Yesterday, while I was killing time waiting for my shift at work to be over, 
I read the opinion page of the newspaper. My hometown newspaper has the 
dubious distinction of being the most conservative paper in the country, and 
if my three loyal readers know anything about such trends, they can now 
figure out where I live.

One of the opinions there expressed was on that most divise of subjects: 
abortion. It  astonishes me that people can see this issue (or most others, 
for that matter) in such stark terms, and it has always baffled me why the 
folk who are against abortion are also against birth control. It seems 
obvious that the easiest way to prevent an unwanted pregnancy is through 
protection, because ---REALITY CHECK--- people are not going to stop having 
sex.

It seems to me that the anti-abortion argument runs along two lines. One is 
that abortion equals murder, and we all agree that murder (at least in the 
general case) is bad. The other is that there are alternatives to abortion 
that should be pursued, such as adoption. Without exactly saying that the 
anti-abortion folk are entirely barking up the wrong tree, there are some 
serious flaws in those arguments.

The "murder is bad" argument is based on the idea that we are all born with 
the right to life. Which makes perfect sense if you buy into the scenario 
which says that we (and everything else) were created by some supreme deity 
or other, and that there's something special about us that gives us these 
inherent
rights. But if you don't start with this supposition, it's hard to find 
evidence that we are born with anything that resembles inherent rights. We 
don't even have the *right* to breathe. What we have is air and the machinery 
that allows us to breathe. Rights are social constructs, things that we make 
up
and grant to each other. It's kind of like a bargain: we agree to live by 
certain rules, and in exchange, we get certain goodies.

So we grant ourselves the right to live. But those folk who argue that 
abortion curtails this right for the unborn child fail to recognize that even 
with a sweeping right like that, there aren't any absolutes. If you plan to 
murder a man, down to the last detail, carry it out and are caught, the 
judicial system
in this country will find you guilty of violating the rights of the dead man, 
and depending on where you are tried, will either kill you or imprison you as 
punishment. If a man threatens you with a gun, even wounds you, and you kill 
him to protect your own life, we call that jusitfiable homicide, and tell you 
that you were lucky. But the first man isn't any more dead than the second. 
It's just that we say that in this case, where the rights of two people 
collided, we award yours more weight. I fail to see, however, how assigning 
the right to live to a child in utero in any way abrogates my right to 
control my body. This is a case where rights collide. We want to make a law 
which says that one right is supreme to the other. This is never going to be 
true in all circumstances. Never. There is no way to make a law which says, 
"You must not kill another person, except under the following conditions" 
because we cannot possibly envision all the conditions which might exist, and 
because extenuating circumstances do not make the dead person any less dead.

There are always going to be situations where rights collide. I used to think 
there wasn't anything particularly "bad" about abortion, though I didn't 
think it should be used as birth control, and I certainly never thought it 
should be undertaken lightly. But I do think that the anti-abortion folk have 
a point:
the purpose of aborting a healthy fetus is to kill it. I take exception to 
the term "pro-life" at least until there are a) no unwanted pregnancies and 
b) no children waiting for adoption and c) no children starving to death in 
the richest country in the world. Or in any country, for that matter. But I 
digress.

The anti-abortion folk would like you to believe that killing a fetus is the 
ultimate crime, because that fetus depends entirely on you for everything. 
They say, better to give it up for adoption. Is it? I suppose it might be, if 
you're talking about a perfectly healthy white baby. But the reality is that 
adoption is a difficult, expensive process, and there are far too many 
children who spend their lives bouncing from one foster home to another, 
burdened with the knowledge that no one wants them. If the right-to-lifers 
would bend their energies towards making sure that no child ever found 
themselves in that position, I would be much more willing to lend credence to 
their vitriolic assurances that abortion is the greatest evil. There are many 
ways to kill a child, and very few of them involve a doctor's office. 
"Abortion stops a beating heart," say their bumper stickers. So do 
malnutrition, belt buckles, guns, knives, lead paint, bleach, cars, baseball 
bats, battery acid, and drugs. Until "pro-life" means that the alternatives 
to abortion are all healthy and happy, their argument remains ultimately 
specious.