The arguments favoring abortion rest on the proposition that women with unborn children have the unqualified right to dispose of those children, including action encompassing the extinction of those children, according to their convenience. The proposition is asserted that women are entitled to administer their bodies as they see fit, without being inhibited by the values of society.
This is a simple-minded approach which assumes that all rights are absolute. In moral truth, in all matters of significance one set of rights must be weighed against another set of rights. Lesser rights must yield to greater rights.
The right of property enjoys widespread moral endorsement, but it must yield to higher rights. The right of a citizen to own a gun can be embraced by the concept of property rights. However, the rights of property affecting the use of handguns must be constrained when the owners of such guns presume to contemplate using them to extinguish the lives of innocent people.
The right of property affecting handguns stops short of discharging a bullet into the heads of other people. The right to own a car stops short of its owner exposing the owners and passengers of other cars, and pedestrians, to needless physical risk.
The right to own property, and to deploy that property, must yield to the right of human beings to enjoy life, and to be protected from avoidable physical infirmity, or even death at the hands of a person exercising his right to own a handgun or a car.
The right to free speech, which has been widely treated as the transcendent human right, is not absolute. This right, according to the prominent U.S jurist, does not extend to shouting “fire” needlessly in a crowded theatre. If the right to freedom of speech can be modified in favor of the right to retain life, or the right to be spared unnecessary threat to life, all lesser rights can be modified in favor of the right to life.
At all times, and in all matters, differing rights are in conflict, and it is the function of society to adjudicate divergent rights. Abortion deals with a conflict in human rights. The right of one set of human beings to be spared major, and sometimes economically crippling, inconvenience is confronted by the right of another set of human beings to achieve birth.
When society is asked to choose between the right of a category of human beings to be relieved of a social discomfort, the entry into their lives of other human lives, and the right of another category of human beings to attain life, there can be no doubt how ethically alert people must choose. The right to attain life, and to preserve life, must displace all other rights.
The pro-life movement has gained immense momentum in the past 13 years. In light of the moral implications of abortion, it is likely to continue to gain momentum.
