I recently stumbled across Youtube videographer gothatfunk’s video “Questions for Opponents of Abortion.” I found it refreshing. Obviously I disagree with his pro-choice stance, but I can appreciate that he actually wanted to talk about the issue. He was not interested in demonizing me or calling me names. He wanted to know what I, as someone who is against abortion, think about several serious questions that would be issues of public policy should abortion be criminalized. He also wanted to know how abortion fit in the wider constellation of my sexual mores. These are fair questions, ones that pro-lifers should think about.
Gothatfunk invited video responses, but I don’t do those. I don’t know how and, to be honest, I thought I would come across very poorly onscreen. I am a much better writer than talking head. I find clips of the few times I have been interviewed for television very difficult to watch. Here is gotthatfunk’s video. I have transcribed his questions below not quite perfectly, but I think you’ll agree my edits don’t distort his meaning. (If you think I’ve made a mistake somewhere, kindly point it out.) It’s just that audio and written aren’t perfectly commensurable formats.
I have included my own answers which you may find interesting. Included in my answers are some questions of my own that I hope other pro-lifers might be able to help me with. Overarchingly, I am interested in hearing from people who have knowledge about countries where abortion is illegal. It seems to me that the first thing to do when asking questions about what it would look like if abortion were to be criminalized is to look at places where it is criminalized. I am no expert in that area and gothatfunk seems not to have considered it at all. Input here would be most welcome.
You are, of course, encourged to post your own answers to gothatfunk. I want to warn you, however, that I am going to keep this thread strictly on topic. We are talking about gothatfunk’s questions, not about the question of abortion generally or about which political parties are liars and which are dirty liars.
1. To what extent do you oppose abortion?
a) You oppose abortion under all circumstances.
b) You oppose abortion under all circumstance except where the life of the woman carrying the baby is in jeopardy.
c) You oppose abortion in all circumstances except where the mother’s life is in jeopardy and/or the pregnancy is a result of incest or rape.
d) You only oppose abortion after a certain period of pregnancy has gone by. (Pick your own number.)
I’m gonna say a) with a tiny side of b). Because I think an unborn child is just as much a human person as you or me, I personally oppose abortion in all circumstances. I recognize, however, that there are terrible ambiguous situations where innocent people die. I am not sure Catholics can try to pass a law that says, “In terrible situations where only one life can be saved, both must be forfeit.” We can practice that ourselves if we think it is true, but that’s a tough one to enforce legally. (In other words, I don’t find the claim that a foetus is a human person with inalienable rights to be a religious position that cannot be enforced on a pluralistic society. But it seems to me that the claim that the woman must forfeit her life in order to avoid killing an innocent person, even if that innocent person will die anyway, probably is a religious position that cannot be imposed on people who don’t hold it. That doesn’t mean I think it is wrong any more than it means I think the Trinity is a bad idea. It’s just not an idea you can enforce with the power of the state.) If the only abortions in a country were the ones that genuinely save a woman’s life, we’d be in a much better situation culturally than we are now.
I do recognize, however, that creating a “life of the mother” clause in abortion legislation can lead to rampant abuse of that clause. I would not want people who have no problem with abortion generally to be the ones making the decisions about which cases actually constitute a genuine threat to the mother’s life.
I know that there are all kinds of troubling things that arise here. But the world is a troubling place. Ambiguity is not a reason for complacence.
2. “The only surefire, guaranteed method of preventing an unwanted pregnancy is to abstain from sexual intercourse. The same is true for men as it is for women . . . Sometimes contraception fails, which is one of the reasons sometimes people get abortions.”
Amen.
3. Would you support laws that make non-procreative sex illegal? How could such a law be enforced?
No, I would not. For one thing, I don’t think it could be enforced. For another, it’s not clear to me that there is anything wrong with sex that doesn’t make a baby. I think we should culturally encourage people not to have sex until they are in a position to accept a baby, but that doesn’t mean making all sex that doesn’t make a baby illegal. You can have sex with your partner not intending a baby as long as, should a baby result despite your best efforts, you don’t kill it. After all, you were aware that sex leads to babies. You knew what you were doing.
