Many people invoke the sanctity of a human right to life from fertilization to birth. Therefore, there should be absolutely no induced abortions. Others allow early abortions in the case of rape, incest or extreme circumstances, but also promote the sanctity of human rights.
Where do we get the idea of the sanctity of human rights? If religious conservatives want to use the Bible as a guide, they won’t get much help from its pages. Abortion foes may evoke the 6th Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” Actually that meant you shall not murder fellow Hebrews, but you can kill heretics, law violators and people of other nations. The Bible is full of wars and genocides abetted or committed by the Biblical God.
The Noachian Flood that killed millions of men, women, children and babies, except Noah, his family, and selected animals, was genocide on a massive scale. A certain percentage of the women would have been pregnant and their fetuses destroyed. Fortunately, the Flood story is mythology. According to various passages in the Bible, God ordered his chosen armies to invade neighboring countries and slaughter everyone; a significant proportion of these women would have been pregnant.
A miscarriage is a natural abortion and there are more that 20 million natural abortions worldwide in a year. Assuming this rate, there would have been around 200,000,000 in just the last 10 years. Every 24 hours 15,000 children die of disease or famine.
Many of the world’s religions show little regard for the sanctity of human rights. Religion has been involved in frequent wars that have killed hundreds of millions of people. The Crusades, the Inquisition, fatwas, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, human sacrifice, burning of “witches,” suicide bombings, honor killings, mass shootings, and millions of slaves perishing on the journey to the Americas are other examples of disregard for human rights to life.
The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people every year. By some estimates, the Spanish Conquistadors slaughtered up to 8 million native inhabitants of South and Central America. In North America, Europeans were responsible for the deaths of about 12 million Indigenous people from violence or disease between 1492 and 1900. There must have been hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of pregnant women killed.
Since all things were purportedly created by the Biblical God, this deity is responsible for all the deadly diseases that caused suffering and death to millions of people since time immemorial, including many women who were pregnant.
Modern humans have tried to produce human flourishing by trying to extend the sanctity of life to all of humanity, but this has had limited success since violence and wars seem to continue unabated. Any alien visiting from another star system would conclude there’s no apparent sanctity for human life on our planet.
Again, where do we get the idea of the sanctity of a human right to life? It appears that it has evolved out of the instinct of motherly love along with benevolence, altruism, and tribal rules to allow the clan to thrive. Without this, human tribes would have been removed from the gene pool, and the human species would never have survived.
Almost everyone agrees that late-term abortions should be permitted when the life of the mother is in jeopardy. Others agree that an unwanted pregnancy caused by rape or incest shouldn’t be foisted upon a woman. Also, fetuses with severe conditions, such as having no brain, or an ectopic pregnancy, could be aborted. Consider a pre-teen girl who becomes pregnant because of naiveté; should she be required to carry the fetus to birth? Of course not. These are just a few examples where pragmatism is needed to determine whether to have an abortion.
The idea of the sanctity of human rights to life doesn’t seem to have any supernatural God-given mandate or natural law injunction. There’s no final answer whether abortion is moral or right, only opinion, and self-righteous religious beliefs should not be imposed upon a pregnant woman. It should be up to the woman herself to decide whether she should follow through with the termination.
David Keranen is a retired Bakersfield College professor.
