Framing the Abortion Debate
When pro-choice and pro-life activists engage in debate over the hot topic of abortion, it appears at times that they are talking about two different things. Unlike a perfect sphere which looks the same from two opposing angles, the abortion debate appears more like a cylinder. Though it is always its own shape, from one angle it looks like a circle, from another a rectangle. Any chance of approaching the true shape of the cylinder is lost if two sides are describing two different shapes.
How then do pro-choice and pro-life activists view abortion? For pro-choice the fixation is on a woman’s right to choose to abort a fetus. Abortion is about the choice. For pro-life it is about the result of a choice previously made. Childbearing is a natural consequence of a previous choice. For them the choice already happened and now pro-choice is trying to choose away a consequence. An analogy will illustrate this point.
A hungry woman enters a restaurant, sits, and orders from the menu. When the food arrives, she changes her mind on what she wants and sends it away. A furious restaurant manger approaches and wants to make her pay for the food she ordered and didn’t want. She is outraged that she should be forced to pay for something she didn’t eat. This is the pro-choice view; a woman having her right to choose taken away.
A hungry woman enters a restaurant, sits, and orders from the menu. When the food arrives, it is not what she ordered. She eats the food anyway. When the bill comes, she protests that she shouldn’t have to pay since it was not what she ordered. The furious manager apologizes for the wrong order but demands payment since she chose to eat the food anyway. This is the pro-life view, an expected consequence of a deliberate action.
The crux of this analogy rests on whether the woman ate the food at the restaurant. If she did not eat the food, then logically she should not, and could not be forced to pay for something to which she did not oblige herself; even if at one point she wanted one thing, then changed her mind to another. If she did not eat, then she should not pay; no matter how tedious or irresponsible her indecisiveness may appear.
On the other hand, if she did eat, then she must settle the bill. While her order may have been incorrect, and even if she did not want to go to that restaurant to eat that meal, the fact remains that she consumed the meal. She chose to eat the meal and therefore must pay. It matters not that the consequence is prolonged. Even if the bill is late to her table, she still owes the restaurant.
Turning back to abortion we ask, where is the choice? Reason suggests that a woman may change her mind about intimacy with her partner. She may change her mind several times; she is entitled to this choice, even though it may frustrate her partner. Once she chooses to engage in the act of intimacy and follows through with that decision, she made her choice. There is no undoing that act; it happened. A decision may be undone in the mind, but an action lost to time cannot be retrieved. What follows is both the natural and expected consequence. There is no right to choose when it comes to the consequence of an action. A woman’s right to choose occurs before she acts. If she willingly and knowingly ate the meal, then the real crime lies not in the expectation to pay her bill, but to request a recusal from the consequences of her own actions.
Now let us turn our attention to the partner who shares equal responsibility for the check. The man who ate with her is not allowed to leave the table and leave the woman with the full check. Women are rightly furious and justified in calling out this shameful shirking of responsibility. However, even when a pathetic person posing as a man escapes the bill before it arrives, this does not justify the woman in not paying either. The result would be two injustices, two irresponsible people, two people trying to escape consequences; one wrong does not justify, negate, or erase the first wrong.
Here is some advice to both men and women caught up in this revelry of responsibility refusal: if you don’t want to pay the bill, don’t eat the food; if you don’t want to share the bill with your partner, don’t eat food together; if you suspect that your partner will bail before the bill arrives, don’t eat food together; and stop pretending you didn’t eat the food, when clearly you chose to.
