To Kill a Mockingbird

Abortion: America’s most contentious topic and why I support it

Abortion is one of the most difficult topics for me. It’s a topic inundated with preconceived notions, bad science, religious ideology and lots and lots of emotion…and all of that needs to be waded through for me to form a proper opinion on the topic. It’s been a topic that I’ve always approached with but a mere nod to what could be called “casual intellectualism” and I have veered far away from any challenging thought on the topic most of my life, not because I feared what it might bring, but simply because I was weary with the arguments surrounding it. As a male, too, I always had this “Problem of the Backseat” that I didn’t really want to cross. It would never really affect me in the same way it would the opposite sex, so a flippant attitude seemed socially prudent for the most part. But it’s always been a topic that has been intellectually challenging to me and I do love a good challenge. At the risk of being labeled a men’s rights activist along with all the other misogynistic members of the (decidedly, laughably horrid) PUA community, I decided to swallow the Red Pill and inject myself into the conversation, the debate, and give my masculine two cents into the issue with as little mansplaining as possible. Put on your diving suits, because it’s about to get very deep.

Entering into this debate, I feel a profound sense of what could only be equivocated with a mental form of vemodalen; but risk the feeling I must because the topic is far too ethically advanced for my philosophy degree to go unused upon. Thus, I feel it is important to first state a few ethical opinions of my own upon which I will base most of this contention. First and foremost, I am a utilitarian in the most classically Bentham of traditions (there is no room for that soft Mills nonsense here). Call me a hedonist, but I do believe that pleasure is a quantitative mental device of emotive toposophism (barbaric in its own right, I know, but animals we were born to be and we must work within such confines at the moment lest we sink into a barbiturate haze), and as such, the needs of the many outweigh those of the few so long as the Unit of Utility is maximized in the process for the greatest number dealt with. I also believe in the principles of utilitarianism thereof, as Bentham laid forth and others so sheepishly butchered for their own fame and fortune. Second, I am a transhumanist, and as such, believe that the preservation of sentience is of greater importance than the preservation of biological life. The bio-organic meat sauce that we all comprise comes in many forms, most of which are utterly useless to the formation of a greater society, and as such, I value the cognizant capacity of a creature over the simple fact that it may posses vitality. The neuron can be recorded, reproduced, re-uploaded and re-developed…the body degrades with entropy. Finally, I believe that the “greater society” to which I refer deals with an anthropomorphic future wherein reason and rationale is granted higher status than emotional response. The Great Society is one in which emotion is removed entirely and sentience and self-recognition are imperative. It is also one in which utility is maximized as stated above and finally, it is one wherein a technocracy exists in its most pure form, removed from the constraints of Homo Sapiens. I believe sincerely that in removing the so-called fuzzy “human element” from the equation, most problems become easily solved.

So with that out of the way, let’s talk about abortion.

Abortion can be defined however you want, but ultimately, all the opinions, all the ideologies, all the facts and all the stances can be distilled down to a simple dichotomy: Either abortion is killing babies, or it isn’t. That’s it. That’s the debate. As the famous comic Louis C.K. once said oh so eloquently, “abortion is either taking a shit, or killing a baby.” There’s no in between. And that’s why the debate is so heated. Obviously, if you believe you’re killing a baby, you’d want to see that stopped. To these people it’s murder, the taking of an innocent life on par with rampant infanticide. It’s a genocidal epidemic that’s state sanctioned. Add in a religious factor and suddenly there’s all eternity to worry about. Did that relative get an abortion? Then they just committed murder in the most heinous degree and deserve hell lest they repent and be saved. Of course these people would be outspoken! They think everyone around them are killing children and they think they’re going to hell for it to boot! If you found out your best friend had just murdered their twelve year old daughter, would you mind? Would you support them, pat them on the back, pay for the murder to help them out and tell them everything will be alright? No, you fool, you’d call the police and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. What a nut job! Well, that’s what the anti-abortion crowd sees. Lots of otherwise seemingly normal, good folks slaughtering children. So putting yourself in their shoes, it’s easy to see the complaint. Those in favor of “taking a shit” see things differently. To them, abortion is no different than an induced miscarriage, something that happens everyday from natural causes…we’re just helping nature along. To them, the fetus is still part of the female body and is thus under her control: It depends on her nutrition to survive, it depends on her body and it developed from her cells. It is part of her. They may also cite logistical concerns: If abortion was outlawed, people would still have them, just in far more dangerous situations that might endanger everyone involved and not just the fetus (abortion is, in fact, nothing new…illegally circulated pamphlets from the 1910s and beyond recommend drinking Lysol to induce an early termination, so there is some weight to these arguments). To them, even if you think it’s wrong, it would be worse to outlaw it since people would still seek abortions en masse. It’s a similar debate to the drug problem: Do we outlaw what people will always be able to get, or do we provide it in a safe and secure location in a pure form that’s less likely to harm? For me, the debate is a little different…

