e., the moral dividing line where it changes from your business to – "well, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do that". Here we get into the justifying reasons. Everyone seems to be OK with "the life of the mother" and then it gets murky. How about the health of the mother, including mental health? And then there's the likelihood of fetal abnormalities. I read that these days about 90% of fetuses with potential Down's syndrome are aborted, even though we see people with that problem around functioning pretty well. So that makes me uneasy, but I guess for most people these things all fit into the "mother and doctor choice" category morally.
But now we get into other reasons, the ones that the overwhelming number of abortions are done for. Losing your job, having to drop out of school, can't afford another child, and so on. Or just – didn't mean to get pregnant! I get that. These can be weighty problems. But balanced off against eliminating the new life it starts to become problematical as to the best option for handling the problem. Still the mother and doctor choice? Well … for the average focus group, … I guess so as long as it doesn't look like a little baby moving around on the ultrasound.
But now we come to the point I think about. We're getting towards being good enough with DNA to tell a lot from the amniocentesis. How about it's got a gene for possible diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, or hypertension. How about it's a different sex or a darker skin color or even a different eye or hair color than I was interested in? Still the mother and doctor choice?
So here we come to the nub of the problem. If we're a little queasy about saying get rid of it if it's the wrong sex, then maybe it's not "just a blob of tissue", even early on when that's what it looks like. Bill Clinton said abortion should be safe, legal and rare, framing the issue as a moral one rather than simply one of "woman's healthcare". Roe v. Wade and the "right to privacy" deemphasized the moral aspect and made abortion the go to method of handling problem pregnancies as indicated by the subsequent giant increase in the numbers after that decision.
The new Supreme Court decision has made us rethink the moral aspect of a million abortions a year, and I think that's a good thing. We have militants on either side, but the great majority are in the middle on the question. In that respect, Roe v. Wade came down squarely on one side and so was not a good solution. Turning it over to the states and letting it be up to a vote of the people in the various localities seems like the right idea to me. That way the people in California and New York can't tell the people in Mississippi and Alabama what their morality should be and vice versa.
But boy, we've come a long way since 1973. What's with all the problem pregnancies anyway? How about looking at that side of it. And what about streamlining adoption procedures. After all, it takes a village!
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