Why It's Hard for Me to Get On Board with the Pro-Life Movement

Few topics in politics get as heated as abortion, and the Church is pretty clear about its policy on the matter. Why, then, do I find it hard to get on board with the Pro-Life movement?

Before I jump into my list, I should stipulate that I don't follow the issue closely, and I'm not steeped in the various legal nuances. I'm just giving my perspective as a regular guy who happens to also be a Mormon and a scientist. Also, I said that the Church's position on the matter is pretty clear, but let's make it explicit. The Church opposes abortion but recognizes three classes of exceptions, as stated in Handbook 2:

The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience. Members must not submit to, perform, arrange for, pay for, consent to, or encourage an abortion. The only possible exceptions are when:

1. Pregnancy resulted from forcible rape or incest.
2. A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy.
3. A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.

Even these exceptions do not justify abortion automatically. Abortion is a most serious matter and should be considered only after the persons responsible have consulted with their bishops and received divine confirmation through prayer.

I support the Church's position, while recognizing that in a diverse society there will be disagreement about where the line of acceptability should be drawn. Nevertheless, I believe that any public policy regarding abortion must at least accommodate these exceptions. With that as background, here is my list:

1. Insufficient confidence that the exceptions above will be respected: In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, several of the candidates expressed opposition to one or more of these exceptions, and this hard-line stance seems to represent that of an increasingly militant pro-life movement. It's fine and dandy to debate these exceptions as abstract concepts, but it becomes serious business when they apply to you or a loved one. The moment a proposed law or legal interpretation significantly impinges on the exceptions above, I'm out.

2. Giving embryos personhood status: Many pro-life activists would like to grant embryos legal protection as persons, and have attempted to do so through ballot measures. This seems to be as much a legal strategy as an expression of belief. If you can get the law to recognize a fertilized egg as a person with rights, then the very concept of abortion becomes much more difficult because now that 'person' has just as much legal protection as anybody else. It has a certain attractive simplicity to it. Every person was once an embryo, therefore every embryo is a person. However, I don't believe this is defensible on scientific or practical grounds [1], and it would lead to all manner of absurdities. Also, see number 1 above: How do the exceptions work if an embryo is legally recognized as a person?

3. Animus toward birth control: Obsession with the well-being of embryos leads easily to attacking contraception. Some people believe that if a birth control method prevents implantation or in any way disturbs a pre-implanted embryo, that it is tantamount to abortion. In this view, pretty much any hormonal or pharmaceutical form of birth control might cause abortion because, hey, can you be 100% sure an embryo was NOT disturbed, disrupted, or inhibited? (If you don't believe me, just Google "contraception abortion". The first result I got claims that hormonal contraception is abortifacient because the uterine wall becomes less receptive to implantation.) Such people are welcome to their belief, but in my mind this takes us back to absurdities because many embryos never implant and are naturally eliminated from the body, nevermind the medical conditions that are treated with hormonal contraception. Further, it is strange to me that people who abhor abortion wouldn't want the next easiest solution to be broadly available. Of course, if you re-define abortion to include the mechanisms of contraception, then I guess there's no difference. But I don't think most people equate the two, and such reasoning doesn't apply to other methods anyway. I recognize that some people have a religious objection to birth control (not the LDS Church, by the way), and I respect their right to refrain from using it. But the moment anti-abortion slips into anti-contraception, I'm out.

4. Animus toward research using fetal tissue: Organ donations save lives, and some people donate their bodies to science (e.g. anatomy labs). These things are generally viewed favorably [citation needed]. But for some reason, when tissue or cell lines are derived from a fetus, many people think an unholy line has been crossed. It would be wrong for women to get pregnant and/or abort just for the sake of science, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that we have laws against, say, paying people to donate their fetuses to science. But given that abortions and miscarriages do and will occur under the best of circumstances, why should it be taboo to use fetal tissue and cell lines for research purposes? It is a historical fact that some embryonic/fetal cell lines have played an important role in medical science, including production of vaccines. In fact, as irony would have it, the vaccine for rubella--a virus that damages fetuses--is grown in a cell line originally derived from an aborted fetus. I don't think that we should view fetal tissue research any differently than organ donation, which is to say that it is legitimate but governed by ethical constraints. As a side note, I'll mention here that the Church has twice stated that it has no position on embryonic stem cell research.

5. Late-term abortion scaremongering: Late-term abortions are not common and are almost universally for reasons covered in the exceptions above (see, for example, articles in Forbes and USA Today). As you might guess, this very assertion is a matter of contention. Nevertheless, 43 states have laws governing late-term abortions. I'm fine with limitations on late-term abortions as long as the exemptions are respected, but the issue seems to be more of a political and cultural rallying point than one of substantive public need [2].

6. Abortion as the axis of politics: Public polling shows that most Americans think that abortion laws should not be absolute (for or against). And yet, the issue has polarized political parties to the point that candidates must increasingly pass purity tests to be acceptable, and many people feel that their vote for a candidate of a particular party translates directly to a vote for or against abortion rights and defines which side of a culture war they are on. This is not healthy for our society. Pro-life nitwits are not preferable to competent pro-choice candidates or vice versa.

So that, in a nutshell, is why I can't fully align with the pro-life movement, in spite of being a Mormon [3]. Does that make me pro-choice instead? I don't think I easily fit in either category, probably like most of America. Maybe we need to make another category.


Notes:
1. What do you mean it's not scientifically defensible? Fertilization brings together a complete genome. Therefore a unique individual--or person--now exists. Sure, but there is still an opportunity for twining, or formation of chimeras. Or it might fail to develop further. So a fertilized egg can represent the beginning of somewhere between zero and multiple persons (in the normal sense of the word).

2. Surely, the number of women who carry a fetus past 20 weeks and then decide to get an abortion of convenience must be dwarfed by those who have made it to 20 weeks only to face serious and heartrending problems.

3. I'm being a little ironic here. Many people (including some Mormons) think that the Church's positions line right up with the pro-life movement. But aside from its opposition to abortions of convenience, there's not as much overlap as one might think, as I've hinted at along the way.

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