As I read this article in Slate about the dilemma over who should have a say in a woman’s decision to have an abortion, I couldn’t help but think that people tie themselves in some awful logical knots without Jesus.
Maybe we can assert that the woman should have the ultimate legal right to choose, but at the same time admit that right is very complicated and charged and morally fraught, that choosing something against the will of the man involved is an act of some degree of unfairness; It may be a necessary act but not an entirely unambiguous one. Our tendency is to give to the pregnant woman the moral high ground, whatever she chooses, but there may be a more honest, rigorous interpretation that does not involve high ground and instead involves the ambiguous…
…and blah blah bleeg bleeble blah. And we go on and on chasing our rhetorical tails to maintain the illusion that we’re all good people here who care about doing the right thing, as long as it doesn’t keep us from killing babies when the need arises.
Everybody wants the moral high ground, but nobody wants to talk about where morality comes from. They say that a woman’s authority over her own body is a moral absolute. But why? And why does that absolute not apply to a female baby in the womb? Does this “absolute” only kick in after birth? At age one? At puberty?
All this rigmarole could be solved by recognizing that, man or woman, you are not your own. You were bought at a great price. There’s no moral high ground that will get you above that.