I think abortion is murder. But that comes with caveats. I think it’s murder on a strictly scientific basis: You’re killing living cells. You are therefore killing life. But some life is more valuable than others. Every day, we scratch our skin, killing thousands of live cells in the process each and every one of them having equal potential as a sperm cell or an egg. We have no qualms about spraying bleach on our toilets, a chemical that murders bacteria by the millions. We have no qualms about “putting down” a dog with rabies or a cat with a bad leg. We hunt, we fish…we kill living, breathing creatures on a daily basis. But none of us get into legal trouble over these murders because we, as a collective society, have agreed that some life is worth more than others. Some cells have potential, and some do not. Some cells become sentient, and some do not. Some cells think, become self aware, grow up and and write articles like this one…others do not.

Thus, I believe that the abortion debate is actually a debate over viability and potential, rather than just a straight debate over life. While they may seem equal, both hold separate values when it comes to this debate so I will tackle each one on its own, starting with viability.

This is the biggest reason why I support abortion. I believe that viability holds massive weight when determining the ethical value of abortion. I also think that most sane people would also agree with me (even you, anti-abortion reader). Let’s start with cases where viability really matters. Let’s say that an abortion would save the life of the mother. In this case, would it be acceptable? Some would say no, but most would agree that this is fine. This is a viability choice in the flesh: One subject is already a fully functioning human with added weight to society, producing and consuming as expected. The other subject is not yet viable, and remains a proposed being capable of such, but as of yet unproven. Consequently, it makes sense as a society to destroy that which would seek to destroy the viable subject, since the cost-benefit analysis would state that the potentially viable could do more harm than the already known viable individual. It’s better to save the one that is already productive than save the one that may, someday, be productive. Thus, abortion is justified. It preserves utility (the cognizant subject remains alive and the world maintains another producer) and it preserves transhumanist values (the sentient being is maintained, while the underdeveloped being is destroyed…a definite cost versus a potential cost in cognizant reasoning).

Using the device of categorical syllogism, we have formulated the following inference: 1) Viability is defined as the ability to survive, 2) a well formed subject is always more viable than a yet-formed one. Therefore, as the syllogism closes, abortion should be allowed in cases where viability is of pressing importance. This would automatically allow for abortion in cases of extreme medical urgency, values the life of the mother by default, would remove the risk of underage pregnancies carried to term and also distance itself from arguments surrounding rape, incest, undesirable circumstance or late term abortions. So far so good, and this is a pretty common stance even amongst those that believe abortion to be generally wrong except in situations of extreme urgency.

Things start to get a bit more clouded, though, when we enter into the concept of “potential.” Viability is one thing and it’s easily defined: You are either living, breathing and therefore viable, or you are not. A fetus is less viable than a mother, as one life is already viable and another has yet to reach that point, so the value of one life is deemed greater than the value of another. But potential is riskier. Potential is heavier. Potential has consequences. Any physicist could tell you that something that appears to not exist still has potential, even though we couldn’t tell from the naked eye. Consider a block of wood. Along in the fireplace, this block is harmless and pretty useless. It’s inert, comfortable in its own equilibrium. But ignite a match and suddenly this wood has lots of potential kinetic energy that will be released and realized once set ablaze. Potential is not always seen. That said, I believe it is possible to make a quantitative statement about potential, but to do that, there must be two factors observed and recorded. I will call the first, the Potential of Minimum Social Quality. I will call the second, the Potential of Minimum Medical Quality. I will tackle the second first as it is a bit more straightforward.

This is fundamentally the same reason I support voluntary euthanasia: while a being may be strictly viable from a biological standpoint, it may not be able to maintain a quality of life that is deemed acceptable by modern society. In past years, this was a great unknown, but today, thanks to the power of modern technology, we can determine if a child will have any major medical problems prior to birth. This is a great ethical question: If you knew that your child was going to be born with a pre-existing condition that would lead to a vegetative state and early death, should the child still be brought to term? Many fully grown, fully formed adults walk around with Do Not Resuscitate tags dangling from their wrists and talk boldly about how they’d wish their family members would just “pull the plug” if something catastrophic were to ever happen. That’s because we all know we’d vehemently never wish to be in a state where we couldn’t survive without machine assistance, completely unaware of our surroundings, breathing through a tube, eating through a syringe, shitting our beds and drooling out our lunch while our minds slowly wasted away unable to comprehend the world anymore. What a horrible way to live. If you can call it “living.” So why do we presume that children living this way from birth should somehow be afforded a different position? Why would they enjoy living like this more than us? Perhaps one day we will be able to cure such states. Perhaps one day we will be able to revive a quality of life that nature has cruelly stripped from us. But today is not that day and the best we can do is crudely keep some organs beating in time to the clock so we can pretend a patient is alive when really their body is screaming to simply be put down. Children are no different. Nature takes no prisoners: The innocent young are just as capable of becoming breathing piles of meat unaware of their surroundings and in constant pain just as easily as a grown adult. Stories I hear about parents that bring such children to term because of some teary eyed belief they should have at least some life do not inspire me. Instead, they sound selfish and cruel, parents forcing life through a trick of science so they can gaze upon the flushed, dying face of a child they wanted…it’s a grotesque pining for a child they were doomed to never have. Better to terminate early and spare the creature the horror.

