The government of South Dakota has thrown down the constitutional gauntlet.

My thoughts and feelings concerning abortion are complex. I apologize for going over well-worn ground here, but I’d like to take a moment to examine where I stand. I used to subscribe to a “consistent life ethic.” That is, I valued life in such a way as to alienate people across the political spectrum: I was against any sort of violence against human life: abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and war (I even made Christine Todd Whitman angry by confronting her on abortion when she spoke at the Nixon library years ago).

While the value of human life is still at the foundation of my ethics, my stance on abortion (and euthanasia, but I’ll save that for another post) has softened. I used to think that human potential was at the basis of my anti-abortion ethic, but I realized that there is a qualitative difference between a newly fertilized egg, the attachment of the blastocyst to the uterine wall, a developing embryo, the non-sentient fetus, and the fully-viable and sentient baby in the womb. At each stage, the humanity of that complex mass of life increases. But I don’t see the new zygote as the moral equivalent of a human being. I believe it reaches that moral equivalency before birth (at viability perhaps?), but the process is gradual.

As far as I know, no woman gets pregnant to have an abortion. I think that it is seen by most of those who do make the choice as an unhappy (and often traumatizing) choice–they would prefer not to be pregnant in the first place. It pisses me off when the groups that are most stridently anti-abortion are also so anti-contraception and anti- public sex education. If they’re so against abortion, then help give women the tools and knowledge to prevent it!

At the moment, I don’t seem to fit on either camp of the highly polarized abortion debate. The closer to conception, the more the issue is about the choice of the pregnant woman. The closer to birth, the more the issue involves a two human beings, and the greater the moral and legal consideration that needs to be given to the lives of both mother and child. I’m trudging through the murky gray middle, and I suspect that most Americans are doing the same. Abortion is a sad, sad necessity. Anyone want to help me work through this?

Here’s a couple of links :

Abortion in Utah: Salt Lake City Weekly - The Parent Trap

Required Reading: Abortion manual for South Dakota women