The Final Word on Abortion

Can a new thought experiment involving hypothetically joining the National Guard shed light on the abortion debate?

With most issues, there is a middle ground, somewhere Americans can agree to meet for a compromise. For example, capitalists and socialists do not have much in common as far as economics, but, in the United States, they can come together and both be mildly satisfied with an American economic system that combines a largely capitalist economy with certain redistributive policies favored by advocates of wealth equality. With abortion, there is little middle ground. One side must be right, and the other side must be wrong. Either you believe abortion constitutes killing or you do not.

To address the most polarizing issue of our time, we must first answer this question: Is a fetus a human life or not? If it isn’t a life, then this will be a brief discussion. However, if it is a life, we must then determine whether there are any circumstances where it becomes acceptable to take the life of another human being in order to fulfill a competing priority: like a woman’s interest in not carrying a fetus to term, at considerable effort and expense, if she prefers not to.

From conception, however, the fetus has a complete human genome and the potential to become an adult, autonomous human, should the fetus be left undisturbed to mature. Nobody else in the world will ever have the same DNA as any one fetus. After just three weeks, it has a heartbeat, often beating with a different blood type from that of the mother. At two months, the fetus can turn its head, frown, and hiccup. At nine to ten weeks, teeth and fingernails are beginning to develop. Whatever it is, it is definitely human. But is it alive?

People have created many ways to define life. Criteria favored by the pro-choice camp for determining whether the fetus is “alive” range from viability to higher standards such as the ability for the fetus to desire to continue living or to use language.