The GOP is more pro-choice than it thinks.
If you don’t think that abortion is murder — and, let’s face it, if you favor exemptions for rape and incest you really don’t — the morality of any given abortion comes down to what it says about the woman involved, not some deontological prohibition on abortion per se.
If the value of an embryo is as a potential person — the sort of thing that can one day have a mind and/or soul — then abortion isn’t a morally neutral thing. The trouble comes when this sort-of-bad-but-not-super-bad thing (destroying a thing that may one day become a person) comes into conflict with a woman’s decisions about her body.
If gestation happened in a box rather than a person, there would be no good reason to pull the plug. Since it does happen in a person — and since that person risks anything from discomfort and inconvenience to death — it’s not so black and white. Every circumstance is different: the ultimate question for woman with an unwanted pregnancy is how much pain, distress, and change to the rest of her life she’s willing to endure for the sake of a potential person.
It’s entirely coherent to say that abortion is bad, but that women should be able to have them. In that framework, the decision becomes a measure of circumstance and values: it tells us something about the character of the woman involved. (Of course, it might just tell us that she’s a fourteen-year-old who is psychologically unprepared to spend nine months carrying the memory of her rape — it can’t a blanket judgment of all women who have abortions or all women who don’t.)
For all the platform’s talk about banning abortion entirely, this is the framework that the McCain campaign has embraced. They want us to know that it was a choice:
Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said. (Reuters)
The emphasis here is not so much in the right outcome, but the right choice. And the emphasis on agency, on people rather than incubators, can only be good for women.
“If you don’t think that abortion is murder — and, let’s face it, if you favor exemptions for rape and incest you really don’t”
Thaaaaaaaaank you, Nicola! Thank you a hundred times over.
“If gestation happened in a box rather than a person, there would be no reason to pull the plug. Since it does happen in a person - and since that person risks everything from discomfort to inconvenience to death - it’s not so black and white.”
Really? You honestly think that the only justified reasons to have an abortion are pregnancy related? It seems to me that the much larger concern for most women isn’t the nine months of carrying the child but the 18 years/eternity of responsibility that comes after. There might be all sorts of reasons to choose not to bring a child into the world, via box or person. In the wikipedia page you link to actually, they mention that the researcher “aborted” the embryo she had implanted in the artificial uterus after 6 days of successful gestation. No woman’s body was at stake, but I think most people (at least, most people who don’t believe abortion is murder) would agree that this was clearly a sensible decision and even that doing otherwise would have been criminally irresponsible.