Jeff Jacoby has a column in the Boston Globe about the evasions surrounding pro-abortion rhetoric, starting off with calling abortion anything but abortion (choice, reproductive freedom, etc…). Definitely worth reading although there won’t be much new to most people who have thought about the issue. I take some issue with the conclusion, however:
Abortion is always a violent and awful thing, whether it happens in a squalid cesspit or in an immaculate doctor’s office. Reasonable people can debate whether abortion should be legal, and under what circumstances. But they ought to be able to do so without euphemistic evasions.
I struggle with the notion that reasonable people can disagree. How many other things that are “violent and awful” are open to debate about their permissibility. I agree with Lysander Spooner who said not every vice need be illegal. But abortion is an order of magntitude worse than gambling, drinking or whoring. It is violent and awful, as Jacoby admits but it is also lethal (or destructive as Jacoby suggests). But would we find Jacoby saying “reasonable people can debate whether suicide bombing should be legal” or “reasonable people can debate whether honour killings should be legal” or “reasonable people can debate whether genocide should be legal.” When pro-lifers concede the point that reasonable people and people of goodwill can disagree about abortion, they are conceding in some small way that abortion is not like other killing and that one can legitimately make a case for its permissibility. The desire for civil debate may have many virtues, but I question the need to get along with people who support something as outright barbaric as baby-killing. As PR the concession might be necessary, but it comes at the cost of diminishing the seriousness of abortion as a moral issue.
