And
end this night,
if it be your will.
Leonard Cohen.
I
do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed
us with sense, reason,
and intellect has intended us to forgo
their use.
Galileo
Making
the option of abortion available under the law is what makes
us human. Refusing the option, criminalizing it is animal.
The
principle that validates the above proposition is derived
from a precedent this small essay dedicates itself to unfolding.
The
argument we most often hear from anti-abortion advocates is
the procedure is tantamount to “the killing of innocents.”
Well of course they are innocent; they’re not born yet.
In fact the fetus doesn’t even breathe until it is born.
What the fetus and dead people have in common is they don’t
breathe.
Both
pro-lifers and pro-choicers formulate their positions by arguing
from a moral perspective. The former cites abortion as a trespassing
of God’s will or violating the sanctity of life. The
latter cites the sanctity of individual rights, and the right
of the individual to determine what happens to or inside one’s
body.
However,
we note that both pro-lifers and pro-choicers are on the same
page as it concerns my unalienable right to subject my body
to pain (participating in the Iron Man triathalon or an S
& M session), or to sacrifice a kidney for a loved one,
just as they would not deny me the right to prohibit someone
from harming my body in any way. The consensus derives from
the understanding that, as an inviolable principle, the individual
is sovereign over his/her body.
What
distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other forms of life is
sentience, the ability to think and reason. When our understanding
concludes that allowing nature to take its course is antithetical
to a desired outcome, we are uniquely able to refuse what
instinct bids. I want to bludgeon my neighbour who opens up
his drum kit at 3 am in the morning every mourning, but reason
tells me that this justifiable homicide will result in a lengthy
incarceration, so I refuse what my nature begs and return
the automatic hand gun purchased without a background check
to an unlocked bottom drawer.
With
very few exceptions in the world, it is the state that decides
on the age when a youth is deemed mature enough to be recognized
as an adult. At that decisive turning, the new adult acquires
both the privileges and responsibilities attendant to adulthood;
he/she can now make final decisions on matters that range
from choosing a marriage partner, place of residence and career.
That age is typically between 16 and 18, and in certain jurisdictions,
in respect to the purchase of alcohol and/or cannabis, 21.
I know of no authority, elected or otherwise, that grants
adulthood to 14-year-olds. The legislators of the world have
unanimously concluded that under-aged persons are best served
leaving the significant decisions in their life to a mature
adult/parent. A 10-year-old hates going to the dentist for
an annual checkup; the parent overrules the child’s
clamouring in consideration of optimal dental health.
At
some critical point in his evolution, man grasped that if
society is to properly function, there has to be in place
enforceable laws that place restrictions on human behaviour.
This critical insight would not have been possible if man
didn’t possess (and employ) his faculties of judgment.
It is this same faculty (intelligence) that is responsible
for all the civilizational advancements we enjoy: the miracles
of modern medicine, the marvels of aviation, state-of-the-art
communication technology etc. Theist and atheist, pro-lifer
and pro-choicer, would agree that intelligence, the ability
to think and reason, is sacrosanct, is man’s single
greatest attribute. There is no human population that does
not exploit this remarkable faculty, because we are human
-- and not animal. When we formulate a Commandment or law,
we are granting human intelligence the right to intervene,
to interrupt to overcall the primordial promptings of human
nature. My untamed nature bids me to covet this man’s
wife and/or pecuniary advantage; the law, underwritten by
human intelligence, proscribes it.
All
cultures grant supremacy to intelligence, the exercising of
which has 
resulted
in the consensus that parents (adults) are best positioned
to make the best decisions as it concerns the well-being of
their children -- except in the US and 25 other countries
when their 14-year-old becomes pregnant; even though the pro-lifer,
at the bidding of his intelligence, has already acknowledged
that adult parents are best qualified to make all the major
decisions on behalf of their children. And this also holds
true for the God-fearing, for whom trespassing God’s
will -- that man shall employ his intelligence -- subtends
theological consequences.
In
refusing the 14-year-old the right to abort, the believer
has somehow persuaded himself that with impunity he can overrule
the will of God who has not only instilled in him intelligence
but willed him to use it. Even if this same 14-year-old has
been raped or sexually abused by a friendly relative, pro-lifers
believe nature should be allowed to take its course, which
is what happens in every animal population. Notwithstanding
that children who have children do not make good parents,
that the off-spring of child mothers will be beset with personal
problems for their entire lives, the burden of which society
must carry, pro-lifers vehemently argue that as it concerns
abortion rights, animal intelligence (code for dumb nature)
should take precedent over human intelligence.
This position, this inconsistency, results in the following
antinomy. On the one hand, pro-lifers grant supremacy to human
intelligence, a supremacy that is expressed through the exercising
of it, meaning not to use it is to either contravene God’s
will, and/or render nul and void man’s most valuable
resource, while on the other hand they argue that as it concerns
child and teen pregnancy, human intelligence should not be
allowed to intervene, that nature is supreme.
Since
we can’t have it both ways, we look to a higher authority
for guidance. In the United States, that would be the wisest
nine that sit on the Supreme Court. In
its manifest wisdom, unabashedly flouting the principle of
consistency of application of human intelligence, the Supreme
Court ruled that nature should be the final arbiter as it
pertains to parents’ right to decide on whether or not
their 14-year-old should terminate pregnancy.
The
discomfiting message embedded in the court's decision to criminalize
abortion is that man is still very much a prisoner of his
animal heritage, and as such, remains his own greatest enigma.
We
know that human intelligence can be twisted, cajoled into
accepting outrageous ideas that have no purchase in the real
world. It wasn’t so long ago that the medicine man or
shaman proposed that thunder and lightening were messages
from the angry gods, that human sacrifice would appease them.
If meteorology, that is human intelligence, put an end to
that bloody hocus pocus, we ask, we beg what will finally
put an end to the abortion debacle?
The
status of inviolability subsumed in a principle is founded
on the rationale that you can’t have it both ways. We
cannot say that being virtuous is its own reward and is not.
We cannot grant supremacy to Homo sapiens because of his intelligence
and then tell either the parent of a 14-year-old or the child
herself, who might have been brutally raped by an enemy soldier,
that they cannot recourse that same intelligence in deciding
on whether or not to terminate pregnancy. We either allow
the faculty of intelligence to intervene in human affairs
or we don’t. We are either human or animal but not both.
What is at stake in the abortion debate is the role, as first
principle, of intelligence in the affairs of man. Even though
man's superior brain has made it possible to create civilizations
that would have been unimaginable a mere 500 years ago, mankind
is still not mindful enough to grant this unique intelligence
its supremacy in ‘all’ matters related to serving
the best interests of the race. “Man is a zoological
group of sentient rather than sapient beings, characterized
by a brain so large that he uses rather little of it . . .
and we cannot expect too much of a learned power placed in
opposition to instinct,” observes Robert Ardrey.
Man’s
glory, his magnificence, his very special place among all
the living creatures in the world is owed to his intelligence,
his ability to think and reason. His stoops to mediocrity
when he forfeits it to his baser animal instincts.
I
propose that the only war man should be waging is the one
against his nature, against the inner animal that is more
than holding its own in the blood strewn fields of human endeavour.