4. Have you personally ever had sexual intercourse without the intention of causing a pregnancy?
At least twice. 😉
5. Do you think abortion is murder? Or do you think abortion is a crime in and of it’s own right but a lesser crime than murder? . . . Is it equal to killing a fully formed adult who has lead a life of whatever number of years? [And not manslaughter which is accidental.]
Objectively, I think abortion is murder. It seems to me that in most cases there will be circumstances that make it less than first-degree murder. This is the same, of course, as many killings of people outside the womb. Each case will have its own special set of circumstances to be sorted through by the legal system.
Objectively, I think it is the same as killing an adult. Subjectively, I think each killing of an adult is different, so I have no problem saying that an abortion will be subjectively different from killing an adult. In fact, I think each abortion will be subjectively different from each other abortion.
6. If you think abortion is murder, by definition, it would be premeditated and therefore it would be a first-degree murder. But who gets charged with the murder? The person who performs abortion or the woman who seeks an abortion?
It may well be first-degree murder in many cases, though, as I said above, I’m not certain it will be in every case. Many people who kill adults don’t get a first-degree murder rap for any number of reasons. I think the same would be true if abortion were illegal.
As to who gets charged, it looks an awful lot to me like hiring a hitman. I think that that would be a useful place to start. What kinds of laws do states have about hiring a hitman? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’d be interested to hear from someone who does. Maybe that wouldn’t be a workable solution for reasons I haven’t considered, but I think it’s worth thinking about.
7. Should the penalty for abortion, for whoever is determined to be the murderer, . . . be exactly the same as it is for first-degree murder? Potentially life in prison and/or execution?
If the abortion is determined by a court to have been a first-degree murder, then yes. If not, then no. I’m thinking now in terms of the actual killer, i.e., the abortion doctor.
However, I should add that I am totally opposed to the death penalty unless there is no other way to protect the public. I think an abortionist behind bars is no threat. Even once released, I think our society is perfectly capable of ensuring he doesn’t do any more abortions. There is no reason to kill another person.
8. Who is an accessory? Is the woman seeking an abortion an accessory to murder or is she the murderer? Is her doctor [not the abortionist] who knows she’s pregnant, who tells her she’s pregnant – and she says that she can’t keep the baby – is he now an accessory if he doesn’t report her? What about the partner, husband, or boyfriend or other family members or friends, if they don’t report her as intending to have an abortion, and she has one, do they become accessories to the murder?
I think that in a huge number of cases the partner/boyfriend/husband was so much an accomplice that the courts would not find the woman guilty of first degree hitman hiring. The pressure by men on women who wouldn’t want an abortion if the father was willing to support her and the child is a major cause of abortion. I would come down hard on men who could be shown to have coerced their partners into abortion. I’m not big on long prison sentences unless they are necessary to protect the public or can be shown to be a major deterrent. In this case, both those factors might come into play.
As for other accessories, i.e., people who knew the woman was going to have an abortion, I’ll admit that that is a very tough question. It seems to me that the doctor was just doing his job and should have the kind of immunity that a priest has in the confessional. As for friends and family who know about it and keep quiet, it seems they are accessories in some sense, though I don’t know enough about law to know what normally happens to accomplices in such cases. I would think that such ‘accessories’ would be in an extremely trying situation psychologically and are consequently often treated leniently by the courts. Anyone know more about this than I?
9. If you think that abortion is murder, should capital punishment be a possible punishment for that? If you think abortion is a crime in it’s own right but lesser than murder somehow, what punishments do you think would be appropriate for that lesser crime? What number of years incarceration would you find justified?
