Abortion and Life
There is really no way of getting around the scientific fact that abortion ends a life. Each individual human life obviously begins at conception. Abortion is a one-sided solution to a two-sided problem. Yet it is not far from being a two-sided solution. All that is really needed initially is an intention to save the fetus.
Abortion procedures, as currently constituted, violate the command of the Hippocratic Oath to "Do no harm!" I am surprised that there are any physicians willing to perform abortions, although it is true that Hippocrates is dead and the U.S. Supreme Court is alive. But modern science and technology is capable of creating a procedure that would satisfy both Hippocrates and the Supreme Court.
Abortion is motivated by a pregnant woman's (and sometimes a man's) desire not to carry a fetus to term. The motivation may be completely selfish or it may relate to a belief, perhaps substantiated by evidence, that the infant will suffer. Yet suffering is an integral part of life, a part that sometimes leads to transcendence. And I am not talking about religion. I am a believer only in scientific and social processes. If you want to put a name to it I am a living systems theorist.
Science routinely solves problems that have plagued humans since they first climbed down from the trees. If a fetus seems to have a problem that will make life difficult there is a good chance that the problem will be solved or at least ameliorated after, or even before, the infant emerges from the womb. And if the problem is social, such as having no loving parents, our social systems have ways to cope with such defects. Such social palliatives are not perfect but they are better than death by abortion.
The gap that needs to be closed is how to get the fetus to the infant stage if its mother is unwilling or unable to provide the necessary functions of a uterus. We already have some partial solutions to this problem. We can transplant a living fetus from one womb to another or, if the fetus is old enough, to an incubator. And we surely have the technology to extend the capabilities of incubators so that they can successfully sustain life at an earlier stage. If we can accomplish conception in a test tube and then implant the fetus in a womb, surely we can go one step further and eliminate the womb part. Once we accomplish that feat there will no longer be even a legal excuse for abortion.
