Dialogue: Indifference to fragile new life is just human nature

I recently had the pleasure of reading an Atlantic Monthly piece in which the writer, a prudent, pro-choice woman, argued that nobody (and she included our Christian friends here) really believes that an embryo of fewer than three months' gestation is a complete human being.

The truth of this, she argued, may be found in the language that the Great Unwashed uses to describe pregnancy.

More specifically - and more graphically, if I may - the truth may be found in the language that the Great Unwashed uses to describe a pregnancy that ends in the death of the foetus.

If the foetus is lost early on in a pregnancy, the incident is described as a miscarriage. If the foetus is lost a little further down the line - say, six or seven months into a pregnancy - the incident is described as a stillbirth.

The term chosen to describe a lost foetus depends pretty heavily on the foetus' point of gestation.

The point, then, is that the fact that different terms are used to describe the loss of a foetus at different points of gestation strongly suggests that the average punter has always recognised that there are fundamental differences between, say, an 8-week-old foetus and an 8-month-old foetus. The latter is understood to be somehow more human, and, if we're to be completely honest, a greater loss to the species than the first.

At the very least, the language ought to disabuse pro-lifers of the rather tiresome notion that a foetus ought to be thought of as a complete human being at each stage of its development. In fact, as the pro-abortion crew often rightly observes, anyone who tries to push any other line comes off looking absurd. For instance, you would worry about anyone who tried to describe a very early miscarriage as a stillbirth.

Likewise, anyone who described the stillbirth of an 8-month-old foetus as a miscarriage would be given the serious go-by.

The truth is in the language. And the truth is that it's not in the natural order of things to get all romantic about the rights and relevance of a just-formed zygote - which explains why even dedicated anti-abortionists have never quite managed to get the contrary argument to fly.

Basically, the collective doesn't start feeling romantic about new life until that new life starts looking and acting human - which is at about three or four months into proceedings.

May I say also that I suspect that God himself programmed in this indifference, and then gave us the words that would best describe its various stages. I suspect he programmed in these rather ambiguous feelings about new life in order to keep us humble, to remind us that human life is actually quite precarious. I'm sure it's all part of the master plan.

So, bring on your RU-486, people. Let's have buckets of it. It's time to concede that it is quite human to feel extremely ambiguous about the significance of new life.

It is also time to concede that people who feel ambiguous about the significance of new life have every right to terminate that new life as cleanly and quickly as possible if that is what they want.

New life is not quite as precious or important or as relevant as we, in our arrogance, like to make out. New life doesn't touch everybody to quite the extent that everyone else likes to pretend.

I'll tell you how I came to this conclusion: it occurred to me recently that although almost every woman I know has had an abortion (and often more than one), they never talk about it.

It's not that they are ashamed of it (there are not, after all, too many limits in female conversation - most subjects pertaining to the body are eagerly canvassed and revisited thousands of times). It is simply not on people's minds.

Nobody ever says anything along the lines of: "The baby would have been born today" or "Today is the anniversary of my abortion" or "I think that guy over there is the one who got me pregnant the first time."

There is nothing stopping people bringing up the subject of abortion if they want to. They never do, so I can only conclude that they are not troubled by it. So, it seems to me that there is no moral dilemma when it comes to disposing of new life; no one today even bothers to finds words for it.