The story in yesterday’s New York Times which reports that some Asian-American women are aborting female fetuses after they have failed to produce a male child is very unsettling. It brings the debate on abortion back to the time of Roe v. Wade with the vengeance cultural history wrecks on those who arrive at moral conclusions too quickly. At the time of Roe v. Wade, it was regarded as bizarre for a liberal humanist like myself to make the at argument, which I did at the time, that readily available abortion cheapened the worth of human life. That was when the argument was largely posed as either legal abortion or the back alley abortionist. Also, that woman’s biology should not be their destiny. I wondered at the time whether the fact that the disadvantage of women being the only gender that could bear children were not balanced off by the fact that women lived on average seven years longer than men. Wasn’t the biological burden balanced off by the biological benefit? I know that is comparing very different attributes, but if you can cite one as a detriment why not cite the other as a benefit?

This was also the era in which Philippa Foote, the English philosopher, argued that pregnancy was like waking up one morning and finding yourself hooked up by tubes to another human being and told you would have to remain that way for a number of months until the other person recovered from an illness. Foote argued that you were not morally obligated to remain hooked up, that you could demand to be disconnected even if that meant the other person would die. It seemed to her perfectly obvious that this was an obligation that was placed upon you rather than assumed by you and so was not binding. I thought the reasoning tendentious then and still do. First of all, forget about the word “obligation”, which causes more trouble than it is worth. The responsibility to remain hooked up remains with you because you are in a position where your action, one way or the other, makes all the difference to the person hooked up to you, and so whatever the vicissitudes that got you there, pulling the plug on your parasite would mean the death of that individual, no way around that. Wouldn’t most people, men or women, think that you have to respond to the situation you are stuck with and that the callous choice is not the only possible choice? Moreover, in the way of many examples invented by philosophers to suit what they think should be the case, this example avoids the crucial aspects of the actual situation. In an era of birth control, it is to be assumed that any woman is capable of protecting herself from pregnancy and so the failure to do so is an oversight or an error which has consequences that cannot be dismissed simply because the consequences were the result of an oversight or an error. Otherwise every drunken driver gets off scot free.

But such was the righteousness of the pro-choice crowd that they would not admit that a fetus was something more than a hangnail. Abortion was, rather, a choice between two evils where it well might be difficult to make the choice between the future of the fetus and the future life of its teenage mother. NOW insisted, at the same time, that women were perfectly capable of arriving at mature decisions about a difficult matter. Why, if the fetus had no higher standing than a hangnail, was the decision a difficult one? There must be something of value that was being sacrificed.

If abortion is a right rather than a legal activity that is regulated, then it can be exercised for frivolous reasons. It is part of your right to a religion unsupervised by the state to try to convince people that the world is coming to an end next week. Part of the genius of the Founding Fathers was to realize that religious freedom exercised in a frivolous way was not a threat to the well being of the nation, even if hearing loony opinions was distasteful. You can also, because voting is regarded as a right rather than a regulated legal activity, write in your high school wrestling coach as your candidate for Governor. Well, we have come to the point where abortion, regarded as a right, leads to certain frivolous decisions. It has become, at least for some people, a life style decision. I will hold out for a boy, and so abort any more girls I might have. That it might be an Asian preference to have boy children is not to the point. We are living in America and trying to decide what women in America are allowed to do. You can make an argument that deformed children should or may be aborted, but that is recognition of the lesser of two evils principle. Here we are talking about allowing a simple prejudice against female children to dictate the decision for abortion. What if we had markers so that we could detect green eyed or non-athletic children? Could they also be subject to abortion? It turns a matter of life and death into a consumer decision: what are the attributes you want. Otherwise, the fetus gets thrown back into the vale of souls until another body needs to be born—except that, as I see it, that particular soul is abolished along with its body, never to be realized again.

I wonder how Feminists will deal with this one, especially given that it is female fetuses that are getting destroyed, though the argument would be the same if it were female fetuses that were preferred and so male fetuses were being destroyed as a matter of what can only be called “taste” in the American context. All those Asian mothers may still be caught up in the customs and culture of their ancestors, but I doubt that is the case, given how quickly people pick up American cultural habits. And even if that were the case, that  is not reason enough  for honoring their decisions, given that we are in America and not in China. The rules apply here. The flag of non discrimination hangs over every fetus that is in America just as it hangs or ought to hang over every inmate at Guantanamo. Rather, I think the case is that we have, by calling them fetuses, reduced babies to consumer objects where we don’t have to honor what they are, which is independent souls, that infusion of soul happening at no clear point, certainly not after the head has poked itself out of the vagina, even though late term abortionists allow that to happen before they zap the baby. If the intention to abort the baby is more important than the actual physical relation of the baby to its mother, then why not abort three day olds or week old babies if the parent thinks she will not be very able to cope with raising a child, if it is causing her emotional distress?

The logic of the pro-choice movement just breaks down because it cannot face up to facts, which is that having no regulation of abortion makes abortion into a life style issue in that it is merely a matter of preference rather than responsibility. I daresay the pro-life people are also insufferable in their self-righteous presumption that the government shouldn’t get engaged in saving General Motors but should get engaged in saving every fetus. Corporations are private matters but human beings aren’t?  So I go back to my humanistic position. There are some matters which are not matters of taste and whether to abort a fetus is not one of them, but rather a matter of responsibility, which means to be accountable for the consequences of one’s actions, at least within one’s own soul, even if the culture has moved on to deny any humanity to a fetus that a mother at one point or another decides to terminate. The people of the United States, we should have learned by now, are not exempt from the charge of being callous to the feelings of those classified, for one reason or another, as part of a deficient group, whether because of race, ethnicity or fighting on the wrong side in a war, or, in this case, just struggling to be born.