The Ideological Foundation of the Pro-abortion Movement

I was considering titling this “the dangers of duplicity,” but I felt that this would not be entirely accurate (you’ll see why later). The reason I originally thought of that title was because of my original inspiration, which was partly some events that triggered me to write this article, and partly a continuing stream of thought about duplicitous (or multi-plicitous–more on that later, once again) living, where one acts as and considers oneself as different people in different settings.

I chose this title instead (after long deliberation) with emphasis on the word “movement:” it’s been discussed in the past how ideology that rejects personhood (and thus places no intrinsic value on humanity ) ”justifies” abortion on an intellectual level; however, it also forms the basis for the popular (cultural) pro-abortion movement and the arguments that are most frequently given by the members of this movement.

You see, when you meet a person on the street and discuss the issue of abortion with them, they are far more likely to defend abortion by discussing the pregnant woman than to simply say, “well, since humans have no value, I think that we can kill the unborn.” In their discussion of the woman, they will probably make a claim regarding reproductive freedom or the rights of the woman to decide what to do with her body and her life. While these assertions may seem to come from a sort of diverted conservatism, they actually spring from the same ideology that gives an intellectual justification to abortion.

The path of thought is this: if there is no core personhood, then each individual human has no defining self beyond physical characteristics and actions. Therefore, a human is a different person from event to event (personhood, or their equivalent of it, deriving itself from actions). When a woman becomes pregnant, however, there is now something always there that threatens to impose unity upon the life of that woman. In order to protect the ideal of a-personhood (or in some bizarre way, to protect the woman’s infinitely many “persons”), it is perfectly acceptable to eliminate this ultimate threat. (It is the life based on this ideal of a-personhood that I originally considered duplicitous living; however, two is far too limiting, and I therefore discarded that title.)

For a practical example, the woman must terminate her pregnancy in order to protect the person who had sex from the mother-person who would be created.

What it comes down to is this: not only does the pro-abortion position gain intellectual justification from an ideology that denies personhood, but it gains popular (or cultural) justification from the same ideology. In the end, this second justification is more dangerous, because such a justification is one where people act on an ideology, and don’t just talk about it.