Again, I am against capital punishment. I don’t think that helps anyone. For the abortionist, I think that they should get the same as the hitman – the one difference being that hitmen are probably a lot harder to keep track of once their sentences are up than abortionists, but maybe I just watch too many movies. Maybe real life hitmen don’t all have the skill sets of ex-marines and international spies.
For the woman, I think there would be a huge range here. I think it would rarely be the case that a woman could be found guilty of first degree hitman hiring. I think that in most cases incarceration wouldn’t be much help. Most post-abortive women probably need to be cared for more than punished, though there may be rare exceptions. I would support the government giving money to groups (probably usually Church groups) to run programs, even homes, for post-abortive women.
I should note that this is in line with my thinking on criminal justice generally. Most criminals need care rather than punishment, white-collar crime being more exceptional here. There are cases where incarceration is needed to protect the public, but post-abortive women (especially one-time offenders) don’t strike me as one of those.
10. Would you say it would be reasonable to investigate women who have a miscarriage as possibly having had an abortion? Would it be fair to say that every miscarriage makes you an abortion suspect? If so, why? If not, why not?
Absolutely not. Miscarriage is so common it is not even remotely reasonable, let alone practical. I would not conduct an investigation on euthanasia for every terminally ill person who dies. So once in a blue moon someone gets away with an abortion (or euthanasia) because we cannot possibly investigate every death of a person who is in a very fragile state to start with? We live in a broken world. We’ll have to live with that.
On top of that, and maybe even more importantly, treating women who are already suffering from the loss of a child as potential criminals strikes me as inhumane.
11. Will you support forced sterilization for a woman who is convicted of having more than one abortion?
Absolutely not. She has been hurt enough. She needs to be cared for, not mutilated.
12. If women are unable to obtain a legal abortion, would you, personally, be prepared to adopt the unwanted baby if the woman was forced by law to carry it to full term?
Absolutely. My wife once had a coworker whose little sister was about to have an abortion. We decided to offer to adopt the baby if she would carry it to term, but before my wife could be in touch with her coworker it was too late. I told several friends about this situation and most of them said they would do the same thing. Others knew of infertile couples who would happily adopt the child. I don’t know how many children we could take in. Obviously I couldn’t adopt hundreds of thousands of kids, but 6 doesn’t strike me as impossible. I really don’t think this is a problem at all. I think the pro-life community could definitely make room for the millions of children who would potentially be up for adoption. I also suspect that many mothers would decide to keep their babies once they saw them. They might even decide to do so well before that.
13. If not, would you personally support the baby after it was carried to full term being put into an orphanage until such time as it was able to be homed by a family? If that’s the case, would you be prepared to have to pay extra taxes so that the government could fund the (abortion) orphanages?
I’m not entirely sure what the first question is asking, but since I didn’t answer “no” to the preceding question, maybe it doesn’t apply to me. In any case, I believe orphanages are better than morgues and families are better than orphanages.
I would happily pay taxes to provide for orphanages or support heroic families who adopt numerous children in this situation. I pay taxes for a lot of things that offend me far more than raising kids.
14. Similarly, would you be prepared to pay extra taxes to fund the extra prisons that we would need to house the doctors and the women and the accomplices who are convicted of being involved in an abortion? We’re talking about years of incarceration here, times multiple people for every abortion. We’re gonna need more prison space, and that money has got to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from your taxes, where should it come from?
I’d be interested in hearing what the expected costs here would be. There are numerous countries where abortion is illegal. What kind of legal and penal costs does abortion amount to in Ireland, Chile and Poland? Does anybody know?
In any case, I would be happy to pay extra taxes if they were necessary. But I suspect that once you got the few underground abortionists off the street, there wouldn’t be too many others to put in prison. If we spent more money on caring for women in tough situations, made coercing a woman into abortion illegal, and shut down the abortionists, I don’t think we’d need a huge amount more prison space. I don’t think we’d actually be incarcerating 3 people per abortion for multiple years at the current rate of abortion, which seems to be the premise of this question.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.
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