In the course of a casual conversation at a dinner party the other day about an event thanking all the U.S. military veterans, a friend remarked that he thought abortion could be considered politics.  I was caught off-guard by the remark and quickly responded by vehemently denying that it was.  I challenged my friend as to why he would think that it was.  The better response would have been, “what do you mean by that”?  The word “politics” is one of those over-used words in conversations that can have multiple meanings.   The dictionary defines politics as:  “The science or art of political government (2) the practice or profession of conducting political affairs.” 

As I thought about it later, it occurred to me that this is an important question in the abortion debate.  I believe that there is more to this question than one can see on the surface.  Our culture has mastered the art of turning certain moral and ethical issues upside down, and in certain cases, such as abortion, turning a moral issue into a subjective reflection and personal choice.  

 When a person refers to an issue as “political” it means that there can be differences of opinion on that issue that would not necessarily mean that the issue is right or wrong or that the person making the assertion is right or wrong.  So, for example, if I say that the war in Iraq is justified and you say that it is not, neither one of us would, necessarily, be right or wrong.  We would just have a difference of opinion not based on any moral absolutes.  Our culture has turned abortion to this type of issue rather than the moral issue that it clearly is. 

Now, can one logically make the argument that if I’m against abortion and you’re for it, that we both have just “a difference of opinion” or that abortion can be considered “political” and we both could be right?  No, we cannot.  Abortion is a moral issue because it involves the killing of a human being and moral issues are not up to individuals to decide.  A moral issue is not relative.  A moral issue is based on an absolute truth. In general, absolute truth is whatever is always valid, regardless of parameters or context.  

The pro-choice advocate will argue that abortion is not a moral issue but a “personal choice.”  This argument falls apart upon examination, however.  A personal choice is subjective, such as my personal choice of color for a car is red, your personal choice may be blue; both are neither right nor wrong, they’re subjective personal choices.   Abortion is not a subjective choice because it deals with the taking of a human life and, accordingly, is a moral issue.  No one would argue that killing a human being is just a subjective choice or something wrong for you and right for me.  We would agree, that we cannot leave such issues to personal choices or we would not have any social order in our society.

One of the ways that our culture has been so effective in de-sensitizing the issue of abortion is to call it a “choice or a woman’s health issue.”  In other words, our culture has succeeded in transferring a moral issue into a subjective personal choice issue.  In this way people can be free of any guilt in approving of what is the killing of human life and calling it something other than what it is.  The pro-choice advocates have had a brilliant campaign for the past 50 or so years in changing the vocabulary related to abortion.  So, the brutal dismembering of a fully formed baby in the womb, ready to be delivered, can be killed legally by what is called partial birth abortion.  By changing the vocabulary of how we discuss this procedure we have removed it from the realm of morality and put it into the realm of subjective choice.  

In Biblical times, the Canaanites, the ancient people of Palestine, worshipped the god Baal and practiced child sacrifice.  The Baal worshipers would routinely offer up their children to him in hopes of getting a good harvest and fertility.  The children would be thrown into a fiery furnace and burned alive.  They saw no problem with this because they changed the meaning of what was a moral issue by calling it something else.  Can you imagine, for example, a smiling one-year old little girl being thrown into a fiery furnace to be burned alive?  The Canaanites did this routinely to appease their god.  Today, we would be horrified at anyone throwing a young child into a fiery furnace, but yet we have no problem with a doctor dismembering a child and crushing his/her skull inside the womb by partial birth abortion and calling it “women’s health.”  This horrifies no one in our culture.  Our pro-choice politicians call it “a right guaranteed by the Constitution.”   If you recall, the Clinton Administration vetoed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban bill twice in the 1990s. 

So, I am not surprised that a perfectly intelligent person, and for that matter, a trained medical doctor, can dismember a fully formed infant inside the womb and call it “a woman’s health issue” as if it was the same as removing tonsils.  Likewise, a person can say that abortion is just politics and just a difference of opinion, so if we are for abortion or against it, it does not matter, it is just a personal matter that people can differ on with no consequences.

I was surprised to hear a debate on abortion the other day on the Michael Medved radio show.   This is a subject that the media, for the most part, rarely if ever touches; sort of the proverbial “hot potato,” but I was pleasantly surprised that the debate was held on national radio.  The audience questions were predictable, with most of them favoring “a woman’s right to choose.”  One of the puzzling questions about this debate is that it never touches on who the unborn is – just an opinion on whether it should be permissible.  I say puzzling because, I will argue here that this is the only question that really matters in this debate:  What is the unborn?

If you answer the question of what is the unborn, you will have the correct answer on whether abortion is right or wrong.  If your answer is that the unborn is a human being then, there can be no answer other than that abortion can never be permitted because killing an innocent human being is not right and can never be permitted.  If your answer is that the unborn is not a human then you can justify abortion because you’re not killing a human being you are just removing tissue such as a liver or a piece of growth and so on.

None of the people calling in to the Michael Medved show ever hinted that what is involved in an abortion is a human being.  All the discussions centered on whether the law should be involved in regulating what most consider "a personal choice."  One woman called and challenged a person on the show who was anti-abortion.  The question to the pro-life person was “since you’re anti-abortion, have you ever adopted any children"?  I could not help but to throw my hands in the air and wonder how this question has any relevance to abortion.  Even pro-life defenders rarely mention the question of what is the unborn.

Scott Klusendorf, in his fine booklet Pro-Life 101: A Step-by Step Guide to Making your Case Persuasively, 1  gives an excellent example to illustrate this:  “Imagine you are at the sink washing dishes.  As you are scrubbing away, your child walks up behind you and asks, “Daddy (or Mommy), can I kill this?  What is the first thing you are going to ask him?  You can never answer the question Can I kill this?, unless you’ve answered a prior question:  What is it?"

Indeed this is the crucial question.   Most pro-choice advocates pretend that the unborn is not a human being.  They will go all out to deny the humanity of the unborn.  Peter Singer is a very well known professor at Princeton University who argues that an unborn is not a human and that human beings do not become humans until after birth.  We can argue here that the unborn is human, but this is akin to arguing that the black slave of the early 1800s was not a human, but property.  There is overwhelming evidence that the unborn is a human being.  Science confirms that life starts at conception, as I have pointed out in previous posts on this blog so I will not belabor the point any further here.

I want to pose a question to those of my friends who are pro-choice.  What do you say is the unborn?  If you say that the unborn is not human what is your evidence? “I don’t know” is not acceptable because there is plenty of evidence to what the unborn is if you just look and critically think about it.  What I’ve found is that the pro-choice person will not address this question. 

In my group of friends, I’ve often proposed that we have a debate on this issue.  Those of us who are pro-life would present our case, in say, 30 to 60 minutes and then those who are pro-choice could have the same amount of time to present their case.  No one on the pro-choice side wants to take this challenge; they respond by saying that this question is too controversial and don’t want to discuss it.

  1 Scott Klusendorf, Pro-Life 101: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Case Persuasively (Signal Hill, CA: Stand to Reason Press, 2002) p.7, to order a copy go to:  www.str.org