Faith in hiding: are there secular grounds for banning abortion?
The Humanist › Vol. 67 Nbr. 4, July 2007
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Faith in hiding: are there secular grounds for banning abortion?
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE asserts our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but conflicts between these rights are commonplace. The extreme pro-life, anti-abortion position states that if there's a conflict between an embryo's right to life and the liberty of adults, for instance a woman's freedom to terminate pregnancy, life always trumps liberty.
Pro-choice advocates obviously believe otherwise. What, they ask, establishes the overriding value attached to a newly fertilized ovum that requires women to bear the children of rapists, and to possibly sacrifice their health and life opportunities to raise an unwanted child? Why should the continued existence of an insentient group of cells have priority over the interests of a woman? The pro-life answer--their basic argument against abortion (and embryonic stem cell research)--is straightforward: embryos, babies, children, and adults are all stages of human life. All these stages are equally alive, they all are human, and therefore, the reasoning goes, all have equal worth. But a...See the full content of this document
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