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| Pro-Choice Doesn’t Mean Pro-Abortion | Does pro-choice mean the same as pro-abortion? Actually, this is not just a question of terminology – this is how college students feel. They have inherited black-or-white labels, but though they call themselves “pro-choice”, their views are grayer than the label suggests.
They believe legal abortion is necessary, but they don’t exult in the procedure. They can’t imagine returning to coat hangers in back alleys, but they recoil when hardliners evaluate fetuses to benign tumors. They would rather see adoptions than abortions, but they don’t see people rushing to adopt babies with genetic diseases and drug defects. They defend the right to choose, while hoping they will never need to exercise it. Yet abortion itself seems a cause for soul-searching, not celebration.
Pro-choice language doesn’t admit these misgivings, as though pro-choice supporters can’t deceive any respect for fetuses without sliding down a slippery slope toward pro-life views. There is a tension between what they say and what they feel, and if the pro-choice movement wants to recover support, it needs to resolve that tension. In place of continually proclaiming and celebrating the right to choose, pro-choice leaders need to emphasize the moral seriousness of the choice itself.
In place of disobediently insisting that there is nothing wrong with abortion, they should distinguish the suffering that having an abortion entails. By acknowledging that most women would rather not choose to have abortions, pro-choice leaders would make less harsh both mothers who do abort and the pro-choice movement on the whole.
Such a move in oratory demands a closer look at the fetus. Considering that the fetus is not yet a person is central to the pro-choice argument, but believing fetuses lack all moral value is not. To college students, the fetus is neither a person to be privileged over a mother, nor ordinary tissue to be casually thrown aside – and pro-choice arguments need to account for this. Though pro-choice advocates don’t view abortion as murder, we could at least recognize that abortions end the potential for human life.
If the fetus is neither “person” nor “discardable cell mass”, perhaps pro-choice arguments could consider the fetus as a third entity, more like an essential organ. The law, for instance, allows a woman to drink until her liver fails, however society will discourage her, remind her about the reality of her actions and effort to offer alternatives. Society recognizes the moral gravity in allowing a woman to end her life by abusing her liver, yet it protects her right to make an educated choice.
In the same way the pro-choice movement could protect a woman’s right to choose, while recognizing the moral gravity in allowing her to prevent potential life by aborting her fetus. Though she must be always ensured to have an access to safe abortion clinics, special trained people could also offer counseling and help her consider adoption whenever possible. By allowing the fetus to be a sort of “in-between” entity, we could advocate protecting both the fetus and its mother’s rights, and maternal and fetal interests would once more be intertwined.
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