The Potential of Minimum Social Quality is more difficult for most people and I think this is where we really start to meet some of the most contentious debate. I will further break this into two categories, the PMSQ of the mother and PMSQ of the fetus. PMSQ is defined herein as the potential for a social toll to be placed upon either the fetus, the mother or the surrounding society as a whole which often is a direct consequence of either of the other two. For example, some potential children may have a very good chance of survival, but they may be unwanted by the parent. This creates social conflict wherein the child is raised in an arguably hostile environment: They are fundamentally unwanted which opens the door for neglect and abuse, either intentional or accidental, thereby lowering their quality of life socially. Entering this being into an orphanage and utilizing the adoption system may be an option, of course, however this has the additional consequence of placing added strain on the society as a whole, shifting the burden upon individuals that never wanted to deal with a child at all (the state and those that make it up, the citizens). This lowers utility both from the individual who is unwanted and from the whole that now must support this unwanted individual. There are also environmental impacts and population impacts that can be unforeseen immediately as demonstrated by chaos theory. Thus, it would be immoral under a utilitarian ethics code that maximizes utility as a hedonistic quantitative imperative, to not abort in this situation. Abortion is therefore moral and ethically acceptable. In terms of mothers, failing to abort may also place added financial strain on their lives, impose health risks, lower certain superficial beauty standards and thereby lower the hedonist quality of utility or even cause a massive life shift in career goals. This lowers the utility available to an already viable individual (as per the principle of viability discussed above) without quantitatively maximizing it for anyone else, even the fetus as presumed quality is unmeasurable and always equal to zero with a potential for more. Thus, it would seem that utility should be maximized for the immediate benefactor rather than the possible benefactor and abortion becomes, once again, acceptable, even morally required.

As a final point, and perhaps the most controversial one I have made yet, I also believe the abortion should be legally sanctioned and ethically accepted if for no other reason than simply as a means of population control. There is no reason under a utilitarian principle that we should be creating more resource draining humans simply to create more humans. There should be a deliberate purpose to each birth and the utility of the whole should be considered a priori. Call me cold, but the creation of life is a responsibility that should not be assumed flippantly, and sometimes it is better to make the life that already exists more comfortable than bring the quality of life of the herd down for the addition of but a few needless creations.

Once these principles are accepted, abortion becomes a much more ethical option. I therefore accept it upon the basis that utility must be maximized for those that already exist over those that have the potential to exist. It’s as simple as that.

I believe that abortion should be regulated under euthanasia laws, if that makes certain people feel better. The difference that would make could be very beneficial overall. For example, if regulated under euthanasia laws, a valid medical reason must be required and corroborated by two doctors before a termination is made. This medical reason can also be extended to quality of life choices as well, so it is not merely relegated to the world of disease, but also takes into account things like the quality of life of the child and/or mother. Abortion would also become a medically sanctioned operation that could be financed by state healthcare services or made standardized under federal law (unlike current situations where the states are largely in charge of pricing and can charge exorbitant fees as a way of reducing availability). Abortions would also have to be made in medical facilities like hospitals, reducing the potential for shady clinics to spring up and operate illegally and potentially dangerously. And at the same time, this would require any hospital in a state that allows for euthanasia to perform the operation so abortion would also become more readily available while also becoming a more clinical, medically cautious procedure. Of course therein lies the rub: In order for this solution to actually work, euthanasia law needs to be solidified federally and more states need to adopt right to die ordinances. Until this happens, this proposal is just drivel and completely useless.

So there it is. My mentally ejaculative take on America’s most contentious issue. Regardless of my personal reasoning about it, though, I will say one thing: Abortions will happen safely under a sanctioned environment, or they will happen in disease ridden basements under the direction of home taught nurses…but they will happen. We can moralize all day long about the issue and such debates are definitely appropriate and good to have, but in the mean time, abortions still need to be readily available if for no other reason than to preserve the health of the living. It’s a difficult topic, a sensitive one, I know. But there are times when the collective good should win out and this is one of those times.