Some thoughts on abortion

One night about fifteen years ago, my girlfriend at the time was freaking out because she was like two days late.  There was a drug store a couple blocks from her apartment, but she didn’t want to go there because her mother’s friend worked there and she didn’t want her parents to think she was pregnant.  So I drove to the drug store across town and bought a pregnancy test.  She took it, and it came up negative.  But since she had read that the tests are more accurate in the mornings, I had to go back and buy a second test.  And the next morning that too was negative.  And she got her period like two days later.

Even after the first test she was still uneasy.  And she said that if she was pregnant she was getting an abortion.  Part of it was because she had some medical issues that could be inherited, and she had struggled with them all her life and she wouldn’t wish them on anyone, let alone a baby.  Also, she was on four or five medicines for these issues, and I think all of them had the side effect of severe birth defects.  So her choices other than abortion were to stay on the medicines, and either miscarry or have a kid with severe health problems, hope that after years of fine tuning her medicines her doctors could quickly switch her to safer meds, or just stop taking these medications that helped her live a semi-normal life.  And even if she managed to get through the pregnancy and had a healthy baby, neither of us were parent material, and we really shouldn’t have been a couple to begin with.

If she had been pregnant and went ahead with the abortion, I would have helped her.  I would have driven her to it, paid for it, and done whatever she needed.  But I was 95% certain that she wasn’t pregnant.  First off, we always used protection, but also because of her medication she had an erratic menstrual cycle.  I wanted to ask how she could be two days late when her cycle was erratic, but I knew better. 

That is the closest I have been to the abortion issue.  But it was a choice I didn’t have to make, so my thoughts on what I would have done are all “in theory.”

If you had asked for my thoughts on abortion twenty-fivish years ago, I probably would have said that I was a militant pro-choicer.  Part of it was the simple idea that women should be able to control what happens with their bodies, but a big part was also that many of those against abortion were religious nuts who I had other issues with.  And if they were against something, well then I was pretty much for it.  The idea I came up with – and which I still agree with – is that the people who should decide if a woman has an abortion are: the woman, the father if possible, her doctor, her parents/guardian if she’s underage, and whoever she wants to talk to about it.  If there isn’t a politician or priest in that group, it’s none of their damn business. 

Now, one night about twenty or so years ago, I was thinking about clones.  Which is perfectly normal for someone interested in/writing science fiction.  Anyway, I wondered at what point in the cloning process could the person who donated the cells stop the procedure.  My idea was that you take some cells from a person, and put them in an artificial womb thing that then grows the clone over days or months or whatever.  And my initial idea was that as soon as the cells are put in the cloning machine, that’s it.  The clone is now another person and the donor can’t stop the process.  Which is great and all, but then I had to ask how that fit in with the old fashioned method of making new people. 

Some people claim that as soon as an egg is fertilized, that’s a new person.  I find that too simplistic an answer for such a complex issue.  The very rough answer that I’ve hammered out, focuses on … separate survivability, I guess you can call it.  As soon as a fetus/baby can survive outside of the mother, that in my view is when they are a new person.  But there isn’t a fixed line when that happens, and medical technology is always advancing.  (Did you really want some schmuck on the internet to just say “Babies are people at X weeks!” and accept that as an answer?)  For my clone idea, there is some machine that takes the cells and makes a new person out of them.  Even if those cells are stolen from someone, barring some machine breakdown, those cells will become a new person.  I don’t see this applying to regular procreation – even if the chance of some cells becoming a new person are the same – because women are people, and not just baby making machines.  If you drop your phone and the screen cracks, you get a new one.  If you drop a baby and there’s a crack, you don’t just get a new one.  We treat humans and machines differently. 

Now, if we had the medical technology that as soon as a woman found out she was pregnant she could go and have the ball of cells removed and put into some artificial womb that would then grow the baby, I would say that should replace abortion and terminating a pregnancy should be reserved for only the most extreme circumstances, like if the life of the mother is at risk.

Of course, if there were now all these babies coming out of artificial wombs, where would they go?  It’s not like we already have plenty of kids waiting to be adopted.  It seems like until that medical technology is fully developed, the best way to reduce abortions would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, through better education and increased use of contraceptives.  And of course, the religious nuts are against that too.