Guilty of Murder?

Day and Night in the Abortion Debate

Some would say that a decade ago I murdered thirteen human beings.

My wife and I were trying to have a child. Owing to my past battle with cancer, we started down the challenging (and expensive) road of pregnancy by IVF. The day our fertility doctor told us we had thirteen viable embryos, I was elated. Becoming a father was the greatest desire of my life. A solemn thrill surged through my body.

How quickly the greatest moments of life can turn into their opposite. A few months later, after a pregnancy test came back negative, my wife decided she wanted her life to go in a different direction. She wanted to end our marriage.

We divorced, and she signed over to me custody of the embryos. For a couple of years, I clung to hopes that some future wife might carry one of those embryos to term. Or perhaps I could pay a surrogate and become a single daddy. When the implausibility of these hopes sunk in, I resigned myself to the inevitable. I authorized the discarding of the frozen embryos.

Here my story meets the abortion debate. If life begins at conception, as many people and some state laws now assert, then the discarding of embryos, like abortion, is murder. It is as clear as night and day.

As clear as night and day — that metaphor may be apt. As I am writing this sentence, the sun is streaming through the windows, so I am certain it is day. When my dog barks at 2 AM, I know it is night. But suppose I walk into my yard late this afternoon with the intent to shout “now” at the precise moment when day turns into night. I can not do it, because it is impossible to bifurcate a process into distinct and separable categories, whether it’s day becoming night or non-life becoming life.

In the biological sense, an embryo fits the definition of life. So do fungi and bacteria. Human sperm do not (though under a microscope they swim like frantic tadpoles). But the moral value of life — the sanctity of life, if you will — is not based on what we have in common with the mold on an orange. We value human life because people can think and feel, because they have a consciousness. They have souls.

Of course, mold can never become a person. Nor, on its own, can a teen boy’s nocturnal emission (sorry to be graphic). An embryo can, though roughly half of them do not. Therein lies the dilemma: Is the potential for human life therefore a human being?

Our fertility doctor described the embryos as the size of a poppy seed. With luck, one of them could have become the child I so deeply wanted. When I signed the paper to discard the embryos, I did so under a heavy weight. I felt defeated and sad — because my imagined child would never become a real child, not because a real child had lost its life.

If the life-at-conception people equate abortion with murder, why don’t they mourn the 50% of embryos that never become babies? By their logic, that’s a lot of human deaths. Though it’s my maxim to imagine the viewpoint of others, I struggle to understand how anyone can see a tiny dot in a petri dish as a person. I respect their view, but I can’t believe it. To me, it’s like trying to believe in ghosts.

When the anti-abortion forces create their posters, they never show an embryo the size of a poppy seed. They do show fetuses that look delicate, vulnerable, and human. Those images give me pause, and they take us to the other side of argument.

A few years ago, two friends of mine were preparing for the birth of their second child. Three weeks before the delivery date, the mother experienced frightening physical symptoms, and it was discovered that the unborn baby’s heart had stopped. She went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn baby.

The couple sent close friends and family a black and white photograph of the lifeless baby lying between them, one of the most beautiful and achingly sad photographs I’ve ever seen. Looking at the photograph, I felt that the baby had possessed a soul. I cannot construct a philosophic argument for my belief. I can’t even define what a soul is. But I know that my friends mourned the loss of a human life.

Many prochoice advocates claim that a woman has the right to her own body — period.

I agree with this — except for the period.

When does life begin? What exactly is death? Is a body with a beating heart but no cerebral activity alive? Is the end stage dementia patient in a non-responsive stupor still that person? Is there life after death? Can space and time really end, or do they stretch into infinity and what does that even mean? These are metaphysical questions that call for wonder and humility, not certainty and civil war.

Not only have we become a polarized society, but perhaps it is human nature that the more difficult and ambiguous a question, the more certain our answer. Night begins at the moment of sunset, damnit, and anyone who says otherwise can go to hell. Would a prochoice advocate really support the right of a woman, a week before the birth of a child, to have it aborted because she changed her mind? Does a prolife person really belief that I murdered thirteen people when I gave up on those frozen embryos? The answer to both questions is, yes, some do believe those things.

Unlike questions about the edge of the universe, the abortion issue has to be addressed. The state has two potentially conflicting duties: to protect the right of women to make medical choices and to protect the developing embryo-fetus-child which at some uncertain point has “moral status,” as philosophers put it — that is, becomes a person with the right to life, not just an appendage of the mother.

Trying to agree on laws that are just and humane, we feel ourselves in the yard, trying to decide when day becomes night. The difficulty of the dilemma brings a new appreciation for the virtue of Roe, a stance that was moderate and balanced. It acknowledged a person’s right to choose abortion and the state’s right to protect prenatal life. It followed the wisdom of the Greeks — nothing to excess. It should also be noted that under Roe, people morally opposed to abortion — like those morally opposed to IVF, birth control, masturbation, or eating meat — are free to live according to their beliefs. These examples are not intended to be glib. I believe persons with those beliefs deserve respect.

The violence of the Dobbs decision is that it has overturned moderation and unleashed extremism. In the worst-case scenario, more and more states will adopt strict anti-abortion legislation, subjecting increasing numbers of women to great suffering and distress. As I write, some state legislators are proposing laws to convict women getting abortions of murder. Senator Graham is proposing a restrictive federal law that would supersede the abortion laws in more liberal states. And as abortion is legally defined as infanticide, can laws against IVF (which almost always involves the discarding of unused embryos) be far behind?

In the political contest over the future of abortions laws, the consequences of the 2022 midterm elections will be great. Many close races will depend upon the votes of people in the middle, people whose views on abortion are conflicted, people who believe in both the freedom to choose and the welfare of the unborn, people unsure about the moment when day becomes night.

In such a battle, there is a tendency to become strident, to shout your view in its most extreme form. But smash-mouth politics does not sway opinions. A more effective strategy is to admit that the morality of abortion is a difficult issue, and that the moderation embodied in Roe is the better way for America.

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